The U.S. military has seen the future, and it involves urban warfare
Interesting article on military operations urban terrain
Link to story
Quote:
This year marks a milestone in human history: For the first time, more than half the world's population will live in cities. A June 2007 report by the United Nations Population Fund said this "decisive shift from rural to urban growth" marks a change in "a balance that has lasted for millennia."
Not coincidentally, Army Chief Gen. George Casey recently gave a blunt assessment of how the United States would wage wars in the future: "We're going to fight in cities."
During his three years as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Casey tried to come up with a way to fight an adaptive, largely ur-ban insurgency. That he never developed a fully effective approach explains, in part, his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus in early 2007. Petraeus' strategy of moving U.S. troops off huge bases and into local neighborhoods has tamped down violence in much of the country. Whether it will work in the long run remains to be seen.
Cities - from Stalingrad to Moga-dishu to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004 - have long played host to history's major battles. In a 2005 speech in Quantico, Va., Marine Gen. Michael Hagee said, "In my opinion, Fallujah is . . . not a bad example of what we're going to fight in the future, and not a bad example of how to fight it. . . . It is about individual Marines going house to house, killing."
The city as battlefield is partly a function of the city as the hub of modern commercial, educational, financial, social and political activity - a trend accelerated by globalization. Densely packed cities are where transportation arteries converge. Troops moving along the path of least resistance, such as paved roadways linking together major urban areas, are at some point bound to bump into opposing troops.
Meanwhile, the urban explosion is accelerating: By 2020, the number of city dwellers will swell to 60 percent of the world's population, and by 2030, it will reach 80 percent. The most rapid growth now is occurring in Asia and Africa, where the ranks of city dwellers increases by a million people every week.
Megacities - those with more than 10 million inhabitants - continue to expand. The U.N. says the wave of urbanization in the developing world could lead to continued unrest and conflict as the growth in population taxes the ability of cities to deliver security and basic services. It also will tax the ability of the U.S. military to adapt to a very different kind of war than it has traditionally waged.
Much more at the LINK
Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare
All - sincere apologies for long absence from this forum, and for showing up now, only to toot our own horn.
I wanted to call your attention to an upcoming book discussion that's going to be held at CTlab, from 5-8 December. The author is Dr. Antoine Bousquet, and the book, about to be published with Hurst & Co Publishers in the UK and COlumbia University Press in the US, is entitled The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity.
We already held a public lecture last week at University College London, entitled "Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare". It's the first in the Battlespace/s Public Lecture Series; it mixed architectural speculation and Bousquet's ideas. Streaming video of that event'll be available within a few days, and an interview with Bousquet has been posted to the CTlab website here, in preparation for the discussion. Quicklinks for the symposium can be found at top right of the main CTlab blog page.
CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS:
Kenneth Anderson – Law (American University)
Josef Ansorge – International Relations (Cambridge University)
John Matthew Barlow – History (Concordia University)
Antoine Bousquet - Politics & Sociology (Birkbeck College)
Martin Coward – International Relations (University of Sussex)
Armando Geller – Conflict Analysis (Manchester Metropolitan University)
James Gibson – Sociology (California State University, Long Beach)
Derek Gregory – Geography (University of British Columbia)
Craig Hayden –International Communications (American University)
Charles Jones –International Relations (Cambridge University)
Jason Ralph – Politics and International Studies (University of Leeds)
Julian Reid – War Studies (King’s College London)
Martin Senn – Political Science (University College London)
Marc Tyrrell – Anthropology (Carleton University) [yes, OUR MarcT]
Tony Waters – Sociology (California State University, Chico)
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
We're all looking forward to it, and I'd be interested to see the discussion extend to this part of the ether, as well. All feedback on form + content is welcome. Ping me direct with any questions/comments/suggestions.
Urban Warfare conference in Geneva, end of the month
Sorry for the short notice, the ministry just sent this out:
http://www.geopolitics.ch/en/colloqu...n_conflit.html
No affiliation on my part, just passing it along.
Has the US Solved the Urban Combat Problem
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert Haddick
Has the US Solved the Urban Combat Problem
So was the 2008 battle for Sadr City a one-off, the result of unique circumstances? Or is it a model for future U.S. MOUT operations? If U.S.-led coalition forces can dominate urban terrain almost as cleanly and cheaply as open terrain, what are the consequences for irregular adversaries? And how might they adapt?
Readers, I welcome your comments.
Happy to comment. In my opinion it's a one off, because context is everything.
Sadr City is only 6 x 5 km laid out on a near perfect grid, and the US held all the cards, as concerns when and where to act.
Going by what was said at CNAS, what happened in Sadr City is what should happen if you prepare properly for that type of operation. Nothing the US did there was new, or original. It's all urban operations best practice from the last 10 years.
To try and draw lessons across to other circumstances may not give any useful insight, unless the same level of resources and preparation can be applied to circumstance that is substantially similar.
To assume that coalition forces can dominate urban terrain as cleanly and cheaply as open terrain, would be grossly misleading based on the quality of evidence to hand.
Sadr City & MOUT - learn from it don't copy it.
As always, thank you for highlighting these events that us not in the U.S. miss. Btw, are we assuming the urban area is cleared of people or not?
On the question, alas, no solution. To my limited understanding, Sadr City involved luxurious amounts of ISR and time, and in its own way was a 'brute force' approach (throw as many ISR, firing platforms and other assets at the problem as possible), a bigger less defined and multi-layer urban area would require exponentially more assets. I suggest it's possible to learn from Sadr City, not copy it - but that is what I'm guessing Gen. Petraeus meant.
In any case, brief thoughts on #2,4 & 5:
2) No need for coalition ground forces to go house-to-house, wrecking the city in the process,
Unless there is some magic to tell me what people living in houses are thinking, or indicate prepositioned explosives (mines etc), I would still want to go house to house. Whether or not going house to house necessarily means wrecking the city is up to all combatant actors.
4) Much reduced non-combatant casualties and refugee flows, resulting from persistent observation and precision fires,
Persistent observation theoretically exists in CCTV systems, but even there it's hard to (in advance) know what is in a bag, car etc. From the description provided, overhead observation of Sadr City was not persistent in the way CCTV potentially is...so many ways to not see what the adversaries are actually doing (seconding Ken White's decoys, deceptions line of thought). The main problem, to me, is how it is possible to (pre-) identify targets, or positively post-identify them (make sure you know the guy about to be shot is the same person who shot at you).
5) Perhaps most important, no climactic drama and resulting media attention.
I understand the broader point of this, but surely for the population (residents in Sadr City) there was drama, that will be remembered (positively or negatively). This would then have an effect on how the population responds to further combat/aid etc.
On potential adaptations, they are surely location-culture specific, but if the U.S. can see above ground, going underground seems logical (ok, this may apply mainly to cities with water-sanitation infrastructure that is underground, or where digging tunnels is possible.)