The urban wars of future

globinfo freexchange

"When the US Army looks to the future, it sees cities. Dense, sprawling, congested cities where criminal and extremist groups flourish almost undetected by authorities, but who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state. And the service is convinced that these 'megacities' of 20 million or more people will be the battleground of the future.”

“The United Nations estimates that such massive cities will increasingly become part of the worldwide landscape by 2030, when the current global urban population of 3.6 billion will likely hit about 5 billion — meaning that 60 percent of all humans will live in cities.”

... “it is inevitable that at some point the United States Army will be asked to operate in a megacity and currently the Army is ill-prepared to do so.”

“McMaster said that by 2030, the Army wants to provide infantry squads 'access to aviation and air support and full-motion video, [along with] the ability to overwhelm the enemy during chance contact.' One of the key things is the firepower of the squad, particularly 'shoulder-fired weapons capabilities, counter-defilade capabilities, as well as flying munitions and combined arms … mobile protected platforms capable of precision firepower.'”

http://www.phantomreport.com/u-s-army-sees-megacities-as-the-future-battlefield

In an alternative scenario, the "criminal and extremist groups" inside the megacities will be the armies of desperate against the new feudalism of the elites in the absence of any form of state. There will be no society to be protected but only working machines and resources:

“... the nation-state should be destroyed as the elementary mechanism required to protect the rights of the majority. Until then, the state will be used to distribute a minimum subvention to the armies of unemployed, so that the big banks and corporations not to be threatened by sudden and massive uncontrolled riots of totally desperate people.”

“We see a rise of private armies that act in various battlefields, like in Ukraine, exactly because in the absence of the nation-states and the national armies, someone has to protect the natural resources and the new means of production for the dominant elite. But when the arms industry will fully automate the new weapons, private armies will only serve as assistance to fully automated war machines. We already see the test fields of the weapons of the future˙ the drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. It's not accidental that the arms industries demonstrate new weapons designed to be used inside urban areas for suppression of potential riots. There will be no 'outside enemy' in the future. The threat for the dominant system will come from the interior, the big urban centers. Soldier-robots will protect worker-robots and resources.”

http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2014/08/the-dominant-elite-ready-to-break.html