Cities Pose Huge Challenges to Military Forces. The Biggest Might be Just Crossing the Street.
John Spencer | October 30, 2018
Many of the challenges of urban warfare are not new; nor, unfortunately, are the options soldiers have to confront these challenges. The US Army has a long history of fighting in cities and its tactics, techniques, and procedures have been refined mostly from the hard lessons of World War II and the evolution of close-quarters combat that occurred following the failed 1972 rescue attempt during the Munich Olympics. Furthermore, urban warfare poses a set of challenge that is not going away. Gen. Mark Milley, Army chief of staff, and Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, commander of US Army Training and Doctrine Command, frequently emphasize the need to prepare the Army for combat in densely populated urban areas. At the most basic level, however, it is clear that there remain an obvious but neglected tactical problems in city fighting that the US Army needs to contend with.
The amount of damage and numbers of casualties in fighting in recent years in Raqqa, Aleppo, Marawi, and Mosul show how rudimentary urban warfare tactics remain, as well as the highly destructive nature of combat in cities. Without new tactics and tools for dealing with some of the basic challenges of urban combat, military units are forced to employ extremely destructive methods to reclaim cities from entrenched defenders. These tactics are reflected in the “destroy the city to save it†mantra.
https://mwi.usma.edu/cities-pose-huge-challenges-military-forces-biggest-might-just-crossing-street/
