Hybrid Threats: Urban Crime Wars and Criminal Insurgencies

The conceptual lens for thinking about “urban guerillas” goes back, at least in part, to the Cold War and the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969) by Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella.  More recently, Jennifer Taw and Bruce Hoffman published a RAND monograph, The Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to U.S. Army Operations (1994).

According the Taw and Hoffman, 

“governments, no longer able to simply rely on their urban counterterrorist or rural counterinsurgency strategies, will have to develop a hybrid strategy that prepares them to fight a broad-based insurgency across rural and urban environments.”

In contemporary terms, these non-state threat actors form part of the hybrid threat and hybrid warfare continuum that potentially complicates the full range of urban operations.  This range includes civil strife, non-international armed conflict (NIAC), and international armed conflicts such as the Ukraine War.

The civil strife and NIAC part of the spectrum includes the situations involving criminal armed groups (CAGs) addressed in “Virtual Urban Siege: Modern Urban Siege and Swarming in Culiacán 2019 & 2023” by Daniel Weisz Argomedo, Nathan P. Jones, and John P. Sullivan.