Future Megacity Operations—Lessons from Sadr City
The challenges U.S. forces confronted in Sadr City in 2004 and 2008 offer a condensed version of what awaits in future megacities. A megacity is a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million. In Sadr City’s case, with every day a struggle for survival the Sadrists’ limited initiatives earned tremendous loyalty among the slum’s population and after 2003, the founding of the Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) strengthened the coercive portion of the Sadrist spectrum of control with religious courts sentencing and gruesomely punishing those who defied Sadrist control structures. JAM ruthlessly purging whole districts of Sunni residents and manning checkpoints to guard against the very real
The challenges U.S. forces confronted in Sadr City in 2004 and 2008 offer a condensed version of what awaits in future megacities. A megacity is a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million. In Sadr City’s case, with every day a struggle for survival the Sadrists’ limited initiatives earned tremendous loyalty among the slum’s population and after 2003, the founding of the Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) strengthened the coercive portion of the Sadrist spectrum of control with religious courts sentencing and gruesomely punishing those who defied Sadrist control structures. JAM ruthlessly purging whole districts of Sunni residents and manning checkpoints to guard against the very real