Anna M. Gielas
Cities are becoming smart. Over the past two decades, urban environments worldwide have integrated digital technologies into nearly every aspect of daily life—from energy grids and transportation systems to public administration and civic engagement. By 2023, over one thousand active smart city projects were underway worldwide, with roughly one hundred new smart cities added every year. The increasing adoption of data-driven urban technologies reshapes how cities operate—but this ongoing transformation is still commonly overlooked in US doctrine and training. Military experts note that the modern city constitutes “the least understood of potential conflict environments.
Where individual smart city technologies are taken into consideration, they usually are presented as potential advantages for US and allied forces. This suggests a one-sided and potentially overly optimistic perception—one that may obscure an underappreciated threat landscape for the US armed forces. As urban conflict becomes more frequent, overlooking this evolving threat environment risks leaving forces underprepared—or unprepared—for the operational realities of emerging urban battlefields. The number of conflicts in cities is expected to further increase in the years to come—particularly in the Global South.
City governments and private investors across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are accelerating their deployments of smart city technologies. Some Latin American cities are outperforming Western smart city initiatives. As of 2025, Santiago, Chile, for example, is home to the largest smart fleet of electric buses outside of China. Similarly, India’s national Smart Cities Mission has funded 8,067 projects across one hundred designated cities. African countries—including Kenya, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Morocco, and Mauritius—also initiated smart city programs. Together, these developments underscore the worldwide trend toward reconfiguring urban agglomerates into data-driven ecosystems.
Traditionally, urban terrain has been assessed based on physical features like buildings, infrastructure, and chokepoints. According to retired Lieutenant Colonel Louis DiMarco “The nature of how armies conduct operations in cities is a function of city design and weapons technology.” However, in the hyperconnected smart city, networked sensors, pervasive data collection, and AI-powered analytics create a persistent surveillance overlay. This environment, encompassing devices from public CCTV cameras to traffic sensors, offers unprecedented situational awareness to the controlling force.
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