Urban warfare is deadly to the city and its people if they are stuck in it. Unless an attacker is willing to lose a lot of its own troops to take a city, firepower is the only way to take the city. Which destroys it.
That's the problem in a nutshell of taking a city from an enemy force holding it:
The enemy could be a conventional military force, like the North Korean Army during the 1950 Battle of Seoul or North Vietnamese regulars in the 1968 Battle of Hue. It could be a nonstate paramilitary organization with military training and capabilities, like the Chechen rebels in the battles for Grozny in 1994–1995 and 1999–2000. Or it could be a well-equipped and prepared terrorist organization, like the Islamic State in the battles across Iraq and Syria since 2014. Regardless, the most destructive urban battles usually occur when an enemy force decides to defend from within a city and an opposing force has decided the city must be reclaimed or the enemy eliminated.
We appear to be approaching the problem frontally by trying to avoid destroying a city (mega-cities has been a big buzz word these days) in the context of our campaign objective in the theater in order to save the city.
I'm skeptical we can figure out how to take a city without destroying it from determined defenders and think we should attempt to define what parts of a city we need to take (and likely destroy to avoid needlessly sacrificing friendly troops) in order to avoid destroying the entire city by taking the entire city when we don't need the entire city.
And really, why do we expect to routinely need to fight in cities when our experience since World War II is so sparse?
The few examples include the 1968 Battle of Hue, Panama City in 1993, Baghdad in 2003, Fallujah (twice) in 2004, Ramadi in 2006, and Sadr City in 2008.
And in World War II, the only battles for cities that I can think of that we fought are Aachen and Manila.
Maybe we haven't needed to take (and so destroy) a city that often. Maybe we should spend more time figuring out whether we really need to be able to take an entire city in the future.
