The Air Force Has Some Thinking to Do: Airpower and the Future Urban Battlefield
Heather Venable | February 14, 2020
The targets . . . just keep getting smaller: individuals, extremists, terrorists, the architects of chaos who disappear in the urban vomit that is the modern city . . . and even with precision, all our options start to look like needles in haystacks.
— Williamson Murray, “Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003†in A History of Air Warfare (ed. John Andreas Olsen)
Anyone following Army outlets such as the Modern War Institute cannot fail to miss the numerous timely pieces being published on urban warfare. Doctrine, study groups, and training exercises supplement this discussion. Although Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein called for the service to prepare for urban battlefields back in 2017, little appears to have been done since then. As such, the Air Force has no similar public discussion to the Army’s, and that is a real problem because, as a range of scholars and military thinkers have argued, war is moving to the cities.
Most of the Air Force’s limited discussion of urban warfare centers on precision weapons as well as the advantages of multi-domain command and control. Goldfein, conceding in 2017 that the Air Force was more prepared for conflict in “open space,†still insisted that the solution for airpower rested primarily in “nodes and networks,†an approach that characterizes Gen. Goldfein’s vision for airpower in general. A more recent article, by contrast, takes the more traditional approach of some airpower advocates, calling for yet another airpower revolution in technology, this time in the realm of munitions effects. What is missing, though, is a larger operational picture that incorporates ideas and doctrine as much as it does technology.
https://mwi.usma.edu/air-force-thinking-airpower-future-urban-battlefield/