Rebuilding Cities After War

What does it mean to kill a city? And can it come back to life?

These are questions that are becoming increasingly important as the United States takes a step back from its recent military interventions in Iraq and Syria. Despite the effort to help these countries expel ISIS militants and reclaim their ISIS-controlled territory, much of the major metropolitan areas of Mosul and Raqqa have been reduced to rubble.

The mass civilian exodus from these cities, combined with the resulting physical destruction of urban warfare, is enough to conclude that these cities are failing or even dying.

But what history has shown is that cities can, in fact, come back to life after wartime destruction.

The question of rebuilding after war was a topic that Sarah Holewinski and her fellow panelists grappled with at the 2019 Future Security Forum, which was hosted by New America and Arizona State University. To make her point clear, her opening comments focused on Syria: “Raqqa is a pancake,” she said.

Why the unusual metaphor? Holewinksi stated that, according to her peers in the humanitarian space, describing a city as a pancake articulates that it has been killed. She added that panels such as hers aren’t often highlighted in security conferences, let alone those that focus on how to stave off war and manage international security threats. By the end of the session, it was clear that discussions like these need to be part of a continuous dialogue.

Holewinksi, a current fellow at New America’s International Security Program and a former senior advisor on use of force and human rights issues to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the U.S. Department of Defense—along with her fellow panelists, Major (ret) John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute and co-director of the Urban Warfare Project West Point, and Kelly Uribe, former Senior Policy Advisor (OSD/SHA) and current country director for Spain, Portugal and Malta, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense and Policy—navigated their way through a complex labyrinth of questions aimed at outlining policy recommendations for future U.S. military interventions.

The panel started the conversation by building consensus on whether or not a city can be killed. Building on that concept, they delved deeper into the idea that, if a city such as Raqqa was indeed a pancake, and if the United States had a role to play in that flattening, what are the country’s responsibilities to help Raqqa come back to life?

Spencer proclaimed, “If you can kill a city, that means you thought it was alive beforehand.” Still, how do you define what a live city is? Spencer argued that cities are organisms and should be treated as such. They’re more than just locations on a map; they’re places where generations and civilizations (often) chose to be. If people have lived in a place for decades or even centuries, then there’s something that has drawn people to it—a purpose. In order to kill it, that purpose needs to be removed.

Crucially, while leveling a city, or making it a pancake of sorts, appears to destroy it, leveling structures isn’t truly enough to kill it, because the structures can be rebuilt. As Spencer highlighted, 10,000 buildings were destroyed in Raqqa, but 150,000 people have repopulated the city. Eighty percent of the city was leveled, but Raqqa isn’t dead. Part of the problem with urban warfare today, Spencer argued, is that it continues to focus on the destruction of buildings.

Indeed, the nature of urban warfare, in some ways, hasn’t changed, which makes it problematic from the start. As Spencer described it: because military members can’t see into buildings, when people are being shot at, every structure becomes fair game. Then, when troops on the ground rely on backup from above, buildings crumble from airstrikes and raining artillery shells. To further this point, Spencer highlighted that one Marine battalion fired 35,000 rounds of artillery in four months in Raqqa, surpassing that of the entire Iraq invasion, as well as that of any other battalion since Vietnam. This speaks to the question of whether we, as a country, are fighting smarter or harder.

So, what to do about the persistent problem of turning cities into pancakes?

Looking ahead, when the United States considers whether or not to engage in conflicts, it can turn to the recently developed Stabilization Assistance Review, or SAR, which was created by the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Defense.

The SAR aims to align the government’s efforts “toward supporting locally legitimate authorities and systems to peaceable manage conflict and prevent violence.” In its opening foreword, the SAR discusses the need to “resist the temptation to throw more money at these complex problems. American taxpayers are right to demand tough scrutiny of such investments.”

These words sound like a departure from what we accept as the new normal to approaches of past conflicts (see war tax). The SAR seeks an integrated approach to conflict from the perspective of these federal departments and agencies, hoping to address fragility after conflict in order to empower local partners to participate in reconstruction and own the process going forward.

Of course, it’s not a cure-all for conflict mitigation. Uribe also discussed that, despite the efforts to reinstate services, security, and infrastructure, stability can still be an issue, which is why the very political nature of the United States’ engagement in conflict needs to be at the heart of how and why it engages. Further, as Spencer emphasized, if we don’t rebuild what we’ve destroyed, resentment will build toward those who leveled the city. Those circumstances “create the next iteration of ISIS.”

Rebuilding after war hasn’t always been part of initial conversations about whether or not the United States will engage in a conflict. But Spencer argued that it should be. “Old frameworks don’t work in new places,” he said. After the forever war, and with other conflicts ticking away, the SAR roadmap is an encouraging first step for the future. It gets to the crux of Holewinski’s question, “Does the United States ever hit a point where it will not enter a conflict because it simply cannot afford the costs?”

United States officials certainly didn’t intend to spend nearly $6 trillion across conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, among other locations, since 9/11. Even with the best intentions, it didn’t anticipate that its interventions would lead to the collapse of cities after regime change, or the rise of ISIS. So knowing what we know now, can the SAR and integrated policies point to a way forward that reduces costs, in terms of both money and lives lost ?

The panelists seemed in agreement that, by proactively addressing the above themes, the United States can be in a better position to manage the three stages of conflict: pre-, present-, and post-. More than that, by addressing conflicts with these stages in mind during the information gathering phase, the United States can be more effective at following its planned trajectory. Spencer argued that the United States needs to address its problem of “failing to realize as a government that cities are the strategic train of the future.” With investment in studying how conflict impacts cities and how to rejuvenate them after conflict, the United States will be able to better approach its role after cities face the aftermath of urban warfare.