A group of insurgents screeches out of a dusty alleyway in an old pickup truck on a typical sweltering day in Iraq and begins lobbing mortars toward one of Baghdad’s primary power stations. Coalition forces are quickly deployed to quell the attack, but in the firefight that ensues, a number of civilians who do not get out of the neighborhood’s crowded streets in time are wounded. How will the residents of the area react to these civilian casualties? Will an angry crowd gather to condemn the U.S. occupation and attack any troops remaining in the area, or will the soldiers’ effort to protect the city’s power supply elicit sympathy from a population that struggles to cope with frequent power outages? What impact will this conflict have on other neighborhoods in Baghdad, on the country as a whole, and on the entire Middle East region? Operation Urban Resolve 2015, the largest computer modeling and simulation exercise ever undertaken by the Department of Defense (DoD), played out this and hundreds of other scenarios similar to the power station attack in a series of virtual war games conducted by Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) during the summer and autumn of 2006.1 Urban Resolve is perhaps the U.S. military’s most frank admission that the megacities of the global South are likely to be the predominant loci of future warfare. Indeed, JFCOM’s description of the exercise acknowledges the increasing primacy of urban combat:
