Insurgency in 2030

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Introduction

Long before the military convoy arrived in the muggy town of Dara Lam, news of the meeting between the U.S. Army colonel and the unpopular governor of the Kirsham province had seeped into social media.1 Angry with the American presence and the governor’s corruption, local citizens organized for a demonstration. Their trending hashtag—#justice4all—soon drew the attention of international media and the online world, trending in popularity. It also drew the eyes of some less interested in justice: the notorious Fariq terror network. Using sockpuppet accounts and bots to steer the course of online and real world sentiment, the terrorists fanned the flames, calling for the protesters to confront the American occupiers.

But this wasn’t the full extent of Fariq’s plan. Knowing where a massive crowd of civilians would soon gather, the terrorists also set an ambush. Their plan was to fire on the U.S. soldiers as they exited the building, and, if the soldiers fired back, the demonstrators would be caught in the crossfire. Pre-positioned cameramen stood ready to record the bloody outcome: either dead Americans or dead civilians. A network of online proxies was then prepared to drive the event to virality and use it for future propaganda and recruiting. Whatever the physical outcome, the insurgents would win this battle.

Luckily, other eyes were tracking the flurry of activity online: those of a U.S. Army brigade’s tactical operations center. The center’s task was to monitor the environment in which its soldiers operated, whether the battlespace was dense cities, isolated mountain ranges, or, now, clusters of social media influencers. The fast-moving online developments were detected and then immediately passed up the chain of command. A generation earlier, the officers might have discounted what was playing out online as mere internet chatter, but now they understood its importance. Receiving word of the protest’s growing strength and fury, the colonel cut his meeting short and left discreetly through a back entrance. Fariq’s plan was thwarted.

Try as you might, you won’t find any record of this event in the news—and it is not because it takes place in the distant year of 2030. It is because Dara Lam is a fake settlement in a fake province of a fake country, one that endures a fake war that breaks out every few months in the very real state of Louisiana.

The Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk holds a special place in military history. It was created as part of the Louisiana Maneuvers, a series of massive training exercises held just before the United States entered World War II. When Hitler and his blitzkrieg rolled over Europe, the U.S. Army realized warfare was operating by a new set of rules. It had to figure out how to transition from a world of horses and telegraphs to one of mechanized tanks and trucks guided by wireless communications. It was at Fort Polk that American soldiers, including such legendary figures as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, learned how to fight in a way that would preserve the free world.

A Quartermaster Supply Unit during the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers.

Source: US Army Signal Corps., Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Since then, Fort Polk has served as a continuous field laboratory where the Army trains for tomorrow’s battles. During the Cold War, it was used to prepare for feared clashes with the Soviet Red Army and then to acclimatize troops to the jungles of Vietnam. After 9/11, the 72,000-acre site was transformed into the province of Kirsham, replete with twelve plywood villages, an opposing force of simulated insurgents, and scores of full-time actors playing civilians caught in the middle. In short, everything the Army thought it needed to simulate how war was changing. Today, Fort Polk boasts a brand-new innovation for this task: SMEIR.2

Short for Social Media Environment and Internet Replication, SMEIR simulates the blogs, news outlets, and social media accounts that intertwine to form a virtual battlefield atop the physical one. A team of defense contractors and military officers create a version of the internet activity of a small city—rambling posts, innocuous tweets, and the occasional bit of viral propaganda—challenging the troops fighting in the Kirsham counterinsurgency to navigate the new digital terrain. For the stressed, exhausted soldiers dodging enemy IEDs and bullets, it is not enough to safeguard the local population and fight the evil insurgents; they must also now be mindful of the ebb and flow of online conversation.

Imagery from SMEIR project of simulated online insurgents.

Source: Provided to author by U.S. Army/IDS SMEIR project

The project illustrates just how rapid –and surreal—technology change can be for military training and the broader political environment. A generation ago, the internet was a niche plaything—one that the U.S. military itself had literally just walked away from, handing off control to a global consortium of volunteers. Only the most far-sighted futurists at RAND were suggesting that it might one day become a crucial battlefield.3 None imagined that the military in that future would have to pay millions of dollars to simulate a second, fake internet to train for war on the real one.4

In this way, what played out at Fort Polk serves not just as a training moment, but a warning for those wrestling to understand the future of war. Despite hopes to the contrary, there will likely be a consistent need to prepare for insurgency, not just because of the continuing issues of failed states and collapsed governance, but the likelihood that, as in the Cold War, great power competition could express itself through proxy warfare.5 Yet while the essence of insurgency—a rebellion against authority that targets the effectiveness and legitimacy of the pillars of society6—remains the same, advances in science and knowledge can reshape it. Just as new technologies can change the society within which insurgency takes place, they can also introduce key shifts in everything from tactics used in battle to the overall dynamics of the conflict itself.

The following report will first explore the technologic change that looms in the years leading toward 2030 and beyond, and then propose a series of their potential implications for counterinsurgency.