What We Learned Creating the Army’s First Urban Planners Course
John Spencer and Rob Wooldridge | 11.29.21
Ask the average division staff officer how many brigade combat teams it takes to seize a city of one hundred thousand people crammed into twenty-five square kilometers and you will likely get a blank stare or a wild guess. This reaction comes despite the realities of the modern world: rapid urbanization with over half the global population currently living in cities and estimates that this figure will climb to nearly 70 percent by 2050; the complexity of dense urban areas that make them labyrinths of structures, people, the electromagnetic spectrum, and infrastructure; and the fact that most conflicts in the last twenty years—from Ukraine to Syria and Iraq to Nagorno-Karabakh—have seen significant fighting in cities.
Although most infantry soldiers can execute Battle Drill 6 (Enter and Clear a Room), few staff officers are prepared to plan and execute large-scale combat operations in dense urban terrain. Famously during the Vietnam War, Lt. Col. Ernie Cheatham, upon learning that he was going to lead his battalion of Marines into urban combat the following day in Hue, found and read two city-fighting manuals that recommended staying off the streets and moving forward by blasting holes in walls. Today’s staff officers need to do better than “cramming” the night before the big exam.
That is why the 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard, decided to create the US Army’s first formal course designed specifically to improve staff planners’ ability to analyze and plan large-scale combat operations in urban environments with populations from fifty thousand to over ten million. The idea came from an Urban Warfare Project Podcast episode and was executed jointly by the authors with a great deal of help from the division’s staff officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers.
https://mwi.usma.edu/what-we-learned-creating-the-armys-first-urban-planners-course/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EBB%2011.30.2021&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief
