[applause] its wonderful to be back so i thought i would give you some of the major ideas that are in the book. Recently essentially see your eyes glaze over then we go to q a so i am in the fifth week to you physically the same talk so i am pretty tired of it. [laughter] blige just thought i would move past that to have the of bit more of a conversation. I think this is an engaged groupon we have had some really good discussions not only the technical detail but the geopolitical mitscher so to me that is the interesting part i will try to throw out enough to talk about but not so much i go into the question and answer time. I started to write september 2009. Rights after i was ambushed in afghanistan is this is one of the classic scenario is. Most live in mountain valleys of the little villages nobody really lives high on the mountains they live on the valley floor and usually there is only one road. By 4 00 in the afternoon everyone knows exactly where. Kid you hear me okay . And then youll be driving down the road in the middle of the valley. I was ambushed 4 00 in the afternoon i remember thinking every deadbeat this is that bad ambush i have been involuntarily of gillespie is actually used to teach it as an instructor i thought if they are my students i would fail them. Was badly put together. Are they having a bad day . That i realized after that one day of thinking about it it was not a taliban ambush but a particular village in the valley that was passed about how much aid we had given to other villages they were sending us a message how they felt about our aid prior to rescission that seems like a crazy over reaction we will know that happens all the time that with the assistance we give to afghanistan that is 14 times the size of federal budget is responsible for a substantial amount of what we see on the ground. And in afghanistan doing exactly the surface layer to look beyond what is actually going on that you dont actually see immediately. What i have tried to do in the book is to start that conversation that i had in my head where i started to say there is a deeper level than just the Counter Insurgency dr. Not just about the insurgency fighting a government but a bunch of villages trying to get authority over other villages in the way people fight and also of the dynamics of conflict common not only to the insurgency but gains, militias, all sorts of non state groups that compete to control populations 24 7 over the planet were sown or not. But i started to realize what we do in afghanistan is a geographical fluke. Bettis with the book ended up being about. We have gotten really, really good at dealing with non state armed groups in a very traditional and Xenophobic Society in remote rural villages with only landlocked mountainous environment with a population density very low the connectivity is almost nonexistent. If you look to the future of the plan at what will happen after afghanistan is over and we move to the next round of conflict you will find that is not it at all but much more on the urban coastal and very highly connected environment. We will do a lot of the same things we have done. 80 of conflict is and always has been a regular in nature one of the main combatants is almost the non armed group more precisely with u. S. Military history there is a specific repeated patent that we do a barge scale operation about once every 20 or 25 years also the size of kosovo about every five or 10 years and that pattern goes right back to the middle of the 19th century and it is completely independent of policy makers preferences. Somebody say to the president say we would get out of this business . He is the seventh president to say the same statement over 80 years and there is no effect whether he wants to do it or not or how often. Looking forward we will do more of the same stuff but that environmental looks very different. Said four big factors drive that environment in to think about what is the shape and what impact it will have a and one is new, the force one on one to focus i will cover the first three. Number one. Urbanization. Number to population growth. Number three around the coast line and then connectivity which is a new factor. Starting with population growth at the beginning of European Industrial revolution and the population of the planet was about 750 million people. It took 150 years to double by 1900 we were out 1. 5 billion people then doubled again in only six years at 3 billion people can double again the 6 billion by the end of the last century and a dozen years since then we have that is slightly more than 1 billion people so today it is roughly 7 billion yen cc the accelerating pattern of population growth since the industrial revolution. Those who do projections looking at the demographics suggest we will not keep rising at the same level for ever be will top out at the middle of this century at about 9. 5 billion that is still 2. 5 billion more than we have no. With that same time frame we are likely to have a significant level of urbanization. In 1800 about 2 percent of people lived in the city of 1 million or more. 2 of the people of the plan in 1900, 10 percent from 1950, to to 5 . 2008, a 50 projection is 75 of people on the planet by the middle of the century. The Current Population wouldbe the urban population by the middle of the century. The third is the fact based on the mechanics of moving heavy stuff that most cities have traditionally been on the coastline. Look at megacities of the population of 10 million or more there either directly of the coastline or on a major river delta only four cities on the planet that are not. Beijing, tehran, a mexico city and moscow. Why is that . It is easier to move heavy things by water so trade has traditionally been river born so the cities would acroterion round of logistics so people moved to existing cities already the population is heavily live coral. 80 percent of the people today live within 50 miles of the coastland. Urban and crowded those are well understood 20 years ago in the marine corps in particular or to talk about the three block for or there were guys in the army as military theorist who wrote all about the stuff way back and well understood. But what has happened in the 10 years since the 11th, the military has been dragged off to this environment of a landlocked remote environment of afghanistan and the planet has changed. In the year 2000 there were only 30,000 as telephones in nigeria. Today there are 130 million. Doing field work in mogadishu i was Walking Around interviewing people about how to make a living in 24 of somalis use a cell phone. There is a big fight to but has said memorialized in a movie called plaque caulked around that happened around a major Market Downtown mogadishu. I was talking to traders in the market were the somali currency surviving 20 years without a central bank is traded on the floating interestrate they have computers set up, theyre on the internet, the understand International Currency in they trade the currency on the floor on the bottom floor five times per day they update the trading rate in dade fire it out by a text message to the traders in the city that is how the works of trades. Somalis have always been traders but until recently there were about Trading International stocks or managing remittance money from minnesota or scandinavia but that is what we see now. What i saw on the Ground Support is something that economists say access to the International Trading economy dependent on connectivity is a major element from the agricultural surplus why people move to cities. With the scientific terms it is like the salty solution or not salty solution on the other they will migrate from one side if you have the connectivity differential between urban and rural environments people will live to were the conductivity is. If you want to be plugged into an to the International Economy coming you have to be in mogadishu you cannot be with the countryside of somalia. We have seen a Significant Movement to cities driven in part by connectivity and that ships and changes the way conflict happens. I would give you two examples then i will summarize how to think about the environment. One is libyas the other is syria. In 2011 there was a very major fire in a coastal city if there was a french Naval Task Force ready to intervene in the conflict but they did not know much about what was going on on the ground. An urban city welleducated and libyans have exploded with access to soft loans over the internet. Of the kids were getting shot as they tried to move around the cities so they began to use gugler and android sell funds to plot the locations of the snipers shooting at them. They would put pins in the map dont go down that street. The french start to see these pins appearing on buglers. So they flew Reconnaissance Mission so then they obviously started to bomb those positions when the school kids realize to freemarket the french will baum it they went out to mark every position they could find and then whenever destroyed they would take them down and disappear from to coerce. Google immerse a crowd source synchronized bombing a system that the pentagon spent billions of dollars the school kids are on the ground because they have access to connectivity that would have been impossible three of four years ago. As far as i can tell talking to kids on the ground those on the French Task Force at no time did they ever talk to each other it was self synchronized based on what they could figure out. A second example is a little more analog. In syria last your for a couple of bad agencies we start to see these little or merge vehicles appearing one of them was 6 feet longer than three fell wide with arbor on the outside. It had a machine gun mounted on top to be controlled remotely with a series of video cameras mounted on the outside actually the. Pro on the top then inside was a flat screen tv in the whole thing driving the vehicle and the control was run through the flat Screen Television through the game boy. This is a backyard workshop. It does not make sense to have such debt tiny Armored Vehicle with a machine gun but seek it for this was a bit where it was built theca of the american styled Armored Vehicles or the soviet vehicle with the regime because the streets are 5 feet wide is not confronting other Armored Vehicles it is designed specifically to operate because federal have the ability. This is perfectly adapted to the environment. But now meeting a very tax savvy population then they have access to use tools to make it taken the backyard. Something not in afghanistan but to look get the urbanize savvy population and final example in the u. S. States of georgia may 2011 a 15 yearold ninth great kid looked at the libyans and thought they dont know how to use of Weapons Systems of the crowd sourced in 48 hours a diving gold medal to teach the libyans how to use the weapons they were capturing he got this from soviet websites and his friends in those to speak arabic. Today that is a major document used across syria with a fighting because neither word gun cultures you deal with people that came up in a gun culture sir buddy knows how to fire a weapon. What i sat with the nafta and travel editor i ask where the ied techniques came from he told his 50 yearold they make me one. They just no hope but they just know how but syria or libya did not have that background banal a kid in United States in 48 hours can pull together a middle that is now the dominant document that people downloading repeatedly it is out there as a key element how people operate in syria. Not to be labored up point but to understand not only do we need to be engaged with the urban environment because we have been distracted of 10 years that will not be in the future norm but in that time it has changed and is dramatically more connected than it was. So the topic that i end on how to understand the urban environment under stress producing violence in and this will be happening across the planet. Some marks was a social scientist looking at european cities cities, berlin, london, were experiencing many of the same things of coastal cities today. We look at lack of Government Services the of communities and people getting alienated that they need to access and how that affects people, there is a lot of similarities but there was the idea of durbin metabolism to write an article that has become very seminal called the metabolism of cities. To basically say just like a body a city has one serious intake, carbon, fuel comair, people, then they are transformed in produces the biomass of this city is in the energy it needs to function but it produces toxic waste. The city has to have the carrying capacity to deal with those byproducts where you see pollution. This is a common procedure in ecology to look deadbeat urban environment to run the material flow analysis of it has the capacity to do with the flow if it is experiencing. I have a number of case studies from jamaica to other places to do and on material flow analysis. Instead of carbon or water but many, drugs, information system, weapons, how they fall in what toxic byproducts, usually violence is generated and what is the way this city can use to cope with the flow. If you look at the problem the military does not figure in the answer there is no solution to the problem of rapid unplayed and urbanization to sew skins 3 billion new people in the next generation across the entire planet. To put an Army Division into one of those and it would disappear nobody would even know. Cities that have 25 billion people come with the entire west coast of india and giant cities not in the military sense. Then they do get into the tactics of how you do that but there is no solution that involves the military going in and. A problem focuses not and will evolve in a solution that is like saying it is Fire Prevention that doesnt help you if your in the fire department. Your job is not to worry about prevention but to fight the guy tim fire when it breaks out. What do i do plan Fire Prevention fails . If you are in the military there is a dead certainty that our political leaders will send us tuesday in fired because that is what they have been doing fed is not affected by the policy makers preferences. See better understand how to operate in a crowded urbanized coastal environment against the actor has access to democratize technology and connectivity that makes the adversary dramatically more the soul than what we have never encountered before. That is the environment the military needs to think about with significant implications the way restructure and the way we operate status and other side of the discussion but what do we do about the problem of . I think it is a matter of resiliency and communitybased design rather than government casting people on the head telling them to sit down and shut up by can talk to much more detail about what we have done with my company with ngos in africa to test the way to operate. I think it pioneered on the design or put them together with a community that understands the problem or comes up with the stuff of a particular is just billion to. Might challenge sen and rub my people do is have to do that in the environment with people shoot team and you . You just cannot have a conversation . Those are the places we worked and where people in the military and lawenforcement need to be focused. Because i have spent very down for the last 20 minutes i will end on the up and no. It is not all bad. 3 billion more people by the middle of the century not only could that be potentially very good for the planet by reduce pressure on the environment but 2 billion more people of the global middleclass 15 people out of poverty poverty, access to education thank economic prosperity. If you are in business there is a massive opportunity these cities have not even happened yet with the entire population will lead stuff just to get by in the big city. There is a significant upside with Good Research data to the adaptive capacity to handle these problems increases farther but there are certain things you have to have in place and one is the ability to make people more resilient so not only stop this with coastlines of the developing world but thinking about how to reach each People Choose swim and urban resiliency in a different way that exploits the adaptive capacity that is out there to help people a lot that as a way to engage with the problems . I could go on but i am bored with the same talk so lets have a conversation. I will defer to you. Just raise up your question cards. Good questions on the richter subjects. One that has come up batiste twice preparing for the last conflict what are some of the bad lessons that will be appropriately coming added the iraq and afghanistan experience for military or government Going Forward . Great question. To equal and opposite areas one might Counter Insurgency is the answer it is a doctrinal construct like any other a human model we are about to where a revolution the way we think about the environment but it is about time the other opposite areas calling is not the answer he got have to worry about protecting populations or to go into choosing is that governments can do. The history is pretty clear weather weighed know how to do it or not we will be sent in their. The other thing to highlight there is a dangerous addiction to the remote warfare. Lot nsa has been doing a avoiding putting troops on the ground and it always reminds me but war is so dangerous often it is perceived from cold hearted this and i think the worst american is to minimize the danger in damage that conflict does and one of those is the reliance on remote forms of technology to compensate our willingness to put troops on the ground. One of the only things that stops human beings from fighting is they have had a tough if you outsource to robots to create a precedent we can tell anybody anytime across the planet provided it meets us it could bounce back at some point. Host i see that. It a related question is clap conflicts in the past are relevant to the world you forsythe and what countries our best placed because of their experiences that they intend to it will translate to what comes next. With iraq or afghanistan it is hard to realize how good people have got and what they are doing. It is only in the realms of special forces. The capability not only of the ad agencies and a state department is unparalleled in history one of the potential tragedys is we may forget everything we have learned to and have to relearn it again. I would love to make some mistakes as to the same once again. But when i talk about in the appendix is how the urban and changes conflict in what that means it is a very complex the military tends to think about content we think about the very time maritime but also there is a subterranean, a land surface , the year bin canyon 20 years ago, the high rises the rooftop environment and the aerospace and a cyberspace but offshore there is maritime subsurface and seabed and also rivers and harbors creeks and harbors in the middle where this is the effect of all different demands the way we think about operating in the featured buyer meant will not cut it. I am conscious i and many marine establishment that the marine corps is extraordinarily well adapted we dont have durbin in firemans when the entire seaboard is serving an objective maneuver will looks like held different because you dont have the seabed in the for the navy withy platforms to ride if of logistics in to the environment you dont have to use the port or the airfield to have the standoff distance will not work going into an environment primarily you have to be there for a long period of time to engage. For the army we are really good at running logistics into the environment to take up this thing is we need from the environment fuel, water, food, logistics is the key. That will not work when the reason you go it is precisely because of the conflict emerging to go in with contract seeing offices that will not work. Lot more to talk about with that question but that is the main issue. Just a quick followup question who is good at the first three issues . Like connectivity but who are experts in that . U. S. Is good with to ring any type of error ben litoral is the british say got a pretty good how you organize junior level commanders to operate . To be a platoon sergeant the way they structure demand but it is completely different to how we doing. There is a discussion because but i talk about this in the book and it may look for the Brazilian Police typical to what the military does. Could questions around the fourth component the importance of having some dissent soldiers with a dynamic how could we incorporates with the americanled military around called the militarys would . I will just focus on one issue but how we use people that understand big data or that they understand the environment. It is a colonial discipline in a postgraduate degree to put on a funny hat to go into somebody elses country it is typhus savages of the South Pacific of anthropology of the author that traveled to the islands in the early 20s to came back to growth this warda account of things happening. Coming from that background i thought that all these people are connected. But there ought to be but latino outside of rio day janeiro i thought i would have to go walk the streets but obviously you do still need to do some of that like to make up but there are 20 robbers sand pluggers one writes about how it is run by gangs. He writes in english the work we do in syria we have four teams doing humanitarian aid reporting for the nba but we dont have our own people because you dont need to put people out there. That is one element with people from basically every country of the planet with language skill and knowledge and relationships to tap into that environment. This is not about spying on the environment but what is going on. It is now possible to really understand through remote observation what is going on in the way that was not possible five or 10 years ago. The highest murder rates of the planet you could fire up googles maps in the morning just by traffic patterns if you have the right over them to look at what streets to avoid the way the traffic moves. People do that i was out at google today how they talk about Data Analysis and one said there is no solution that there is no one that will allow us to solve the problems but it will allow people that live in these environments to be more resilient and figure out the existing environment catalogs them to function. I dont want to be bad backs thunder dome but leveraging the people to come from where we might operate with the operation of the ground with the big data picture is critical stuff that we need to be doing better. Every Police Department every new york Police Department in to talk about what is going on. Host this certainly are with the Disaster Response to integrate is that components. Weld is the injured governmental structure to a klay to be effective . Or Pure Technology components. Pilots death of mumbai attacked in 2008, a gang warfare in jamaica, a little of shriveling data also the era of spring when i was the to what about these Research Efforts the from what he might to think is probably the unit of the analysis we need to apply. With that level of city coverage for what happens in the national but two good examples. Mogadishu has been without a Central National government for her before they were College Professor shoreham the terms but mogadishu is a thought of a farrell said the end of the government goes the way it will collapse but actually Research Shows those when the government goes with the city doesnt just go as wild it is the mad max environment. The other to think about is stability. Bit it is a better way to describe it. We see open systems with continual input the capital of bangladesh is a great day simple in 1950 to bryans 450 you will be a 25 million and a whole series of National Government have come up with a fix with the problems repeated the overtaken by events so by the time to be implemented but at the nation state level it was too late to affect what they tried to change. Getting a below the nations states to the subsidy increment is important. Looking at the same pattern repeated at the street to block subdistrict level and off than it is similar but with a twist. When you learn what works at the streets or district level and look at that pattern. Motivation for violence as a concept that makes him think of the disparity between the wealthy. By the way there is not as strong correlation in the Field Research between a street coefficient that this job besides the ability to but just the fact there is a disparity between rich and for more. Go arent. Host that came up with education and to leverage education. Like a goalie and that has a lot of wealth to bridge the gap but to see the grass greener on the other side or to influence of the countrys future and then blackmarket business, drugs , and arms being the of fuel. The single biggest motivator that i saw was predictability but if you have a city with people moving and selling them that goes on for generations with those people settle you end up with the horse shoe shaped or ring of territory where there is no officers of slums not to allow the presence people are excluded from the mainstream of the economy of politics and there was a time after 9 11 we would talk about when governed spaces like if there is no government presence but talk about the slums of africa theyre not uncovered that all they are thoroughly governed because what happens when that happens the role they play is like the police force were then tear restore insurgents the jamaican in drug smuggling gang we got them into mortar and rocket the city within kingston to deal with this one guy who was smuggling cocaine into the United States. If you talk to people on the ground they dont look it as a drug Smuggling Organization that is just what it does what it does on the ground is like the government do gets a job it keeps down petty crime for how you access fuel or water or in such a city it is the government just like ours kills people overseas, just like in jamaica and the fact the government sells drugs that is not the main issue. Thinking of this city as a system the main motivation for violence is getting away from a dangerous environment of unpredictable uncertainty to the environment where i know exactly what i need to do to be saved. One will set down a rule said that basically says heres the rules i will protect you and i will not hurt to. If you break the rules you are asked risk at risk but they flocked to that to come under the control but the effect of politicians with a downtown urban area that a ring of territory was not taken to fetas refuse to be for the water now those of have a chokehold like the non stage actor ramifications of humanitarian issues . Nato is still very relevant what is happening below us city level they could engage to solve those problems are three International Constitutions in nato right now thinks about what they will do post afghanistan part of the conversation i have had in neat nato is afghanistan is a geographical fluke see will be awesome after fighting the conflict will still happen but it will not necessarily require the same things we have been doing so nato, the when like the world bank and asia and africa of Development Aid talks about to address this. There is a program is never called violence prevention where people using your been designed to prevent balms from happening yet figured out ways to limit its when it does happen. That is like having an effect although it is not military. The worldwide marshall plan. I would not go that far but it does not get helped by large the International Assistance philanthropic donations of overtaken behalf government with the aid battered in talking about the Gates Foundation many philosophical have a single issue like health so if the focus is Maternal Health and infant mortality that is where you have money for that is what you focus on the looking at the city in the system you better have a great Education Plan in five years or Employment Plan in 20 years or you just create a mess of problems to buy even the acid degeneration from now which is what we see with the environment. We will end with this question. The process of forgiveness and reconciliation of leadership and post conflict using iraq, afghanistan places that have been struck by violence are. Were due leaders get their mandates to do the right thing by them or their people . Right to. To my mind one of the under it knowledge but an important points reid never effectively made peace after 2001 for every kid that went to high school taught the of the lease effective treaty is the upper side treaty at least we invited the germans we never even let the taliban stand up. They surrendered and tried to make peace after a 2001 Technology Authority to be a part of the peace building process if we said no. They came back in 2003 because they were excluded from the reconciliation process that never happened. That is the missing piece in the last chapter talks about the initiatives that have spent a successful one is the way the liberian women banded together that led to the end of the civil war in 2003. Talking about women there is a gender equity way to think of women involvement with these complex and is important and relevant but another way is economics. Most of sees some slum and firemans there are no jobs for men. It is not accidental it is a dormitory environment so they worked in townships. They are there because the english Colonial Government put them there for an unmarried men to be a labor force if you live in san jose the guy who delivers your mail does not have the money to live there but he lives tumor three hours away. In her bid environments in africa is probably a slum. They meet every morning the only people that stayed around in the environment old man or young man or crime. Most jobs that exist are held by with an almost all businesses are owned by women. If you exclude women from your discussion of peace building you miss 50 percent of your population but 80 or 90 percent of the actual economy. In liberia muslim am presbytery and women got together to create an alliance to put economic pressure on the government to shut down the conflict then they went overseas with help from nigerian lawyers to put pressure on the rebel side to force them to stop fighting one of the few examples of the bottomup peace building enabled by conductivity and we will see more examples Going Forward. Third piece building bottomup is important but they still have the International Peacekeeping force to keep that agreement but ultimately the solution comes from within the society or it does not, and all. You certainly cannot impose legitimacy on the political system you cannot assemble a state to bring in the spark battle of body parts of a slap you can animate that that will walk and talk then it will go dead. And that spark of legitimacy hast to come from within said with a couple places of nigeria that happen to be resilient, libya and it comes from an urban population that will be dominant of the next generation. Host david thank you very much. This concludes our portion. [applause] the was an excellent talk and saw a really good discussion from the participants in the audience. He will be here to sign copies of the book. I have read more than 30 percent of the book but it is so readable i cannot tell you how great it is. It is rich reading so i encourage you to look at it. If you have insomnia i recommend it. Figure for coming