Enhancing the Army’s Urban Warfare Capability
Abstract
This article sets out a bold training investment opportunity for the Australian Army — a multinational, large-scale urban warfare training centre. Australia’s current training facilities fall significantly short of what is required to prepare force elements the size of battle groups and larger formations for either short-duration or sustained operations in the urban littoral. Urban warfare is an Army-wide skill set, not a specialisation restricted to members of Special Operations Command. Investing in the development of a large-scale and realistic urban operations training facility will enable commanders and their units to conduct the Army’s core business — winning the land battle — in the crowded urban littoral.
For the Army, operating in high density urban terrain will no longer be a discretionary activity.
- Future Land Warfare Report 20141
If the Australian Army’s vision of the future operating environment is accurate, fighting in urban terrain is almost inevitable. Indeed, recent history and current conflicts such as that in Iraq suggest that this is by no means a futuristic concept. Yet there is a mismatch between the imperative for the Army to be ready for the urban fight and the limited training facilities available to allow it to prepare its units.
Australia’s current training facilities fall significantly short of what is required to prepare force elements the size of combat teams, battle groups and larger formations for either short-duration or sustained operations in the urban littoral. Moreover, the best facilities available to the Army reflect the assumption of recent years that the special forces community will bear the brunt of complex urban warfighting, a dubious assumption at best. Urban warfare is (or at least should be) an Army-wide skill set, not a specialisation restricted to members of Special Operations Command (SOCOMD). This article proposes the development of a large-scale urban warfare training facility to provide regular collective training across the Army to enhance capability. Such a facility would allow the Australian Army and partner militaries to immerse battle group and possibly larger force elements in a complex and realistic training environment.
This article is divided into two broad sections. The first describes the imperatives that may see the Army deploy substantial force elements into the urban littoral in coming years and examines the inadequacies of the currently available training infrastructure. The second section proposes a solution to the identified shortfalls and briefly examines this solution.
The future operating environment and the training status quo
Australian Army publications have recognised for some time that the world is becoming increasingly urbanised, and have discussed the security implications of this trend and some of the broader realities of operating in urban terrain.2 It is now widely accepted that the decisive phase of many conflicts will be concentrated in major population centres either during the conventional phase of operations or in the insurgency that may follow. The implications of urbanisation and the emergence of weak states also suggest a reasonable possibility that the Army will face terrorists, organised crime and other threat groups in this environment. Near-peer, conventional, high-threat (choose the jargon) scenarios should also not be dismissed lightly as urban possibilities in coming years.3 Attention has recently focused on the question of how to effectively control a city with limited mass, with particular reference to understanding the ‘metabolism’ of a city.4 As David Kilcullen states,
The future conflict environment is likely to be characterized by rapid population growth, increasing urbanization, accelerating littoralization, and greater connectedness ... We are still likely to experience wars between nation–states, and conflict in remote areas such as mountains, jungles and deserts will still undoubtedly occur. But the trends are clear ... more Mumbai, Mogadishu, and Tivoli Gardens — and we had better start preparing for it.5
While such discourse is useful from an intellectual and strategic planning perspective, it actually does little to prepare units to operate in such an environment. Indeed, without proper preparation of force elements, the iterative process between concepts and strategy and what we can actually achieve with our assets and formations cannot proceed. Without testing our vision of urban operations we are conceptualising into a vacuum, surely a bad idea when the level of friction in the urban come real-world operations will be high. This we know for certain.
Current urban training facilities available to the Australian Army tend to consist of modified shipping containers or low-density settlements that are no more than three-storeys high and of limited sprawl.6 The limited size of facilities restricts what can be achieved in an exercise and, as such, training tends to focus on penetration from rural terrain into urban terrain. These limitations are true even of Holsworthy’s Special Forces Training Facility, an excellent facility but one understandably tailored to a certain mission set.7 High quality urban training facilities are required for more than domestic counterterrorism missions. While small facilities are sufficient for soldiers to practise individual drills and for section and platoon manoeuvre, they constrain capability across units and formations.
Training should be oriented to sustained operations in the urban littoral, rather than the disconnected tactical challenges this environment presents. The small size of current facilities means that training and exercises tend to focus on penetration from the rural to the urban for a geographically and temporally limited objective, such as the seizure of a sector or the destruction of a small enemy force, prior to withdrawal from urban terrain. Commanders and units seeking to exercise a broader range of tasks for an extended period lack the infrastructure to do so. There is simply no infrastructure to support battle group or larger urban operations training across the spectrum of conflict, let alone in a sustained and immersive fashion. This size limitation also fails to replicate the diverse nature of urban terrain, from slum to urban sprawl to high rise complexes and so on, instead presenting the commander with a more or less homogenous urban environment. Australian doctrine recognises the complex reality of urban terrain, accepting that even limited urban operations, let alone sustained ones, create a heavy burden on combat service support elements.8 Add to this the likelihood of heavy casualties and an extremely confusing and confronting tactical situation for commanders and soldiers alike.9 A training facility that allows adaptation to this challenge is a necessity.
Force elements will not always launch into an urban environment from the rural or littoral, conduct short-lived operations and withdraw. Rather, combat teams, battle groups and possibly larger formations, with their enabling, supporting and supplying assets, will lodge into urban terrain. They will then fight, live, resupply, refit, repair equipment, rest, plan, command, and so on, on a prolonged basis from within that environment. At present it is impractical for combat service support assets to exercise on anything approaching the full-scale resupply of force elements in an immersive urban environment. Yet this is undeniably what they will be tasked to do. Their role will range from the resupply of forward operating bases within cities — and require counter-improvised explosive device and ambush protection — to the resupply of a combat team in contact with a near-peer or peer enemy in suburban sprawl with its own very different challenges.
The nature of the urban environment in current facilities is also unrealistic in its simplicity. Typical urban clutter such as furniture, vehicles, vegetation and rubble are under-represented both indoors and outdoors making training and manoeuvre far too straightforward. Perhaps more importantly, there are far too few civilians and other state and non-state actors represented in urban training. It is rare that the entire civilian population will be able or willing to abandon their homes even in the event of a conventional combined arms assault on their city. The American experience in the Iraqi city of Fallujah provides a graphic example of this reality.10
While the Army has become well practiced in manoeuvre in the rural environment, including through regular brigade-level conventional exercises such as Exercise Hamel, it has so far committed only limited resources to training for urban operations, despite identifying this as its most likely battlefield for the remainder of the twenty-first century. This is not abstract futurism, nor is it ahistorical. For example, if Australia was to deploy substantial combat rather than training forces to Iraq to counter Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), those forces would most likely experience heavy fighting in cluttered, complex urban centres such as Mosul.
Clashes between ISIL and Iraqi forces to date have been very much urban in context.11 Other Australian experiences — including in conflicts popularly perceived as within the rural environment —attest to the likelihood of the Army confronting this challenge once again. The Australian infantry and armour at Binh Ba, Vietnam, in 1969; INTERFET troops in Dili, East Timor, in 1999; and Australian infantry and cavalry in Nasiriyah, Iraq, through 2007, all testify to the challenge that urban warfare presents.
A large-scale urban warfare facility
The Army needs to consider how it will educate and train the future force to fight in this environment. It is important for commanders and soldiers alike to become as comfortable as possible with the complexities of combat and sustainment in the urban environment. The mentality of thriving rather than surviving in the conditions, of living rather than merely fighting inside the area of operations — a mentality that at least nominally underlies large-scale rural-centric training activities — must be applied to the urban environment.
The Israeli Defence Force (IDF), in the aftermath of its 2002 incursion into Gaza and 2006 Second Lebanon War, concluded that it needed a specialised facility to adequately prepare formations for the conduct of contemporary urban warfare. While the IDF has a pressing imperative the Australian Defence Force does not, the Australian Army ignores urban warfare at its peril. The IDF’s Urban Warfare Training Facility is a sprawling site that consists of over 600 buildings, some of which are up to eight-storeys high, comprising schools, shops, a mosque and apartment blocks.12 The IDF facility is not suggested as a template, it is simply an example. A training facility of this size allows the conduct of battle group-level exercises entirely within the confines of an urban centre. It allows truly combined arms operations to be practised, including the use of armoured vehicles in close cooperation with infantry and engineers in a confined space. Planners for an Australian facility might also draw lessons and ideas from multiple American examples as well as British ‘fighting in built-up areas’ facilities, such as the Salisbury Plain training area.13
The Australian facility should be defined by a set of training outcomes. The overall benchmark standard should be, as a minimum, the ability to conduct a combined arms, battle group-sized, immersive exercise annually. This would work to rectify the shortcomings in urban training for non-SOCOMD units identified in the first part of this article. This annual exercise could then grow in frequency or scale and should be tied from the outset to the force generation cycle. Organisationally, it seems sensible for the Combat Training Centre to ‘own’ training at the facility.
A number of sub-benchmarks should also be met. The facility should have the capacity to be divided into discrete areas to simultaneously conduct smaller activities. These areas should include an instrumented live-fire urban range to practise applying fire to a fleeting enemy in apertures and tight spaces such as alleyways. A ‘suburb’ or ‘sector’ with a high level of destructibility ideal for breaching training could also be used to practise the hardening of structures for urban defensive operations. Two or more of these sectors, at least one or some of which should be instrumented, should be able to conduct simultaneous combat team-sized activities while armoured vehicles should be able to use every sector in order to engender close cooperation between armour and infantry.
Any blank firing exercise in the facility should incorporate a high number of civilian role players to add increased complexity to the scenario, including the prospect of collateral damage. These role players should be of identifiable religious or ethnic grouping and should be placed to interact with Australian and enemy forces, tasked to either hinder or assist according to the scenario. Specific actions or mistakes by Australian soldiers or commanders could even drive these civilian role players to take up arms in ways reflective of a real insurgency. Such role players should not be neglected given their ability to add valuable complexity to conventional warfighting scenarios.
Over a period of some years, the Australian facility should continually add structures, incorporating various types and sizes of buildings as well as urban patterns such as areas of urban sprawl, transitioning to industrial zone, transitioning to slum. It should also aim to represent other aspects of urban terrain, such as featuring a substantial level of destructibility to facilitate the full exercise of breaching, use of armoured vehicles, and so on. Israeli experience in Gaza also demonstrates the increasing trend towards subterranean warfare as the enemy will seek to use sewers, subways and even purpose-built tunnels to facilitate manoeuvre and resupply. Any urban warfare facility should, as a matter of course, include subterranean tunnels, allowing combat engineers, for example, to adapt to the challenges of tunnel clearance.
The full scope of such a facility need not be achieved in one build; it may make sense to build in stages with ongoing expansion and development over a number of years. Perhaps the greatest construction challenge involved in this proposal is the requirement to site this facility on the coast — in the littoral. As such, the first planning requirement would be to identity a suitable location on or very near to the coast upon which to build the facility. While this poses challenges, the vast Australian coastline offers ample options, many of sufficient distance from population centres. Indeed, one option simply involves the expansion of facilities at Shoalwater Bay. Locating the facility appropriately to maximise the scenarios and terrain it can be used to exercise is essential.
There is also a degree of multinational potential in a large-scale urban training facility. The list of nations with at least a theoretical interest in this kind of proposal is extensive. Starting with Australia’s closest allies and neighbours, these may include the United States, New Zealand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Slightly further abroad, but still regionally, South Korea, Japan and China represent more possibilities, and there may be other sporadic, but still worthwhile interest from like-minded nations globally. Many of these partners may also be interested in combined training opportunities in such a facility, particularly once it has fully matured. Into the future, a modest level of multinational investment could be attracted to boost funding for continued additions to the facility.
Conclusion
The Australian Army recognises that it must operate in the urban littoral in the future and it should take the necessary measures to ensure that it can train a force to prepare for such an eventuality. Armies have and will continue to operate and fight in villages, towns and cities. However Army’s current facilities are inadequate and fail to meet the requirements for realistic training in the contemporary operating environment. The gradual development of a large-scale urban training facility
would allow the annual training of a battle group-sized element in an immersive and realistic environment and effectively resolve this critical shortfall. This collective training benchmark should be the overarching goal of the facility, along with a number of sub-requirements such as instrumentation, the use of role players and partitioning into various sectors.
The Army must consider its training investment priorities as it moves forward in a changing operating environment. Adequate urban training facilities should be seen as a non-optional fundamental input to capability.14 The fiscally constrained reality that confronts Army makes this prioritisation all the more essential. The proposal outlined in this article needs political and organisational effort to bring it to fruition, from both within and outside the Army — but it is well worth the effort. Even if it is later conceded that the Army’s Future Land Warfare Report 2014 has overstated the inevitability of operations in the urban littoral, the Australian Government must have forces at its disposal that are capable of conducting such a mission — and they must be appropriately prepared. A large-scale and realistic urban operations training facility will enable commanders and their units to conduct the Army’s core business — winning the land battle — in the crowded urban littoral.15
Endnotes
1 Directorate of Future Land Warfare, Future Land Warfare Report 2014, Canberra: Australian Army, 2014, p. 9.
2 Directorate of Army Research and Analysis, Adaptive Campaigning: Army’s Future Land Operating Concept, Canberra: Australian Army, 2009, p. 11.
3 John Antal and Bradley Gericke, City Fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from World War II to Vietnam, Novato, California: Presidio, 2003; Michael Dewar, War in the Streets: The Story of Urban Combat from Calais to Khafji, London: David & Charles,1992.
4 David Kilcullen’s work is perhaps the most widely cited. See David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: Coming of Age of the Urban Guerrilla, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
5 David Kilcullen, ‘The City as a System: Future Conflict and Urban Resilience’, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 36: 2, 2012, pp. 37–38.
6 For example, Line Creek Junction at High Range Training Area and the Urban Operations Training Facility at Shoalwater Bay. See Jacquie Mackay, ‘Defence Force Builds Training “City” at Shoalwater Bay’, ABC News, 10 April 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/local/ stories/2007/04/10/1893177.htm.
7 Department of Defence, ‘Governor-General Opens Special Forces Training Facility at Holsworthy’, Media Release, 2007, http://www.defence.gov.au/media/DepartmentalTpl. cfm?CurrentId=6881.
8 Alice Hills, Future War in Cities: Rethinking a Liberal Dilemma, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012, p. 53.
9 Ibid., p. 140.
10 Much has been written on the battles for Fallujah. For a personal account see David Bellavia, House to House: A Soldier’s Memoir, New York: Free Press, 2007. For an account of later operations in the city see Daniel R. Green and William F. Mullen, Fallujah Redux: The Anbar Awakening and the Struggle with al-Qaeda, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2014. See also William Head, ‘The Battles of Al-Fallujah: Urban Warfare and the Growth of Airpower’, Air Power History, 60: 4, 2013, pp. 32–51.
11 For example, see Megan O’Toole, ‘Battle for Mosul: The Cards are Stacked against ISIL’, Al Jazeera English, 10 June 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/battle-mosul- cards-stacked-isil-150610060202092.html.
12 Israeli Defence Force, ‘Urban Warfare Training Center – Simulating the Modern Battlefield’, IDF Blog, 26 October 2011, http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2011/10/26/urban-warfare-training- center-simulating-the-modern-battle-field/.
13 Alan Taylor, ‘A Replica of Afghanistan in the Mojave’, The Atlantic, 18 September 2013, www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/09/a-replica-of-afghanistan-in-the-mojav…; British Government, ‘Improvements to Urban Training on Salisbury Plain’, GOV.UK, 4 March 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/improvements-to-urban-training-on-sa….
14 Department of Defence, Defence Capability Development Handbook 2012, Canberra, 2012,
pp. 2–3.
15 Directorate of Future Land Warfare, Land Warfare Doctrine 1: The Fundamentals of Land Power, Canberra: Australian Army, 2014, pp. 6, 8, 31–32.
