Cities under siege – the new military urbanism

Rubbilizing cities during warfare is one of the most devastatingly costly human activities. The siege of Stalingrad during WWII cost more Russian lives than were lost in the whole war by America and Britain combined. As long ago as 1500 BC the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu expressly warned that ‘the worst policy is to attack cities’. Yet US war-fighting strategies for the twenty-first century are increasingly focused on transforming all urban terrain into conflict zones. In Cities under siege, Professor Stephen Graham, an urban geographer at Newcastle University, explores the emerging body of new military doctrine, technology and targeting, which he says blurs the traditional distinction between military and civil spheres, the inside and outside of nations, and who is a civilian and who is a combatant. The vast landscape of this book’s vision details the level and extent of these changes in a series of brilliantly observed critiques of the new military urbanism, its tactics, technologies and standard operating procedures. What has been called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is professionally deconstructed here in a devastating critique of ‘The technophilic fantasies of perfect power that . . . offered to absolve those who wielded it from moral responsibility’. Urban geographers like Stephen Graham have in some ways moved beyond the theories of the traditional security, peace and conflict communities in their grasp of the enormity of current military planning and ideology. In great detail, Graham catalogues what he sees as the radically intensifying militarization of urban life. What has emerged is a foundry of new control technologies to provide battlespaces which see, target, track and destroy. And yet this new military urbanism and its wars are: