Book Review - Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century
Written by: Anthony King
John Wiley & Sons, 2021, 288 pp
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-509-54366-3
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-509-54365-6
Reviewed by: Charles Knight
We run into a curious void in the literature of warfare. Those practitioners of the art who were also its ablest theorists, scholars and writers dwelt on its varied aspects to the limit of their imaginations. One thing, however, they did not touch upon—combat where life is centred. Run through the list of writers and their works—Frederick, de Saxe, Clausewitz, Jomini, Kuropatkin, Bernhardi, Henderson, Foch, Fuller, Hart, et al. Not one has anything to say about military operations within or against the city.
SLA Marshall, Notes on Urban Warfare, Army Material Systems Analysis Agency, 1973.
The crux of SLA Marshall’s lament was that none of the great military thinkers have provided us a theoretical foundation for urban war. Since a large proportion of all conflict has occurred in—or for—cities, to isolate and then synthesise the essence of this diverse subset has always been a daunting project. Worldwide urbanisation and the dramatic changes wrought by information technology in recent decades have only made comprehending urban war harder. This challenge is explicit in the Australian Army’s label for such conflict: complex operations. The term refers to the systems idea of complexity and captures how, during conflict, the interaction of myriad physical, human and informational factors makes urban war emergent, meaning resistant to conventional analysis, uncomputable and unstable. While, by definition, a complex system can never be fully understood or predicted, a holistic, big-picture approach is best. This is what Professor Anthony King has provided in Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century, and it fills a gap.
While there are many excellent case studies, reports and analyses (a good selection of which can be found at the Australian Army Research Centre’s website), there are few books that deal broadly with the subject of urban warfare. The most important are those by Professor Alice Hills and Professor David Kilcullen. The former’s Future Wars in Cities offers a rigorous academic analysis across the spectrum of military operations, while the latter’s Out of the Mountains anticipates asymmetric or guerrilla warfare in cities. Both are excellent but future focused. King’s book echoes his colleagues’ warning that the future of war is urban, but he takes a wider view to look back into history.
Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century provides an introduction to the topic as well as a conceptual framework to unpack it. It is both a textbook for newcomers and a structure for specialists to theorise and debate. As such, it is a major contribution to the field of urban warfare studies. The work reflects King’s background as a sociologist. Specifically, his thematic approach uses a wide-angle lens, only briefly zooming in on aspects of cases to illustrate a point. Some historians may be disappointed by King’s repeated reference to a select handful of battles, including Stalingrad. And while King sets out to take a multidisciplinary approach to the topic, he is limited by space to substantial contributions only from his own field and from history and geography. Despite these limitations, however, the book provides an excellent start point for alternative perspectives. King has carefully judged how far to delve into pertinent but (to the average reader) inaccessible matters such as the architecture and French philosophy underpinning Aviv Kokhavi’s and Eyal Weizman’s concept of walking through walls. With his deft prose, King ensures that the text remains accessible to a broad audience.
The major thesis of the book is deceptively simple. The world is urbanising, cities are far larger than ever before, and armies are far smaller. As a result, urban warfare is both changing and increasing in frequency. As King puts it, historically ‘Mass armies swamped cities … Today cities envelop the Armed Force’. In support of this thesis, in the second chapter King assembles the empirical evidence, and multiple arguments flow from this. Drawing persuasively on the work of Christopher Duffy and other researchers, King argues that ‘Battles for cities now take place inside those cities … as contracted forces converge on decisive points’. Proceeding from this, the urban battle is portrayed by King as a series of ‘localised micro-sieges’, acknowledging that he is departing from the historical meaning of siege as total isolation from resources. In a deduction based on the declining force to space ratio, King argues that the advantages historically enjoyed by governments in defeating guerrilla movements in the city are waning. King also presents some of the important debates within the urban operations community, for example the question of whether urban war is a new problem deserving of special attention and resources or whether it has always been part of warfare and we have simply forgotten that fact. King does not take a position on the issue, rather prompting the reader to reflect and perhaps follow up the sources mentioned.
Rather than organise the book temporally or around key historical cases, King has chosen to dissect urban warfare using distinct and memorable conceptual themes to provide his chapter structure. This approach successfully breaks down the topic so that the reader is offered cognitively accessible and manageable chapters. To begin and end each chapter, King uses biblical titles that convey horror and destruction. The introductory ‘Gomorrah’ overviews past and current urban warfare, while the concluding ‘Armageddon’ chapter recaps key ideas to postulate possible futures. The nine chapters in between are ‘Numbers’, ‘The Urban Guerrilla’, ‘Metropolis’, ‘Walls’, ‘Air’, ‘Fire’, ‘Swarms’, ‘Partners’ and ‘Rumour’. Each construct is writ large, so, for example, ‘Fire’ refers to firepower and effects and ‘Rumour’to contestation in the information and narrative domains. Throughout, historical examples and vignettes are used to explain the ideas gathered under each theme. In addition to the conceptual framework defined by the chapter structure, King also offers us a novel (to the reviewer) model of urban warfare as having three elements: cities, weaponry and forces. This is a very neat device for beginning a conversation.
Introducing the challenges of urban warfare is itself a challenge, as this reviewer can attest from his own future-focused attempts. Developing a definitive framework for understanding urban war is likely to require extensive scholarly debate and many iterations. What Professor Anthony King has provided is a solid foundation for the future work of other scholars, a tool for military training and an accessible, engaging textbook. Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century offers a grounded account which should be ‘required reading’ for leaders at all levels in the Army. For decision-makers, the book shines a spotlight on Western unpreparedness for peer-to-peer conflict in cities. It quietly highlights the alarming implications of changing force to urban space ratio, army tardiness in conducting more than token training in combined arms tactics and techniques in urban environments, and the related misapprehension that counterinsurgency-derived close-quarters battle (‘interior combat’) is an appropriate priority preparation for urban war. While there is risk in drawing premature conclusions from the information operations dominated picture of the Ukraine conflict, Professor King’s warnings have been robustly borne out by Russian and Ukrainian failures and losses.
