The bloody 20th century began in a different world. Most of humanity lived in villages or small towns. While cities had begun to grow exponentially in the 19th century, our rural histories continued to shape our lives and beliefs. When war came, the fields of battle truly were fields. Cities were prizes to be captured, but mankind fought in city streets only to put down revolutions or colonial uprisings. Our century changed everything.
Certainly, battles for cities and their consequent destruction occurred throughout history, from Babylon and Carthage to the sieges of Petersburg and Paris. Cities always focused military operations.
But, sometimes for practical reasons and otherwise by cultural agreement, the great battles we study in our military colleges usually took place in rural landscapes, from Cannae to Gettysburg. Although siege operations formed a sophisticated military discipline in our own culture, that science peaked in the 17th century.
Thereafter, we regarded urban combat as something of a shameful nuisance, to be avoided by sensible soldiers.
Then came our century. Battle and atrocity were linked in urban battles, from Nanking and Manila to Stalingrad, to say nothing of the terror-bombings of London, Coventry, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and a host of other cities.
The cities that had long been prizes of war became its landscapes, just as they had been when the armies of Charles V sacked Rome in 1527 or Tilly's men ravaged Magdeburg during the Thirty Years' War.
However bloody the period may have been, the West had enjoyed two centuries of wars with good manners. Despite the horrors, we might term the 18th and 19th centuries the heroic age of warfare. The 20th century destroyed that age forever.
We end this century in a world populated by a majority of urban dwellers, with the grimmest cities growing larger and sicker every day. When asked why he robbed banks, a famous thief answered, "That's where the money is." We will fight in and around cities because that's where the people are, for today's conflicts are ever less about reasons of state and increasingly about the fundamental problems of humanity.
Cities are also where the wealth, communications, infrastructure, governments, religious seats and national symbols are. They are the ultimate killing fields. The age of grand maneuvers on green fields is over.
The new century will be one of street fighting, uncontrollable masses, shortage, disease and immeasurable hatreds -- all concentrated in the decaying urban landscapes in the world's least-successful states and regions.
It is a kind of warfare for which our Army is unprepared. Worse, it is the type of warfare for which our Army refuses to prepare.
The Marines have moved out on the development of concepts, doctrine, training and weapons for the urban fight. The Army has left them to it. I admire the Marines as the most forward-looking and honest of the services today. But there are not enough of them to address the massive challenges the coming decades will bring.
The Army must stop preparing for a replay of the Normandy breakout at the expense of everything else. We will fight in cities; the problem will not go away just because we have chosen to ignore it. If we do not prepare, we will kill soldiers and embarrass our country. The Army's neglect of urban combat issues -- even after Mogadishu -- is a disgrace.
Now there has been a certain amount of "Russian progress" in our Army -- a growing amount of chatter about urban operations with no meaningful follow-up action. Future concepts briefings have begun to throw in a few lines about urban warfare, but then the briefer proceeds to describe systems, organizations and doctrine for Desert Storm VI.
We need to face this issue head-on, no matter how many rice bowls shake and shatter. There is no single branch -- certainly not Armor, Infantry, Field Artillery, Military Intelligence or even the Medical Corps -- that is prepared for an urban fight. As we dither and dally, our general officers and their shiny little yes men hide behind a series of myths.
Let's explode a few of them.
We're too smart to get into an urban conflict.
First of all, the Army does not get to pick its fights. We go where the president tells us to go. Increasingly, that will be to urban areas where masses of humanity are suffering and/or our business interests are threatened.
Our recent military disasters have occurred in urban settings in which we proved naive, inattentive and unprepared.
Our open-ended commitment in Bosnia stems from a war in which cities and towns were the objects of military operations and the scenes of the worst atrocities. Even our National Guard's most demanding operations over the last 30 years have been in city streets -- our own. Terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction or plain old bombs don't go for the tractor repair shop in a farming village. They go for cities.
Cities are the world's dilemma in multiple respects, and they will be our great military dilemma in the future.
We must prepare. We don't get to choose our battles. Today, more than ever before, the battles choose us.
We won't go into the cities. We'll just conduct sieges.
This would-be solution, which made the rounds over the past six months, wins the Dumb And Dumber Military Sweepstakes. It makes buying the F-22 look smart.
Whoever came up with the idea of the Army conducting sieges does not understand our Army, our national values, cities, or the nature of contemporary conflict, to say nothing of the history of siege warfare.
Sieges are horrible. At best, you shell people and slaughter them into surrender. At worst, you starve them out while they die of disease.
Even if we were cruel enough to conduct a real siege, what would it accomplish if the problem was genocide in the streets? Or a dictatorship perfectly willing to let the masses starve? Or if there were thousands of international residents? Read hostages. Or if the Europeans had business interests in the city?
Sieges are horrible, lengthy and wasteful of human life. We cannot even enforce trade sanctions, let alone airtight sieges.
It is exactly the wrong sort of operation for the Army. We would not even be able to cut off international satellite communications without global cooperation, and any cooperation we might muster would evaporate with the first footage of besieged infants dead of hunger or cholera.
Before any officer says one more word about sieges, he or she should study a few. I suggest Berlin or Leningrad, although the squeamish can settle for Vicksburg.
Technology will take care of the problem.
This is the great American answer, and it may prove true in 50 or 60 years with the advent of behavior control weapons.
At present, our combat systems, our communications gear, our intelligence collectors and even our medical kits are so inappropriate to urban operations it would be hard to design worse. Our doctrine barely accommodates village fighting. Our force structure is for future Desert Storms -- and it is rapidly becoming too hollow even for that. Technology could certainly aid us in urban operations, but we need to seek out incisive technologies, such as survivable armor for protected fire and movement, three-dimensional mapping, smart weapons for individual soldiers, penetrant communications (and knee and elbow pads, please).
In an urban setting, our present military technology is as apt to hinder us, to slow us and confuse us, as it is to aid us.
It is a combat environment in which we cannot even identify our enemies. Out forces can operate in urban areas, but those forces are extremely inefficient, cumbersome and relatively ineffective. The city fight is fundamentally different. It is up close and dirty, and vastly more complex than maneuver operations in Mesopotamia.
Soldiers need fundamentally different training, and they undergo intense psychological pressure. They need more upper body strength, and they need more leadership at the lowest levels. Cities consume manpower, even when the combat is low-level and intermittent.
The local population is a third force that can paralyze our operations. Military forces assume different and much broader responsibilities. The fight is truly three-dimensional.
Traditional fire support is useless, unless you want to go for a Russian solution and flatten the city. Lines and boundaries are fantasies scribbled on a map. Unless you hide in a fortress, the enemy is always behind you. And soldiers die just because they are looking the wrong way in that most distracting of combat environments.
Talking about the problem is useful, if talk leads to serious thought and eventually to action. But sloganeering about sieges and technology and nonsense about being too wise to enter an urban fight reduces our Army to satire.
We do not have to like it -- and we won't -- but urban warfare is today's problem, and the problem will only intensify tomorrow. We cannot delay intelligent preparations.
If I am wrong, and we prepare for urban operations that never take place, we will have lost money and effort.
If I am right, and urban combat is the warfare mode of the future but we fail to prepare for it, the cost will be in lives and damage to our national interests.
Our nation will remember the men who made the fateful choices.
| HOME | CONCEPTS | DOCTRINE |
| OPERATIONS 1 | OPERATIONS 2 | TECHNOLOGY |
| COMMERCIAL | RESEARCH | MOUT FORUM |
| BOOKSTORE | SIGN GUESTBOOK | VIEW GUESTBOOK |
| UNITS/IMAGES | DEDICATION |
Get your own Free Home Page