21st Century Warfare, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, collapse, Doha Accord, Grand Strategy, international relations, Military Change and Transformation, Military Strategy and Policy, Pakistan, Security force assistance, Statecraft, strategy, Strategy and Policy, Taliban, Ukraine, War and Society
Keywords: urban warfare, Ukraine, Afghanistan, modern warfare, Military Strategy, 21st Century warfare
Episode Transcript: “Urban Warfare”
Stephanie Crider Host
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
Conversations on Strategy welcomes John Spencer. Spencer currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He served over 25 years in the US Army as an infantry soldier, having held the ranks from private to sergeant first class and second lieutenant to major. He also currently serves as a colonel in the California State Guard, assigned to the 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard, as the director of urban warfare training. His research focuses on military operations in dense urban areas, megacities, urban, and subterranean warfare.
Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, John. I’m glad you’re here.
John Spencer
Thanks for having me.
Host
Let’s talk about urban warfare. The US Army War College Press has published several pieces on this topic over the years. On a recent Urban Warfare Project podcast, you note urban warfare is the hardest. Can you elaborate on that?
Spencer
Sure. So I’m pretty adamant out of all the places you could ask military units to try to achieve strategic objectives, the urban operating environment is the hardest.
Because, one, the physical terrain, right, which is complicated and hard in all areas—high elevation, you know, deep jungles—but the actual element of the urban physical terrain, the three-dimensional, the surface, subsurface, rooftops, the canalizing effect of the buildings, and the architecture of the city that reduce our military’s or any military’s ability to do what they want to do, right? So to do maneuver warfare, to use (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance or) ISR and long-range strike capabilities—it doesn’t get negated; it gets degraded in the urban environment. So I think it is the hardest because of that complexity of that physical terrain.
But, by definition, “urban” means there’s people present. By our definition, the US military’s definition, “urban” means that there’s man-made terrain on top of natural terrain. There’s a population, and then there’s infrastructure to support that population. So with the presence of civilians in the operating environment in which militaries will be told to achieve objectives, the presence of civilians means that there will be a limit on the use of force. Because of the law of war, the international humanitarian law, (law of armed conflict or) LOAC, the different names that we use for it—since World War II and even all the way before World War II—most people think that in urban fights, like Stalingrad and, for us, Manila and Seoul—that was just a free range. There’s always a limit on the use of force. So going into it, it’s going to be harder for the military to use their form of warfighting because there’s gonna be limits on the use of force. Of course, there’s the three-block war, where soldiers and commanders will have to be fighting a peer competitor, at the same time dealing with humanitarian approaches and trying to get civilians out of the battle area, trying to save infrastructure. General (Charles) Krulak called it “the three-block war.” And then, of course, we often, when we envision urban warfare in massive operating environments that are urban, we think the civilians are just a hurdle or a concern to protect them. But, you know, modern warfare and old warfare—I mean, the population can be either a challenge, they can be supportive of the military’s objective and actually take part. Of course, they lose their civilian status to become combatants at that point but . . . or they can be completely nonsupportive and be going against what you’re trying to do. And that just complicates it, makes it harder. Right?
Next—and I think it’s hard to put, like, which one of these is really the hardest—but the information domain. I call this “the First Battle of Fallujah effect,” although—yeah, that was 2004. The level of the information domain in the application of military power in urban environments is the hardest. The fight for the truth, the ability to hide—it becomes, literally . . . like, one of the primal warfighting functions is to fight in this information domain, as no military unit in the operating environments is gonna be very challenged to hide. All actions will be viewed because every civilian is a camera, an uplink to the global community. There’s so many sensors, and we’ve seen this on the modern battlefield . . . is I can watch live combat as we speak. I can tune in to most cities in Ukraine, and I can actually watch. In war, we talk about these three populations, right: the military, the political apparatus, and the populations. Well, in the urban terrain, those all collide into what we call a “tactical compression,” where the strategic and tactical become one because of the information domain.
I could go on for a while because this is my thing. I think the complexity of the urban terrain . . . unlike other areas like mountainous or Arctic warfare, when we asked militaries to conduct operations in urban environments, the complexity, as in the cause and effect of our actions . . . in the urban terrain, just presenting a military force changes the environment in unknown ways.
There’s very few cities—and there are some, and there’s been some great writings . . . every city is different. And that’s the challenge of understanding urban environments.
The commanders and the political leaders have to understand the risk in second-order effects of the operations. Well, in the urban train, sometimes that’s near impossible. That’s literally the definition of complexity, is “I can’t tell the second- and third-order effects of touching the system on the global supply chain, on the global economic factors, on the regional factors.”
Those are just some of the highlights. I know that it’s a podcast and you want me to be brief, but I honestly believe that it’s the hardest place on Earth you could ask militaries to try to achieve political objectives.
Host
We’re obviously not the only people thinking about urban warfare. How do other countries like England and Israel look at and train for urban warfare?
Spencer
Sure. So I’ve actually spent a lot of time in England with the British Army, and, of course, I just got back from the NATO Headquarters (Allied) Rapid Reaction Corps conference on urban warfare. So there’re not really a lot of differences between the US and the (United Kingdom or) UK model. But I think, interestingly, what the UK or England has done is that they have embraced that this should be a primary area of training focus and preparations. So they actually put out a mandate saying, “We used to do 80-percent rural and 20-percent urban preparations.” Now they put out a mandate that states all units in the British Army will do 50-percent urban, 50 percent rural. You know, sometimes, that’s just words, but that’s actually translating into budget priorities and how they spend their time.
So for me, that was really important. They’ve made major changes at their major training areas like Copehill Downs (Copehill Down), major investments in synthetic and physical training and distributed training. I think it’s really translating. There’s not a different way they approach it. They know combined arms maneuver is the most powerful form of maneuver. But in the urban terrain, you have to prioritize preparing for this hardest environment.
Now the Israeli model—there are a lot of differences, just because it’s a different army. It’s not an expeditionary military like, uh, NATO members—you know, NATO partners. So that does actually cause changes in the approach. Plus, they know their likely environments they’re going to deploy into.
But spending a lot of time with the Israeli military and security forces, there are differences on how—even their equipment. Because they actually, in their urban warfare experience, will then make immediate changes. And that’s kind of their power of their ability to adapt their technologies. So when they go into a contested urban environment, they will come in with a much more armorized force: a bulldozer in the lead, infantry compartment in their tank so the infantry can get inside of it, an active protection system on all their tanks.
And not saying that we don’t have these things, but they’re very deliberate in their approach to going into a completely nonpermissive urban environment. Because that’s their assumption if they’re going in, again, because they have different—whether it’s (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities or) DOTMLPF or what of their force design—they can do things like have heavier equipment, have purpose-driven units designed for underground warfare, things like that. So...
