The Warlord and His Carpenters

IN WHICH CHEAP TALENT AND LABOR GIVE A HIGH-TECH ASSAULT FORCE FITS.


Cities, and especially Third World cities, remain problematic for urban warfighters, as they (and readers of Black Hawk Down and similar accounts) understand. The confusion and friction that occur even in natural terrain multiply in densely built urban areas as sight lines shorten, while buildings and tunnels add a third dimension to the hazards that attackers must consider.

First World armies’ technologies let them accurately reconnoiter and map cities before a battle; for example, UAVs can help visually untangle slums and aid ground units. However, in the scenario below, low-tech (if labor-intensive) countermeasures defeat even the best mapping technology.

Assumptions: Small GPS-linked robots are deployed en masse to map Third World slums prior to military action. Somali warlords continue to compete with the weak central government.

Scenario: In 2018, Mogadishu remains a maze of largely unplanned development that features winding streets, low-rise buildings, and large numbers of unemployed men and women.

The city is somewhat wealthier than in previous decades. For one thing, commercial shipping now frequents its port thanks to international suppression of Indian Ocean piracy during the late 2000s.

Mogadishu is still largely lawless, however, which is why four U.S. helicopters now sweep in over the densest part of downtown. They are the vanguard of a team whose mission is to quickly seize Warlord Rashid from his headquarters.

The helicopters simultaneously release what observers at first mistake for gas clouds—perhaps of pesticide. In reality, the “clouds” are composed of thousands of golf-ball sized robots, each weighing mere ounces, that float to the ground beneath tiny paper canopies. Each device is a miniature sensing station equipped with GPS plus a separate radio transmitter, video camera and microphone.

Although they cannot move, these devices quickly orient themselves and begin to observe their surroundings, coordinating with one another and with rear-echelon computers.

From rooftops, streets, courtyards, awnings and even the hoods of cars and beds of trucks, these Advanced Mapping Devices (AMDs) rapidly generate an accurate, continually updated map of downtown Mogadishu and its inhabitants that is accurate to the centimeter, including overlapping video coverage and some capture of nearby voice traffic and background noise.

Minutes later, a second wave of helicopters approaches bearing an assault force that is now highly confident of its ability to navigate Mogadishu and capture Warlord Rashid. The attackers have an informant who places Warlord Rashid inside a known building, and the just-created AMD network knows he hasn’t left there. Teams of soldiers fast-rope from helicopters to the street, ready to race off to their assigned tasks once everyone is on the ground. Thanks to the AMDs, this should be a quick in-and-out; there will be no lengthy Black Hawk Down-style battle today.

But as the first soldiers to hit the ground watch, Mogadishu begins to change.

Its inhabitants have watched three times before as U.S. forces have conducted these fast, robot-mapped raids, and this time they are better-prepared.

First, groups of children converge on the AMD drop zone, racing around and smashing the tiny electronic observers wherever they find them—and continually degrading the AMD network’s overlapping coverage. Older Somalis rapidly start and re-park the cars and trucks whose locations other AMDs have so painstakingly mapped. Women hurriedly take laundry in from some clotheslines and run it out on others, changing and obscuring sight lines. Still other groups climb onto sterile-looking rooftops and cover them with pre-built wooden decks and patio furniture.

More startlingly, whole false walls of buildings swing out on giant hinges from either side of narrow streets, turning thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs. Giant potholes are revealed when large steel plates are dragged to one side.

And on it goes: Windows are rapidly boarded up or unboarded to alter the appearance of apartment buildings, garage doors are rapidly opened and quickly transformed into storefronts, and iron grilles blocking doorways are either opened or closed.

Warlord Rashid’s followers have radically changed Mogadishu’s complexion to confuse and hinder an attacking force, all in a few minutes following the first helicopters’ arrival. Here’s how:

Months ago, Warlord Rashid became interested in camouflaging himself, the better to hide from Western officials who had started blustering about the need to bring him to justice. Shortly thereafter, some of his agents abroad began hiring the best workers for creating short-duration, high-impact illusions: carpenters, engineers and builders from Hollywood and Bollywood, who specialize in building lightweight structures that can be moved or modified on short notice.

At first, Warlord Rashid was able to persuade only the most adventurous of these skilled creatives to travel to Mogadishu and help turn his part of the city into a giant breakaway set. Soon, though, ever-larger groups arrived as word spread among Los Angeles and Mumbai creatives that Warlord Rashid was a good—if somewhat demanding—employer who paid top dollar, honored contracts, and protected those who worked for him while they were in Somalia.*

Entertainment-industry carpenters, painters and set dressers were suddenly in high demand thousands of miles from Hollywood and Mumbai, not least because other clans’ warlords began competing with Warlord Rashid to see how rapidly their part of Mogadishu could be changed during a Western military incursion.

Although the Hollywood/Bollywood types were expensive to keep on hand, their designs and instructions could be realized cheaply through the labor of hundreds of unemployed Somalis eager to earn a few weeks’ pay.

The assaulting troops, watching the cityscape change around them and keep changing, are stymied and quickly lose the surprise and mobility that their plan requires to apprehend Warlord Rashid.

Better yet from the defenders’ point of view, this goal has been accomplished largely without violence—Warlord Rashid long ago sternly instructed those involved in changing the city’s appearance to carry no firearms. This both minimizes the defenders’ casualties and increases their feelings of superiority over the invaders.

The assaulting troops can now choose to destroy or penetrate Mogadishu’s obstacles and camouflage; but doing so risks civilian casualties. Meanwhile, their quarry successfully flees more quickly than the assaulting force can pursue.

Questions: In this scenario, determining how much a place’s appearance can change becomes as important as mapping its streets and landmarks. Is a second mapping pass, in which a second set of robots coordinates with remnants of the first, feasible? Should U.S. forces drop a few decoy robots (or a whole set of fakes) first, to fool Mogadishu defenders into revealing planned modifications, then drop the full load of robots after those modifications are revealed?

Is it now important to monitor the costs of and demand for certain kinds of skilled labor in cities as removed as Mumbai and Los Angeles? Does a sudden tightening of skilled-trades markets in those cities, or spot shortages of lumber, nails and construction tools in East Africa, indicate that Warlord Rashid or his colleagues are up to something?

References: Minority Report’s mobile, eyeball-scanning spider robots (kinda like this minus the legs); the burning tires and barricades of the first Battle of Mogadishu; the kasbah chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark; and the finale of Blazing Saddles, where Sheriff Bart builds an entire fake Western town to fool marauders.

*While some Hollywood contractors shunned work in Somalia for ethical or legal reasons, others figured that working for a glorified bandit such as Warlord Rashid wasn’t that different from designing and building a 1,500-seat theater at a mobbed-up U.S. casino, which would then show Cats twice per night at an average $115 per ticket. Banditry, the contractors reasoned, came in all sorts of guises.