Good:
The Marine Corps plans to launch an urban-combat operations experiment this summer, and the service wants defense firms and academia to submit ideas for weapons and fighting technologies aimed at making Marine infantry units more effective in this deadly environment.
The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory recently released a request for information to search for emerging and mature technologies to be included in a new "limited objective experiment" focused on dense urban operations, according to an April 15 solicitation posted on the government contracting website FedBizOpps.
This will be a series of experiments held between August 2019 and August 2023, with the opening experiment set for August 1-30 at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana, according to the solicitation.
Megacities are a thing we need to be prepared for. I hope part of what the Marines look at is what parts of a city they should seek to control when they go into a city. Surely there are core objectives to effectively control an enemy-held city for the purposes of advancing the military campaign without paying the price to fight for the entire city.
For the Army, I'd like it focuses on mobile warfare. But I'd like some of our officers (or entire headquarters elements?) ready for that urban warfare mission with the skills mostly hosted in the combat engineers to support any Army units (with training and equipment given to them in preparation) that need to supplement the Marines, as I mention in this post.
UPDATE: And of course the Army must have basics for urban combat well in hand because even outside of megacities there will be towns and villages to clear in a campaign.
I'm just worried that the focus on megacities will drag the Army into urban Hellscapes when the Army doesn't need to enter them to advance the objective of a campaign.
