These war-ravaged cities are but a few examples of a growing trend in global conflict, where more and more of the world’s most violent conflicts are being fought in densely populated urban areas, at a tremendously high cost to the civilians living there. Other World War II battles, and a range of post-1945 conflicts up to the present day, call into serious question the validity of the “lessons” of Stalingrad, such as the tendency for commanders to lose control of the battle, the symbolic resonance of cities that causes politicians to invest greater strategic meaning in them than they ought, the permanent advantages of the defender, the high force ratios necessary to succeed, and the idea that superior weaponry, training, and mobility inevitably become less important or useful in city fighting. Then, when I come back later with my men to carry out my evil schemes, I can let the plan take care of itself.41, In other words, while the presence of civilians in the city is indeed a factor that adds to the complexity of the operating environment, this is also the case in other environments, even ones that seem, at first glance, to be relatively uncluttered. Enemies might booby-trap stairwells or rip out the stairs completely and instead rely on retractable rope ladders. The truth is that the jungle is neutral. One oft-cited example is the way the Israelis conducted their attack on the town of Nablus in 2002 by “inverting the map” or “walking through walls…like a worm that eats its way forward” — using roads as barriers rather than thoroughfares, and using the interior of buildings as roads rather than a series of impermeable walls. This difficulty, however, is neutral, manifesting differently, but with equal impact, upon all sides. For practically all of history, generals have loathed the prospect of fighting in cities and have sought to avoid it. Urban guerilla warfare is very much a game of cat and mouse whereby improvised homemade devices such as coffee jar bombs, drogue bombs, horizontal mortars, petrol bombs, land mines, mercury tilt switch under car booby traps, even human bombs (a guy was once chained to the steering wheel of his lorry with a bomb in it and coerced into driving it into a British army checkpoint, he died, as did several … The report concludes that camouflage and deception can be tactically significant in urban warfare provided that effective materials are provided … William G. Robertson (Fort Leavenworth, KS: US Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2003), 84–85. The insistence of Israeli military strategists in the Operational Theory Research Institute on using such terms did much harm to their cause insofar as it freighted a good deal of common sense with language that made it incomprehensible to those who needed it. 3) Effects of Building Damage and Rubble: The intense employment of machineguns, artillery and explosives will greatly change the urban landscape. Applying multiple points of pressure to the enemy would allow a force to achieve the mission while affording the commander the opportunity to judge where and how to commit resources to exploit success. Military forces might need to reorganize and augment their MEDEVAC and medical treatment capabilities to deal with numbers of WIA that could exceed any historical precedent. 11 The cases considered were: Jerusalem 70, Rome 410, Constantinople 1453, Londonderry 1689, Gibraltar 1779–83, Acre 1799, Sevastopol 1854, Lucknow 1857, Paris 1870–71, Plevna 1877, Mafeking 1899–1900, and Port Arthur 1904–05. 57 See, Lutz Unterseher, “Urban Warfare,” in, Brassey’s Enclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare, ed. Neither is any Western army up to such a task without an extraordinary concentration of effort that is politically implausible and therefore strategically tenuous. In the first section, we seek to establish the fundamental characteristics of urban warfare, making reference to canonical works on the history of the city; specifically, works on war and the city. There are many advantages to operating in such a manner, including fewer civilian casualties, as potentially jittery soldiers are less likely to open fire on unidentified vehicles approaching their perimeter. 42 Jim Storr, The Human Face of War (London: Continuum Press, 2009). Units that have spent the past seventeen years learning to restrain their use of firepower, will have to break the habit quickly. How must urban combat tactics change if the United States and its allies find themselves in a high-intensity conventional war against a modern, combined arms force like Russia, China or North Korea? OPOT INOS1M GOV'T ACCOLUoU NO: S4 IPSUrS CATALLo MWuaoG SSC-TN-2625-16 I& TITLE tmd Ase) S. 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