Getting Beyond Door Kicking: Four Tasks for Urban Warriors
John Spencer | September 18, 2018
Ask any group of infantry soldiers what they train to prepare for urban operations and the answer will usually be: Battle Drill 6, “Enter and Clear a Room.†Battle Drill 6 is one of the fourteen drills, defined by doctrine, that infantry platoons and squads are intended to master. But it is also ingrained in soldiers—alongside shooting and breaching—as the foundation for preparing for urban combat. These skills are necessary for success in urban environments, but not sufficient. A review of historical urban operations shows that there are several other tasks that units need to add to their training programs.
I practiced and trained others to enter and clear a room for most of my twenty-five years as an infantryman. It is simple. The initial training takes almost zero resources. You put white engineer tape on the ground in the shape of rooms to construct “glass houses,†and start practicing the methodical movements that make up the battle drill. Four soldiers line up, one behind another, and follow a very prescribed choreography to enter and move through rooms. Once the drill is trained to standard, the squad or platoon moves to a shoot house to conduct dry, blank, and live-fire repetitions on a single room, and then progress to clearing multiple rooms in a single house.
https://mwi.usma.edu/getting-beyond-door-kicking-four-tasks-urban-warriors/
