My Underground Warfare Wish List
John Spencer | February 19, 2019
The age of urban warfare is already here. It cannot be avoided any longer. And the urban environment includes not just what is on the surface, but also super-surface and subsurface levels. Most major urban areas include an entire world of underground transportation, maintenance, water, sewer, and telecommunications tunnels. Tunnel warfare has gone hand in hand with urban warfare from the time when medieval warriors attacked castles. Since then, tunnels have been used by urban insurgents, revolutionaries, and terrorists, such as Chechen rebels during the two battles of Grozny to the even more recent extensive use of underground terrain by ISIS across Iraq and Syria.
Knowing how to shoot, move, communicate, survive, and adapt in subterranean environments is as foreign to most soldiers as walking on the moon. Much of the technology I have seen being developed for operating in this environment focuses on breaching, communicating, and navigating. There are also efforts to develop robots to advance into tunnels for a variety of tasks and situations. All these are very important. But when the time comes to send troops underground, here are a few things I would have wanted in my kit bag, some at the cutting edge of technological advancement, others substantially less so.
https://mwi.usma.edu/underground-warfare-wish-list/
