As a general idea, there is nothing wrong with being aware of the need to fight in cities:
Today, over 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, two out of every three humans on the planet will reside in a city. The U.S. military will continue to be asked to conduct a full range of operations in major cities — whether it is assisting in offensive operations against insurgents like ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, peace-keeping operations in Sarajevo and Mogadishu; or humanitarian aid operations in Port-au- Prince, Haiti, or Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. It is not a matter of if, but when again, we will send Army units to conduct missions among the populations of dense urban areas.
Army senior leaders have made it clear that the Army will begin preparing for operations in dense urban areas. The chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Mark Milley, has said, "In the future, I can say with very high degrees of confidence, the American Army is probably going to be fighting in urban areas,” and with readiness as his number one priority, Milley believes the Army “need[s] to man, organize, train and equip the force for operations in urban areas, highly dense urban areas.”
I do not believe that the Army needs to man, organize, train, and equip the Army for offensive combat operations in dense urban areas as if city fights are fun and easy if we prepare.
And this gets really problematic:
[TRADOC commander] Townsend not only believes the enemy will continue to pull the U.S. into dense urban areas in the hopes of gaining an advantage over American forces, but also that “we’re going to see battle in megacities and there’s little way to avoid it.”
Enemies will try to pull American troops into cities because it provides them an advantage over American troops with our training and firepower that is partly nullified by the ease of dying in place and taking as many down with them as they can. And thinking we can man, organize, train, and equip" the Army to flip that advantage to our side is futile. And of course we can avoid it--by knowing what we need to fight for.
The Army should be able to fight in cities. Especially on defense to wreck attacking enemy armies. Although I'd like it if the Marines take that offensive role on as a core competency.
But whoever fights in cities must not make the mistake of thinking that fighting in cities means you fight to control the entire city.
In the Iraq War, we focused on a population-centric strategy to deny the enemy sanctuaries for terrorism and insurgency. We had to control the entire city.
Against ISIL, the Syrians and Iraqis had incentive to liberate their cities. We had no such incentive to bleed to control those cities and simply helped our allies free their own people and territory.
We must not think that because of those city-clearing campaigns that controlling enemy-held cities is the normal thing to do--especially in conventional war. Unless we are trying to liberate one of our own cities, why do we need to capture an entire enemy-held city? Unless it is the capital of a highly centralized state whose capture can reasonably be said to represent the final objective of winning the war, why do it?
If our purpose is to defeat the enemy army, I'd rather bypass an enemy force holed up in a city and let them wither on the vine. Treat the cities the way we treated Japanese-held fortresses in the Pacific during our island-hopping campaign in World War II.
If we do that, we just need to conduct limited military operations in the city to allow our forces to bypass the city. If a city has rivers or restricted terrain running through or near it, we may just need to gain control of one side of a river or otherwise control the lines of communication in or out of the city in that direction.
Maybe operations within the city just need to take out offensive weapons and supply depots to defang an enemy offensive threat, including destroying lines of communication and supply leading out of the city in directions we don't anticipate needing but which the enemy could use.
Maybe operations just need to seize key terrain and facilities like a road/rail line going through the city, an airport, port facilities, or power or water stations.
And certainly we need officers who understand how to fight in large cities and we need to equip and train combat engineers to help infantry (given pre-operation training in city fighting) move and fight through urban terrain when needed.
Indeed, given that even fighting across open terrain will include lots of smaller urban areas, American troops need the ability to fight in urban areas just to continue an advance across so-called open terrain.
But don't let that reality suck us into prolonged and bloody combat to take megacities when we may or may not need to control the entire city.
We need to get back to the idea of "securing" a city as meaning making it secured enough to continue offensive military operations in pursuit of the objective--not that the city is full controlled, pacified, and functioning. We don't need officers who understand how a city works enough to just crush the latest version of SimCity. We need officers who understand how much of a city we need to control to continue the campaign.
(Funny enough, I ran across a very similar post I had written early in the year. I may be wrong but you can't say I'm not consistent!)
