The Plow and the Well: Conflict Is Moving to Systems
Abstract: Control over water, food, and supply chains is increasingly shaping how power operates in modern conflict with non-state armed groups. When these systems fail, recruitment rises; when they are controlled, they become tools of governance; and when they are deliberately disrupted, they can generate effects far beyond the point of impact. This framework shifts counterterrorism analysis from an actor-centric to a systems-centric approach.
Counterterrorism efforts have long been focused on tracking networks, targeting leadership, and disrupting ideology. While attention remains fixed on communications, financing, and battlefield activity, a more fundamental driver of instability is unfolding in plain sight. The next front line of conflict is less about hidden compounds or urban battlefields and more about the systems people rely on in everyday life: water, food, and the infrastructure that moves them. Where wells run dry, crops fail, or supply chains fracture, instability takes root well before violence becomes visible. Understanding future conflict requires looking past ideology and focusing instead on what populations depend on to survive.
In modern conflict, control over life-sustaining systems has become a primary source of power. Ideology or force alone is no longer sufficient to explain how power is built. Instead, power comes from these groups’ ability to shape access to essential resources and the networks that distribute them. As economic and resource competition intensifies among states, these dynamics are taking hold among non-state actors. System breakdown creates openings for recruitment, while control over those same systems leads to governance. Once manipulated, their effects can extend far beyond the immediate area of control. The result is a shift in focus from who the actors are to what they control and how access is structured.
When Systems Break, Recruitment Follows
When the systems people depend on begin to fail, the effects show up long before violence does. Farmers lose access to irrigation. Markets become unreachable. Trade routes degrade or disappear altogether. When livelihoods collapse, so too do the set of choices available to individuals. In those conditions, joining an armed group is often less about belief than about survival.
The Lake Chad Basin (LCB) is a clear example of this dynamic. Since the 1960s, the lake has shrunk by more than 90 percent. What was once roughly 25,000 square kilometers now covers less than 2,000. The effects of this were not immediately visible in security terms. They showed up first in the collapse of livelihoods when fishing yields declined, arable land disappeared, and the pastoral routes that had existed for generations became unreliable. By the time violence escalated after 2009, the underlying conditions in the LCB had already deteriorated, leading to millions being displaced out of their livelihoods and out of the region entirely.
The collapse of the LCB economy reshaped decision-making. A 2023 UNDP study of former recruits across Africa found that economic need, not ideology, was in fact the primary driver of joining armed groups, with employment cited more frequently than religious motivation. Boko Haram, a Salafi-jihadist insurgent group operating across northeastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin, adapted directly to this failing environment. Boko Haram became one of the few remaining avenues for people to access resources and income. Fishermen had to pay to use the lake, and farmers were taxed on what they produced. For many, joining Boko Haram, whether voluntary or coerced, became a way to re-enter an economy that no longer functioned.
After splitting from Boko Haram in 2015, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) took a more organized approach (and also sought to distinguish itself from Boko Haram’s indiscriminate violence) by regulating trade, taxation, and access to resources more systematically. But the underlying dynamic remained the same: when existing systems collapsed, armed groups became the gateway back into them.
When Systems are Controlled, Governance Emerges
Where systems collapse, someone inevitably steps in to reorganize access. Armed groups do not always need formal institutions to govern. Control over resources can substitute for them. Authority, in these environments, is less about legitimacy in the traditional sense and more about who can actually deliver water, food, or access to markets.
ISIS demonstrated this with astounding clarity. At its height in 2014-2015, the group controlled vast swaths of territory, but more importantly, it controlled the systems that made that territory livable. Across Iraq and Syria, ISIS seized irrigation infrastructure, dams, and key agricultural regions, including roughly 40 percent of Syria’s wheat production and a third of Iraq’s. By controlling water flow along the Tigris and Euphrates, ISIS had the power to determine which land remained productive and which communities could continue to farm (and, by extension, survive).
This control translated into governance. ISIS redistributed land, taxed agricultural production, and managed food supply through a structured system of collection and distribution. In some cases, it confiscated massive quantities of grain, at one point seizing an estimated one million tons and cutting off payments to hundreds of thousands of farmers. In short, farmers couldn’t plant, harvest, or sell without operating inside ISIS-controlled systems.
Similar patterns appear elsewhere, even without full territorial control. In Somalia, al-Shabaab was able to shape access to economic and humanitarian systems by taxing trade and forcing payments from businesses and humanitarian aid flows. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has long embedded itself in rural economies by taxing agricultural production and regulating trade routes that connect local markets. In each of these cases, authority comes from control over access to essential systems.
When Systems Are Manipulated, Coercion Scales
The dynamic shifts again once control gives way to manipulation. At that point, geography matters less than connectivity. Armed groups no longer need to hold territory to exert pressure. They only need to disrupt the systems that people depend on. Supply chains, transport corridors, and critical inputs become leverage points. A disruption to fuel, fertilizer, or food distribution rarely stays contained; it cascades outward, sometimes quickly, affecting regions far beyond the initial point of impact.
Beginning in 2025, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgent coalition operating across Mali and the broader Sahel, weaponized this logic by targeting the fuel supply chains that keep the country running. The consequences were immediate and severe. Fuel prices in Bamako surged up to 500%, transportation slowed to a halt, businesses shut down, hospitals struggled to keep generators running, and even schools and universities closed down for weeks. By disrupting these core systems that keep life moving in the capital, JNIM was able to pressure the government, strain the economy, and affect the broader population, without ever needing to control territory directly.
The implications of this strategy extend further. Agriculture, in particular, presents an especially vulnerable target, and one that is often underestimated. The deliberate introduction of crop or livestock pathogens, which is often termed agroterrorism, offers a low-cost, high-impact means of disruption. A localized biological attack can ripple its way through supply chains, trade systems, and food security, and produce effects far disproportionate to the initial act. In this sense, the battlefield shifts away from sites of violence and toward the systems themselves.
A Strategic Blind Spot
We are preparing for the wrong kind of conflict. Despite these changes, much of today’s counterterrorism architecture still relies on an actor-centric model. It maps networks, monitors communications, and targets leadership, but often overlooks the underlying systems that enable power.
If recruitment accelerates when systems fail (and the evidence suggests it does), then protecting water access, agricultural production, and market connectivity is not a secondary concern. It’s central. Where governance emerges through control of access, counterterrorism efforts must focus not only on removing actors but also on limiting their ability to structure these systems. And when coercion stems from disruption, securing key chokepoints, including trade routes, supply corridors, and infrastructure nodes, becomes essential to preventing instability.
One way this shift is already being operationalized is through scenario-based tabletop exercises focused specifically on systemic disruption. At Arizona State University’s Center for Agriculture and National Security, we are developing a backcasting exercise that begins with a future defined by widespread failure in food, water, and supply chains and works backward to identify the stressors, decisions, and missed opportunities that produced that outcome. Participants are immersed in a scenario of agricultural collapse, water scarcity, and fragmented trade flows, and are tasked with tracing how these pressures interact across sectors and over time. By focusing on how system breakdown unfolds rather than on discrete events, these exercises help translate a systems-based understanding of conflict into practical planning for government and industry partners.
The Conflict Ahead
Military force alone cannot resolve conflicts rooted in systemic failure. When instability is driven by the breakdown of water, food, and economic networks, the most effective interventions are those that restore and protect the foundations of everyday life. That means treating agricultural production, water access, and supply chains as core elements of security, not peripheral concerns. The most important contests of the coming decade will hinge less on territory or firepower and more on who can shape access at scale over time. In this sense, stability starts well before the battlefield, taking shape in the conditions that determine whether societies can absorb stress or fracture under it.
The post The Plow and the Well: Conflict Is Moving to Systems appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.