Review Essay - Cities Without Joy: Urban Warfare in the 21st Century

Journal Edition

Future War in Cities: Rethinking a Liberal Dilemma

Written by: Alice Hills,

Frank Cass, London, 2004,

ISBN: 9780714684949, 285pp.

Review Essay by: Michael Evans

In the Old Testament Book of Joshua, it is recorded that, when the Israelites took Jericho, ‘they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword’. This passage is a chilling reminder that human history has frequently witnessed war for, and in, cities—from the sack of Carthage in the Third Punic War through the savage destruction of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years War to the bloody siege of Stalingrad in World War II. Because cities symbolise human progress in architecture, artistic culture and social organisation, their descent into the violence and chaos of armed conflict strikes a deep chord in the popular imagination. Over the past century, the power of cinema has increased our imaginings of the horror of urban warfare. Films such as Gillo Pontercovo’s The Batle of Algiers (1966), Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1992) and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), portray, in often harrowing detail, the deadly world of urban battle.

More recently, fictional portrayals on screen have been supplemented by graphic television footage of street fighting in such cities as Mogadishu, Grozny, Vukovar, Jenin and Nablus. The veteran British journalist Mark Huband described Mogadishu in the early 1990s as ‘the land of Blade Runner, the city of Robocop’—a city wracked by crime, drug dealing and camouflaged battlewagons, night vision and missiles. Like no other combat environment, cities merge pre-modern, modern and postmodern forms of armed conflict. They are a metaphor for our times.

In the 21st century, the frequency and intensity of urban military operations are likely to increase. It is a sobering fact that, at the beginning of the new millennium, half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Moreover, by 2015 the global population is expected to be 7.2 billion—an increase of 1.1 billion since 2000—and almost all of this demographic growth will be in cities of the developing world. In the Asia-Pacific in 1970, there were only eight cities with populations of over five million. By 2003 there were thirty such cities. Asian mega-cities now include Calcutta, Jakarta and Karachi, each of which has more than ten million inhabitants. Beijing, meanwhile, has fifteen million inhabitants; Shanghai, over twenty million; and Tokyo, thirty million. Increasingly, cities are linked to the kind of demographic pressures that produce insurgency, criminal warlords, terrorism and persistent low-level warfare.

Given these realities, there is a strong likelihood that war in cities will become commonplace in the future, and it is this premise that underlies Alice Hills’ timely and impressive study of urban military operations. Hills (who will be a guest speaker at the Chief of Army’s Conference in September 2005) notes that, of all forms of contemporary warfare, urban operations have changed the least over the past half century. Furthermore, urban operations challenge contemporary theories of war built around the notion of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), with its vision of information systems and long-range precision munitions, robotics and a digitised battlespace. Indeed, the current gap between military theory and military reality was graphically demonstrated by the battle for Fallujah in November 2004. In Fallujah, 6000 American soldiers and marines undertook Operation al-Fajr against Iraqi insurgents and foreign mujahadeen. In the fighting that followed, RMA-style technology was of limited value, and the struggle for Fallujah became a test of basic military skills in combined arms, close combat and infantry training. American forces took the city but suffered fifty-one killed and 425 wounded in the process—an 8 per cent casualty rate—while about 1200 insurgents were killed. The battle of Fallujah was a far cry from the 1990s with its fashionable military theories of casualty-free warfare by stand-off strike and air power. The battle was a reminder that the confined space of cities with their high-density wires and omnipresent fire from infra-red man-portable missiles and small arms often nullify advanced technology, especially air power.

From Grozny through Mogadishu to Fallujah the most powerful insurgent weapon remains the thirty-year old rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). The RPG is the poor man’s cruise missile and, when combined with the use of machine guns, mortars and low-cost commercial technological devices such as cellular phones and scanners, provides a bargain basement, lethal weapons system for urban insurgents. In her book Hills argues that, if Western militaries wish to succeed in urban warfare, they must develop a more operational–strategic approach to the subject—one that seeks to recognise the human environment of cities and its critical interaction with armies. Urban operations require combined arms warfare and the grouping of armoured infantry at lower tactical levels in order to provide direct-fire support rather than traditional open-terrain manoeuvre. Engineers and logisticians are essential, and armour, flamethrowers and mortars are usually more useful weapons than jet fighters and attack helicopters. In recent urban warfare, both the Israeli Defence Force and the Russian military have tended to avoid the use of helicopter gunships due to their vulnerability to small arms fire. Hills quotes one Israeli Defence Force officer as stating:

A tank is always better, more accurate and far more effective [in urban operations]... Basically a helicopter is good as long as it’s moving. [Use it for] rapid insertion, hunting down groups of gunmen, [and] some light fire support. If they start hovering around the same place for too long, they become targets.

In the immediate future, a new land-air dynamic based on precision firepower and sensor technology for urban operations is unlikely to emerge. On current trends, advanced technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and smart missiles are most likely to enhance fighting on the ground. Fighting in cities remains a form of warfare that is often pre-modern in its physical and psychological intensity. Writing in the immediate aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom and before the outbreak of the urban insurgency in Iraq, Hills warns:

The West’s experience in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq is misleading because it detracts from the fact that urban war is probably the single most difficult form of warfare it can encounter. It remains a brutal and exhausting matter involving significant collateral damage (that is to personnel or property not forming part of an authorised target) and casualties, and is the closest the West comes to pre-industrial forms of conflict. The traditional core capability of aggressive close combat—the Hunter-Killer philosophy of ‘What I find, I can kill’—remains essential for successful operations.

Hills believes that the West has yet to realistically assess the conditions under which it might have to fight sustained urban operations against an intelligent and well-organised enemy. The most valuable theme of her study concerns the West’s need to place urban operations in a proper analytical context and to use interdisciplinary research from military history, security studies, development studies and disaster studies to complement doctrine and to shape new operational concepts. A new paradigm is necessary because, when deploying into cities, Western militaries need to place a premium on managing complex transitional operations—that is, operations involving movements from one phase to another in which there are rapid changes in mission, situation, task organisation and command-and-control arrangements.

Australian readers will find Hills’ discussion of urban operations in Somalia in the early 1990s interesting. She compares the relatively heavy-handed use of force by the Americans in Mogadishu with the more subtle methods used by the Australians in Baidoa—methods that emphasised patrolling, disarmament of militia fighters and the role of civil affairs. She notes: ‘the Australians, recognising that Somalia was a heavily armed state, used measured force to restrain local warlords, but they also employed a coherent strategy to deal with the humanitarian and sociopolitical symptoms of violence’. American military forces generally failed in all of these areas.

The book points out that, in urban warfare, tactical knowledge must be accompanied by attempts to develop strategic coherence. Cities have their own strategic grammar and act ‘as multidimensional magnifying glasses in terms of complexity, and the speed and scale of [operational] change’. Hills points to the importance of the Russian military’s three battles for Grozny in 1994, 1995–96 and in 2000 as an urban warfare laboratory for Western armies. The savagery of the fighting between Russian troops and the Chechen rebels created an almost lunar wasteland. In 2000, the French photojournalist, Eric Bouret, was moved to write: ‘when I entered Grozny, it was as if I was hit by an apocalyptic vision. In 20 years of covering wars I never had the occasion to feel like an astronaut landing on another planet’. In the Russian operations of the mid-1990s, the sheer scale of Grozny swallowed up nearly 50 000 troops, 230 tanks, 454 armoured vehicles and 388 artillery pieces.

In short, in Grozny, ideas of surgical warfare were proven to be a fantasy. Urban war is the realm of elemental firepower, including phosphorus bombs, flechettes, flame-throwers, and cluster bombs and, more recently, thermobaric weapons. The Russians confronted determined Chechen fighters who used snipers and who were armed with RPGs, heavy machine-guns and mortars. Russian troops progressed through the rubble-strewn streets often by blowing up entire buildings using self-propelled guns and anti-aircraft weapons. Armoured forces also proved critical. As Hills observes:

[In urban operations] armour will probably continue to play a significant role in the coming years, especially when special assault teams are used; it can successfully breach concrete and steel structures for infantry when forming part of a combined arms team. Indeed, it was a key technology in Iraq (and Jenin) because it provided protection and survivability against sniper and machine-gun fire.

However, there is an important caveat: armour cannot be deployed as a lone iron fist; it must be encased in the mail glove of strong dismounted infantry support. In 1994, in Grozny, unaccompanied armoured assaults suffered up to 70 per cent losses of vehicles and in later operations the Russians rediscovered the necessity for combined arms teams of armour, infantry and engineers. Recent operations in Jenin and Ramallah also confirm the necessity for armour to be employed in conjunction with other arms, especially infantry, in order to combat nests of well-armed insurgent fighters.

Because urban warfare is often pre-modern in its character, it forces liberal democracies to confront their own value systems. The moral challenge of engaging in a form of war that may lead to the death of noncombatants and the destruction of vital infrastructure is compounded by the West’s lack of a theoretical strategic framework for operating in cities. The best work on urban warfare in the West has been completed by the US Marine Corps, who in the late 1990s under General Charles C. Krulak began a serious program of preparation for ‘three block’ fighting in cities. However, for all their achievements at the tactical and operational levels of war, the Marines have yet to develop a strategic framework for their theories of armed urban conflict.

Indeed, one of the most important lessons flowing from urban operations—whether these involve the British in Northern Ireland, the Russians in Grozny, the Israelis in Gaza or the Americans in the Sunni Triangle—is that successful tactics or techniques do not necessarily translate to successful strategic policy. This situation is a major military weakness, and Hills speculates that, ‘just as the Cold War placed security studies at the centre of the intellectual and political challenges confronting the West, so urbanisation may result in urban operations shaping many of the critical security issues of the twenty-first century’. If she is right, then much work remains to be done by Western militaries if they are to avoid more Mogadishus and Groznys. A major stumbling block is that intellectually soldiers often view urban warfare as a subject that belongs to military history rather than to contemporary security studies. The vision is of Stalingrad, Berlin and Hue.

As a result, there is no coherent strategic theory of urban war, and the military implications of rapid urbanisation have no place in current strategic studies programs. This is a situation that security analysts and operational planners must urgently address. Urban operations require geopolitical insight and an analysis of disciplines that traditionally have lain outside the field of defence and strategic studies. These disciplines include urban studies, disaster management, law enforcement and policing, architecture, anthropology, sociology and geography. Hills argues that the strategic challenges of urban operations must involve military professionals and security practitioners in developing knowledge of the technical-social factors underpinning urban infrastructure and the human geography of cities.

Military studies of disaster management might, for instance, yield important insights into how cities can be managed in times of crisis. In addition, an understanding of the process of how inter-agency responsibilities overlap in urban operations between the military, political leaders and civilian organisations might assist armies to rebalance their tactics, operations and strategy. As Hills puts it, urbanisation represents a ‘critical interactive context for operations’. She suggests that, just as open terrain warfare has given the military art concepts such as tempo, so closed terrain warfare embraces the concept of density. In urban warfare, density is omnipresent in terms of buildings, city blocks, streets and the presence of vehicles. Other factors—such as civilians, continuous noise and vibration—add another layer of complexity. The cumulative density of an urban environment magnifies the character of operations and can create sensory and capability overload among soldiers. Troops face limitations in using precision missiles while back-blast effects from using high-powered munitions—such as shoulder-launched, single-shot, disposable thermobaric weapons in confined spaces—deafen and disorientate their users. ‘Density,’ notes Hills, ‘like the linked notions of tempo and fragmentation, thus represents a way of understanding the dynamics of [urban] operations’.

Ideally, Western armies are better off bypassing cities and avoiding urban warfare. Unfortunately, that solution may not be possible in the future because it is into cities that many enemies may deploy. Cities represent one of the classic realms of asymmetric warfare since their complex environments and teeming human geography negate many military technological advantages. The urban labyrinth confronts modern armies with a deadly array of snipers, suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices including car bombs. Man-portable missile and RPG teams, inflammable shanties, child soldiers, ambush alleys and booby-trapped apartment complexes add to the continuous and multiple levels of stress that the soldier must face in an urban town or city. Rock music from ghetto blasters and automatic fire from Kalashnikov assault rifles coexist while insurgents, bandits, warlords, narcotics dealers and drug runners may form a shadow regime that controls the streets through noncombatant collaborators and an informal criminal economy.

In 1961, the scholar, Bernard Fall, published his famous book on rural insurgency in Indo-China entitled The Street Without Joy.¹ Fall’s study took its title from the infamous coastal highway that French soldiers dreaded travelling because of the frequency of Viet Minh ambushes. Ironically in 1967, while on patrol with US Marines along the same highway, Fall himself was killed by a Viet Cong landmine. Over forty years later, Western soldiers are now confronted by the rise of urban insurgency and, with it, the prospect of cities without joy. As the ancient Chinese military philosopher, Sun Tzu, warned in his classic treatise, The Art of War, ‘the worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative’.²

Yet one cannot always choose the wars one would like to fight. As a result, in the future, Western armies may have no alternative but to prepare for multidimensional operations against enemies that exploit complex urban terrain. In seeking to tame urban labyrinths of the developing world, the West’s liberal value system is unlikely to embrace the use of maximum force. There can be no Jericho solution involving the ‘edge of the sword’ against combatant and noncombatant. Instead, Western soldiers will be called on to practise strategic restraint, tactical judgment and the discriminate use of force under harrowing operational conditions. Hills’ book reminds us of the complexities and menaces of fighting in cities. It is an important contribution to our knowledge of how we can improve our understanding of a neglected field of warfare and should be required reading for all military professionals.