Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Survival Resistance Strategy
Jenn Smotherman
The changing character of warfare does matter. There are few parallels between ancient historical accounts about fighting in cities and the character of urban combat today. Not accounting for the social or technological changes in which a war is fought is an abuse of military history and as dangerous as not recognizing history at all. Assessments about the difficulty of urban warfare today in comparison to other environments or with reference to past conflicts need to be fully contextualized to have contemporary value. War and warfare must be understood in the context of their social, cultural, economic, human, moral, political, and psychological dimensions.
Military forces fighting an urban counterinsurgency are usually conducting operations in a permissive environment. Everyday life of the city continues while the military looks to use a range of intelligence capabilities and search operations to both find insurgents and separate them physically and ideologically from the rest of the population. Once found, the military conducts intelligence-driven raids to kill or capture insurgents. Counterinsurgency operations also often involve stability operations meant to address the underlying social, political, and economic conditions allowing insurgencies to persist.
Thus, to argue that conducting a counterinsurgency in a jungle, mountain, desert, or any other environment is more difficult than an urban is not logical. Trying to find, separate, capture, or kill a small group of individuals without drastically changing the environment is orders of magnitude harder where there are tens of thousands or millions of people compared to all other environments that do not contain this density of populations.
In the context of both a counterinsurgency and deliberate assault, urban combat is the most difficult form of warfare because the environment is both the most physically constraining and also involves the most constraints from a policy perspective.
The ready-made defensive qualities of urban terrain cannot be overlooked. While defensive sites can be prepared in other environments such as mountains and jungles, it takes large investments in time and resources to do so. Fortified concrete bunkers, pillboxes, towers, and gun positions must be constructed. Tunnels and underground military complexes must be dug. This constructed defensive infrastructure can take months if not years to make other environments defensible. The Japanese invested over a year to supplement the existing natural defensive qualities of the island of Iwo Jima for the eventual United States attack and communist forces spent years digging networks of tunnels under the jungle terrain of South Vietnam. In urban areas, it is already there.
In their article, Betz and Stanford-Tuck emphasize not allowing the enemy time to establish a defense. They also suggest the best advice military officers can give to political leaders is that they should think twice before ordering the military to assault a city. Both of these points are irrelevant to an assessment of whether conducting a deliberate assault against an urban defense is more difficult than doing so in other types of terrain.
This rapid and easy use of the urban physical terrain for military purposes has also been seen in many other battles and theaters of war. In the Battle of Manila in 1945, Japanese forces, mostly poorly trained sailors, turned the steel-reinforced concrete buildings of the city into a series of fortified strongholds. They made barricades out of cars, laid mines along roads, filled windows with concrete, made gun slits in walls, and dug tunnels connecting select buildings. The attacking US forces of the 1st Cavalry Division quickly learned that reducing the Japanese strongpoints required deliberate and overwhelming force. They developed a tactic that required a full battalion to attack a single multi-story building. For example, on February 20, 1945, the Americans used a battalion to clear a large building, Rizal Hall, within the University of the Philippines complex. They fired two hours of preparatory fire before breaching the exterior walls, although that fire did not flatten the building. Inside, the Americans found that the Japanese had created bunkers throughout the building, which was itself a bunker. For two days the opposing forces literally fought an indoor battle, hurling grenades at each other from room to room. Rizal Hall is also an example of how dense urban terrain can contain numerous micro-environments. Urban battles have even seen opposing forces controlling different floors of the same structure at the same time.
Any urban environment today will have thousands of instant messengers. There are few barriers to getting information from a combat zone today, and information is most readily available and waiting to be transmitted in urban environments. Not only can the plentiful media that is found on a modern battlefield broadcast live and unfiltered images, but every photo or video captured by a cell phone can be uploaded on the internet and instantly shape the narrative of the battle.
The challenges of urban warfare do make it the hardest of all environments to conduct multiple different types of operations, but the challenges posed by cities should never be looked as insurmountable. Military forces must be prepared to fight and win in any environment. New approaches, doctrine, training, and investments are needed to increase military effectiveness when they are asked to accomplish complex missions in dense urban environments.
Instead of thinking less about Stalingrad, militaries should think less about using techniques typically unique to special operations forces, which is generally a legacy from the failed 1972 operation to save members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany. In his book, The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Dr. Anthony King details how the failed operation led to the creation of elite counterterrorism forces around the world and the development of specialized close-quarter battle tactics and techniques. These tactics center on high-risk, intelligence-driven raids and the capability to enter and clear a building and room to kill a surprised enemy while sustaining few casualties to both the soldiers and any civilians intermixed with the enemy. The context for training this mission usually involves a semi-permissive environment where military forces can get to the objective and assumes knowledge of where the enemy is, that the enemy can be surprised, and that the enter-and-clear tactic will be successful.
Very few militaries have training sites that allow them to train city assaults or urban counterinsurgencies with large combined-arms formations. The US military only has one training site that can train more than a battalion of soldiers. Even that site, at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, lacks density or realism. A brigade in the US Army will use the site for a simulated battle for only one day during its biannual training rotation to the training center. The site also lacks any ability to simulate the effects of combat inside or on the physical terrain itself. An enemy soldier can hide behind a plywood door and not be affected by the rounds of attacking soldiers or their fire support.
Militaries must be able to train for both city assaults and urban counterinsurgencies, not just intelligence-driven raids in permissible or semi-permissible environments. They need urban-optimized capabilities for the most difficult challenges they will face. Not having the best tools for urban operations and the right training opportunities only contributes to the difficulty posed by cities.
Urban warfare is not the mythical monster Betz and Stanford-Tuck describe it as. It is a very real monster that military forces must be prepared to slay. Warfare in densely populated urban areas is the hardest type of warfare for many reasons, it is not something that can be wished away or avoided, and the city is most definitely not neutral.
Excellent Work Michael! I agree with your conclusions 100 percent. Urban warfare is one of the trickiest operations a military unit can embark on. Even with the high tempo of urban operations in the past 20 years we still have not cracked the code to fighting smart in Cities. We have exhausted our Tier one units in the past years fighting back to back engagements in both Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously. There is also the psychological stress of not knowing who or what is on the other side of the door you are about to kick in. Insurgents, family, local gang members, Day in Day out these types of operations wear down a soldier's sole.
Should we consider that, although the city indeed may not be neutral, the question of whether this should be seen as a good thing or bad, this will depend on one's political objective, for example, to:
a. Move one's country forward and, thus, to (a) achieve necessary political, economic, social and value change/reform; this, so as to (b) better provide for one's national security today and going forward. Or to:
"If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least King Zahir Shah's reign (Afghanistan's first "modernizer?"), has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional."
"Having spoken with members of rural communities and the weary survivors of Afghanistan's numerous conflicts, I sought the opinion of a different demographic: young city-dwellers that have a different perspective from their forebears. In the opinion of one young Uzbek I spoke to in Kabul, it is the duty of all Afghans to be united under a single country and state. For a Hazara in her mid-20s, the goal was to get a college degree and eventually run her own business. Such a dream could only become a reality under the current government in Kabul. And for a young male Pashtun who ran a local enterprise in the city, the Pashtunwali and the strict interpretation of Islam belonged to the countryside, not in places like Kabul."
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