Out of the Mountains (16 page)

Now, this is an obvious point, but you should understand that I'm putting this into my words, not theirs, and that this is a neatened-up, theoretical description. Real fights are always messy and chaotic, and real fighters rarely do exactly what they're supposed to do under fire. And yet any leader of irregular cavalry or light infantry (or, indeed, any mounted constabulary officer) of the past century would recognize these simple tactics. Echoing the comment of the special operations officer on Mumbai, any professional soldier in the world would be proud to command troops with this kind of tactical initiative. Indeed, I found only one slight issue on which to fault the SNA tactics: the fact that the squad leader stayed in the vehicle while his troops dismounted to assault. Western tactics would call for the leader to dismount with the troops, carrying a radio to talk back to the vehicle and direct its fire, and leaving a trusted subordinate, as vehicle commander, to maneuver the gun truck.

But as soon as this thought entered my head, I realized I was looking at the Somali squad in completely the wrong way: I was misapplying the social and economic framework of a professional state-run military to an organization that had evolved from an irregular militia. In the Somali environment of fragmented, semianarchic clan organizations in which these tactics had emerged, the way someone became a squad leader in the first place was to own the technical (an extremely substantial piece of capital equipment). The squad leader became the squad leader precisely because it was his vehicle, so it would have been the height of stupidity for him to dismount and thereby cede control of the gun truck to someone else—let alone to leave someone behind him with a machine gun. He might not have remained the squad leader for long! Moreover, dismounted fighters are cheap and replaceable, but the vehicle is a precious investment that is decidedly not expendable. Seen from this perspective, the SNA's “mounted swarm” tactics have (like any tactical system) an economic, political, and social logic, as well as a military grammar.

It actually takes much longer to read these words than to execute a swarming maneuver of this kind. Because each vehicle and its fighters is a semiautonomous unit that needs no formal orders, because the momentum of the advance puts each vehicle in roughly the right position at any given moment, and because the overhead geometry of supporting fire from the vehicle avoids the need for complicated fire control orders, a swarm fight can be incredibly fast and smooth.

Each dismounted fighter and each vehicle commander need only remember five basic rules. These rules define how the group fights at every scale (the individual, the dismounted squad, the vehicle, and the group of vehicles) and they never change, regardless of the terrain, the tactical situation, or the size of the engagement. They are: “Maintain an extended line abreast,” “Keep your neighbors just in sight, but no closer,” “Move to the sound of the guns,” “Dismount when you see the enemy,” and “When you come under fire, stop and fire back.”

This explains the speed and flexibility with which the fighters were able to react to TF Ranger's foray into the Black Sea: the swarm tactics I was observing in
2012
were directly descended from those used by Aidid's militia in
1993
. In systems terms, this kind of autonomous, rule-based maneuver is the essence of a self-synchronizing swarm: like individual birds in a flock, each vehicle and its troops follow a few simple rules to maintain formation and react to the enemy, and like the overall flock, their formation constantly shifts and changes size and shape (without orders) in response to changes in the terrain and the tactical situation. The same rules that bring reinforcements to swell the size of the swarm when it hits a major obstacle also cause it to disperse when there is no imminent threat. In fact, the size, shape, and disposition of the tactical swarm are completely emergent properties of the rule-based swarm maneuver system itself, something that happens without conscious direction or formal control from a central commander.

This is why, in the battle for Afgoye just past, the Somali brigade commander had simply roamed about the battlefield, armed only with a pistol and carrying the short walking stick that's the symbol of age and authority across Somalia, and encouraging his troops: he had no need to run a centralized command post, since his fighters fought autonomously by rule, rather than following conscious, formally expressed orders. Rather, the commander's role was to read the battle, to know where his presence was most needed, and—critically—to think ahead, beyond the current fight, to the next engagement, and the next, and the next. He might also have brought with him, under his personal control, a commander's reserve of troops, vehicles, and ammunition with which to reinforce weak points or exploit success. A simple handheld radio, connecting him to his most trusted commanders, allowed him to tap into a continuous feed of chatter among those fighting the battle and thus maintain his situational awareness and decide where he needed to be. Strictly speaking, however, such a tactical system should work in complete radio silence, avoiding the need to expose plans to electronic eavesdropping and making the swarm formation relatively invulnerable to jamming or radio deception. Using these tactics, an experienced unit of this type (and remember, these fighters had, in some cases, ten years of nearly continuous irregular warfare under their belts) could—in theory at least—maneuver at a vastly faster tempo than a regular conventional force relying on orders.

At the unit level, an organization that operates like this doesn't have a command post that can be found and killed. Ever since J. F. C. Fuller's
Plan 1919
, modern maneuver tactics have centered not on fighting and defeating each and every enemy combat unit but rather on finding and destroying the enemy's command node. Writing at the bloody climax of World War I in
1918
, Fuller argued that “the first method may be compared to a succession of slight wounds which will eventually cause [an enemy] to bleed to death; the second—a shot through the brain.”
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In a similar vein, Colonel John Warden's “five rings” model of targeting analysis for airpower seeks to achieve physical paralysis by finding and targeting key nodes (centers of gravity) in an enemy system.
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But a fully decentralized swarm system like the one these Somali fighters employed
has
no brain, no central command node that can be killed. The swarm's command system is distributed, rule-based, emergent, and thus embedded in the system itself, not tied to any one person, vehicle, or physical location. This suggests the uncomfortable possibility that even if TF Ranger had succeeded in killing General Aidid, the loss of its commander would have had a negligible effect on his organization's ability to function.

The Somali approach is also a very different solution to the same problem that led Lashkar-e-Taiba to adopt its remote-node command model for the Mumbai attack: where LeT made its command node invulnerable by putting it in another country and relying on Internet and satellite connectivity to connect the operations room to the assault teams on the ground, the Somali militia made their command node invulnerable by not having one at all. When I asked the SNA soldiers how their tactics differed from those of Shabaab and the various local militias, they laughed. “They
are
us,” they said with a shrug, pointing out that many of them—like many Shabaab fighters—had previously served with militias of one kind or another before joining the SNA.

Long-Term Flows

As well as these swarm tactics (which we'll return to in Chapter 5), we've already noted the way that temporal rhythm and spatial logic affected the Mogadishu battle over the term of the city's daily flow cycle. But there is a lower-frequency cycle also, a longer-term metabolic flow that shapes the urban environment in a place such as Mogadishu. This is the pattern of population movement, urbanization, and littoralization, occurring over decades, and it was this pattern that gave the city its structure, both in 1993 and today. This is obvious if we note that—in common with other organisms—the history of an urban organism is physically recorded in its structure, just as scar tissue, a lost digit, a callus, or a growth in a biological organism is a permanent structural manifestation of that organism's past. Mogadishu today, like any other city or organism, embodies a physical record of its history.

The Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, writing in
1998
, brilliantly captured the long-term flows that have shaped Mogadishu. “If Mogadishu occupies an ambiguous space in our minds and hearts,” Farah wrote, “it is because ours is a land with an overwhelming majority of pastoralists, who are possessed of a deep urbophobia. Maybe this is why most Somalis do not seem unduly perturbed by the fate of the capital: a city broken into segments, each of them ruthlessly controlled by an alliance of militias.”
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Farah identified several waves of urbanization and coastal settlement that over decades drew in population from the hinterland, expanded the city, changed its social and political character, and created accretions of new peripheral settlements around the older coastal core:

Before independence, huge numbers of Somalis, who could best be described as semi-pastoralists, moved to Mogadishu; many of them joined the civil service, the army and the police. It was as if they were out to do away with the ancient cosmopolitan minority known as “Xamari,” Xamar being the local name for the city. Within a short time, a second influx of people, this time more unequivocally pastoralist, arrived from far-flung corners to swell the ranks of the semi-pastoralists, by now city-dwellers. In this way, the demography of the city changed. Neither of these groups was welcomed by a third—those pastoralists who had always got their livelihood from the land on which Mogadishu was sited (natives, as it were, of the city). They were an influential sector of the population in the run-up to independence, throwing in their lot with the colonialists in the hope not only of recovering lost ground but of inheriting total political power. Once a much broader coalition of nationalists had taken control of the country, these “nativists” resorted to threats, suggesting that the recent migrants quit Mogadishu. “Flag independence” dawned in 1960 with widespread jubilation drowning the sound of these ominous threats. It was another thirty years before they were carried out.
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These tensions, which arose from long-term flows of population, goods, and money, and a struggle for control of economic resources and nodes within Mogadishu—including, particularly, the port and the livestock and trading markets—manifested themselves physically in a patchwork of informal urban settlements, and socially in a pattern of fragmented territorial control across the city, with each group dominating its own area and the clans coexisting in an uneasy, shifting pattern of temporary alliances of convenience.

Nuruddin Farah's analysis here echoes the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu's comment on the urban-rural dynamic between Damascus and the rural hinterland of Syria, suggesting a widespread pattern of conflict between population groups that have traditionally dominated cities and the former peasants or rural dwellers arriving as migrants from the countryside. Batatu identifies this as a cyclical flow, “a phenomenon that repeats itself: rural people, driven by economic distress or lack of security, move into the main cities, settle in the outlying districts, enter before long into relations or forge common links with elements of the urban poor, who are themselves often earlier migrants from the countryside, and together they challenge the old established classes.”
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Batatu's notion echoes an old and very influential idea that came out of the coastal cities of North Africa in the fourteenth century—a theory of the circulation of elites put forward by the great Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun. As Malise Ruthven points out, Khaldun's theory, sometimes called Khaldunian circulation, is based on the idea that “‘leadership exists through superiority, and superiority only through
asabiyya
—social cohesion or group feeling. In desert conditions, the social solidarity of the tribe is vital to its survival. If and when the tribes decide to unite, their cohesion puts the city-folk at their mercy. Inspired by religion, they conquer the towns, which are incapable of defending themselves, and become the rulers until such time as, corrupted by luxury and the loss of their group cohesion, they are in turn replaced by a new nomadic dynasty.”
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This same cyclic flow seems to have been present in Mogadishu's evolution. Indeed, Farah's and Batatu's analyses turn on its head one common interpretation of Somali history: namely, the idea that the intergroup competition, corruption, winner-take-all abuse of defeated opponents, and clan-based violence that Mogadishu experienced after the fall of the Barre regime in
1991
was primarily a
symptom
of state collapse. The popular notion is that this chaos emerged after Barre's rule fell apart under the pressure of war, drought, and economic collapse. On the contrary, in Farah's telling, it was the pattern of fragmented urbanization (producing marginalized garrison communities with patron-client connections to political leaders) and rapid population growth (with the resultant lack of resilience and carrying capacity in the city's metabolism) that produced the violence and instability that eventually destroyed the state. In this version of events, Mogadishu didn't become a feral city because the state collapsed; rather, the state collapsed because the city was
already
feral. Mogadishu's very structure created a political and social space for the city's own destruction at the hands of “a cast of borderline characters posing as city-folk leading armed communities of marginalised nomads. . . . The savageries visited on the city's residents [were] masterminded by urbophobics already installed in Mogadishu, which for hundreds of years has lain under the envious gaze of people who hated and feared it because they felt excluded from its power politics.”
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