Here are some excerpts from another Mike Davis article. This one raises the idea of the network form as the architecture of resistance to Empire. The excerpt is from The Pentagon as Global Slumlord (located on the tomdispatch.com site). As usual w/ Mike Davis's writings, the whole thing is very much worth reading, but here's one section I thought was especially relevant to this blog:

'More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal. "Rapid urbanization in developing countries," writes Captain Troy Thomas in the spring 2002 issue, "results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned."

'Thomas contrasts modern, "hierarchical" urban cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by "informal, decentralized subsystems, "where no blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the system are not readily discernable." Using the "sea of urban squalor" that surrounds Pakistan's Karachi as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering challenge of "asymmetric combat" within "non-nodal, non-hierarchical" urban terrains against "clan-based" militias propelled by "desperation and anger." He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other potential nightmare battlefields.'

(The entire article is available here: Slumlords Aerospace Power in Urban Fights)

Cities are networks. Here's how Thomas describes the urban terrain:

"One can understand cities as a set of interrelated elements interacting as whole cities interdependent with the environment- cities are not islands. Rather, they are connected to a surrounding mixed terrain or rural setting through permeable boundaries and LOCs [lines of communication - jd], a fact having much significance to urban airpower strategies, operations, and tactics. With a systemic perspective, airmen should better orient their thinking to relationships and patterns of activity rather than static objects or individual events in time and space." [good advice anywhere - jd]

In his article, it's clear that Thomas's "nonnodal" terrain is really a kind of terrain that does not present the kind of targets that aircraft can hit (e.g., a microwave tower). That is, the terrain isn't really "nonnodal", rather, the nodes just aren't visible. City networks may have a granularity that is not visible from 30,000 or 10,000 or even 1,000 feet -- the nodes are too small or informal to be visible at that distance. Instead, the communications system nodes might consist of walkie-talkies or low-power radio, easily concealed and highly mobile.

"A systems approach recognizes that complex, interacting urban factors, including the relationships of human activity, intersect at key nodes. The more decentralized and unconventional the enemy, the more difficulty in discerning the nodes. The problem is compounded in the sprawling peripheries. The dynamic complexity of cities often means that relationships between cause and effect are difficult to discern and that the effects of aerospace power may be delayed in time."

Under "primitive city" conditions w/ "unconventional forces", air power attempts to achieve "indirect effects".

"Warfare in a primitive city against an unconventional force, however, is more the domain of ground forces conducting tactical engagements. Aerospace power can achieve operational effects here as well, but indirectly, through cumulative attacks on key relationships (such as movement patterns, personal exchanges, and fluid assembly areas). "

"Indirect effects flow out of direct attacks but are delayed in time or removed in space. These effects are more difficult to predict, given the highly complex nature of the connections between subsystems and threats. One can also achieve operational effects indirectly as the result of cumulative tactical effects. One may need to use this approach in primitive cities against unconventional enemies due to the lack of knowledge about subsystems. As previously asserted, both the system and the threat exist outside government control and may actually be nonnodal, featuring unpredictable, inconspicuous relationships." (Thomas)