Unpacking the Urban Fight: Introducing the Twelve Challenges (Part I of a Series)
Posted July 11, 2020
Charles Knight
Armed conflict is increasingly occurring in urban areas: a fight amongst populations. The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer argues they present the most difficult future combat environment and are becoming more so. That trend was already evident in 2004 when the Australian Army labelled this ‘Complex Warfighting’. As explained in the 2008 Future Land Operating Concept ambiguity and uncertainty have compounded since then as technology, population and social factors drive a shift that the Chief of Army describes as ‘Accelerated Warfare’.
Complexity remains a useful label and is far more than a synonym for ‘complicated’. Complexity describes a problem that resists analysis and singular solutions because its elements are interwoven and dynamic.
Military leaders and security professionals must nevertheless not only understand and analyse the challenges of urban war, but persuasively explain them and their implications to politicians, media and subordinates. How can this be done? While military doctrine offers useful lists of characteristics and considerations these are not readily recalled nor applied. This series of short pieces presents and then explains a framework of twelve challenges – a tool to understand, describe and analyse the key problems of urban operations.
https://groundedcuriosity.com/unpacking-the-urban-fight-introducing-the-twelve-challenges-part-i-of-a-series/
