Us army urban combat manual

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Posted by Survival Ebooks Site map of full articles Comments Army Field Manual Military Manuals and Courses. Choosing a Shortwave Radio 12p. Short Wave Frenquency Guide 4p. In the Second Battle of Fallujah , enemy fighters reinforced the insides of buildings with sandbags, booby-trapped windows, doors, and roofs, and established kill zones in courtyards and the building entryways they knew the attacking forces would attempt to enter.

The attacking troops took heavy casualties in the streets, in alleyways, and while attempting house-to-house clearing using close-quarters tactics. US soldiers and Marines adapted. Instead of exposing dismounted troops to clear rooms, they changed their method to one that relied extensively on tanks and indirect firepower to clear buildings.

Thus, in the absence of fortification-clearing tools or tactics, they increased their use of explosive force to penetrate buildings fully. No matter how the three primary urban fortification tools or tactics demolish with aerial bombardment; strike with aerial munitions, tank fire, or some other explosive to reduce enemy strength inside; or send dismounted troops to clear it with close-quarters tactics are used, they are inadequate.

Attacking soldiers left with no adequate tools will adapt, just as US troops did in Fallujah. In the Battle of Marawi , Philippine troops constructed giant slingshots they called them angry birds to launch grenades into second-, third-, and higher-story windows.

They also dug giant trench lines reminiscent of World War I to get closer to urban fortifications. In most cases, these adaptations use weapons, tactics, and tools that are designed for other environments and other types of warfare—meaning they are suboptimal.

To alter this urban warfare rule, tactics and technologies would have to change considerably. For instance, direct-fire munitions that could accurately penetrate the thickest steel-reinforced concrete would allow dismounted troops, who are best positioned to distinguish military targets from noncombatants in the complexity of urban terrain, to target defenders from a safe location.

The defender maintains relative freedom of maneuver within the urban terrain. To be able to move through it, to be able to get to everywhere you want to go, you need to keep the arteries open, or to make new arteries, by either planning or destruction or the interaction of both.

They are also primarily ground assaults. Air mobility, or the use of aircraft to insert forces, and close air support are usually limited during attacks due to the degraded ISR in dense urban terrain and vulnerability of slow and low-flying air assets, as seen during the Battle of Mogadishu. There are military tactics that attempt to deceive the defender regarding the exact location of the main assault, which attackers employed during the Second Battle of Fallujah , successfully using information operations and small feints to make the enemy believe the attack was coming from the south of the city when in fact it came from the north.

But once the main assault is committed, breaching the city defenses, the defenders can reinforce planned fortifications with mobile assault groups as Chechen fighters did to successfully defeat a major Russian formation in the First Battle of Grozny. Urban defenders maintain freedom of movement inside their defenses. They can prepare the terrain to facilitate their movement to wherever the battle requires.

They can connect battle positions with routes through and under buildings. They can construct obstacles to lure attackers unknowingly into elaborate ambushes because of the limited main avenues of approach in many dense urban environments.

But, if the attackers could manipulate the terrain to their advantage during the attack, the rule would change. This is done in modern city attacks in small ways. Bridges in and out of the city can be disabled and major routes blocked by troops, but mobility inside the defense remains unfettered. To truly change this rule, attackers would have to be able to rapidly manipulate the urban terrain to their advantage.

Existing terrain such as buildings could be knocked down to isolate pockets of enemy fighters within a smaller area of the city. Some type of physical obstacles could also be emplaced deep into the city to cut it into more manageable battle areas. In the Battle of Sadr City , US forces emplaced nearly three miles of concrete walls to prevent enemy fighters from getting to vital rocket launch sites and accessing military resources they needed to fight.

Advancements in military ISR and aerial attack—despite their limitations in cities—have pushed urban warfare underground. Recent combat operations in Syria, Iraq, and eastern Ukraine have all seen a rise in the use of the underground. Defenders use existing tunnels or dig their own to connect fighting positions, hide from detection, and provide cover from aerial strikes, and even employ them offensively as tunnel bombs against stationary military forces.

Attackers in modern urban operations mostly view the underground as an obstacle to address if encountered.

US Army doctrine and training overemphasizes subterranean operations like the ability to clear tunnels. By either digging tunnels from the outside of the city or using existing urban infrastructure, an attacking force might be enabled to bypass all primary defensives and start its attack from the center of the city moving outward. It would be a modern-day Trojan horse. It would also be similar to the German response to the French Maginot Line.

They changed the rules and the advantages of positional defensive lines of previous eras. To be sure, digging a tunnel big enough to pass enough troops through would take time and resources.

But the assault on Mosul took nine months once it started, and that does not account for planning activities ahead of the battle. The Islamic State had been allowed two years to build multiple complex defensive belts around the city.

In and rebel fighters in Syria dug tunnels over three thousand feet long in just fifty days with hand tools alone. With modern technologies, digging a tunnel long enough and big enough is not unfeasible if a military would commit to the idea.

While some US defense organizations are exploring rapid tunneling , it is not yet for these types of purposes. Neither the attacker nor the defender can concentrate their forces against the other. Most advanced militaries prioritize maneuver warfare. That is the type of warfare for which they train, organize, and equip.

They do not prepare for positional warfare. Maneuver warfare relies primarily on the rapid and unexpected movement of formations to destroy enemy forces. A key principle of maneuver warfare operations is to mass and concentrate the effects of combat power at the most advantageous place and time to produce decisive results. A defense established in dense urban terrain constrains both the rapid movement and the ability to concentrate formations against decisive points. This goes for both the defender and attacker.

There have been a few modern examples of urban defenders with the ability to organize in disaggregated formations that combine without instructions to attack their opponents once identified. This was the case of paramilitary fighters in Somali during the Battle of Mogadishu.

There have also been plenty of historical examples of militaries using swarming , engaging an adversary from all directions simultaneously, from ancient sea swarming by Greeks during the Greco-Persian Wars to Mongolian land swarms combining horses and archers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A major evolution of tactics and technology would be required to change this rule of modern-day city attacks. Most militaries do not practice the decentralized operations required to truly implement swarming and rapid massing in an urban attack.

A very broad combination of doctrinal change, risk acceptance, an instant and shared operational picture, and experimentation would be required to attempt swarming by dismounted soldiers. One of the reasons none of these rules of city attacks have been really explored is because modern, Western militaries, especially the US Army, is playing the wrong game.

The US military is designed for maneuver warfare and the city attack is classic positional warfare , more like siege warfare fighting than something the principles of maneuver warfare call for.

In fact, if the eight rules of city attacks are compared to cases of siege warfare in medieval Europe, one would see that many of the challenges are largely the same: attacking fortifications with no cover or concealment or hindered by massive defenses.

But the difference is that militaries in the past adapted, developing ways to address these challenges such as using mobile cover while closing the distance to fortifications, digging tunnels under walls, employing artillery to create opening in walls, and many other innovations.

Since modern militaries do not sufficiently understand the city attack as terrain-based positional warfare, they apply the principles, tools, and methods of enemy-based maneuver warfare that rely on maneuver and firepower.

Ultimately, this fundamental misunderstanding leads to the destruction of entire cities, building by building. If militaries fail to address these rules, the city attack will remain one of the missions with the most tactical, accidental, and political risk.

It will continue to drive combat into urban areas where weaker combatants can use the advantages they gain for short-term political wins. If, however, the rules of urban warfare could be changed, if militaries overcame the disadvantages of attacking an urban defense and took advantages away from the defenders, warfare would move out of the cities as adversaries learned it was a quick way to be rapidly defeated.

He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. I'm not sure how anyone can casually toss off that fragment with a straight face.

It is flat out a credibility killer. I wonder if perhaps there may be more complexity to items four and five if the defenders should hold hostages—these may be key political personnel or ordinary civilians.

How do you deal with this situation? Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The articles and other content which appear on the Modern War Institute website are unofficial expressions of opinion. The views expressed are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

The Modern War Institute does not screen articles to fit a particular editorial agenda, nor endorse or advocate material that is published. Rather, the Modern War Institute provides a forum for professionals to share opinions and cultivate ideas.

Comments will be moderated before posting to ensure logical, professional, and courteous application to article content. Share on Facebook Share. Share on Twitter Tweet.

Share on LinkedIn Share. Send email Mail. Print Print. It is expected to be prepared to answer any call by the US government in the pursuit of national interests—anywhere around the world and in any domain. In a previous episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, host John Spencer spoke to three guests from the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California about the urban operations training units undergo during rotations there. This episode features a Joe Vega.

He has been working Daniel Hendrex. When the conversation was recorded, he was serving as command sergeant major of the 3rd Infantry Division. He has since become command sergeant major of Andrew Steadman, the senior Roger Noble. In their conversation, Col. Winton discusses the topic of his PhD Richard Norton. While in the Navy, he served extensively at sea on This episode of the Urban Warfare Project podcast is unique—mostly because it isn't specifically about urban warfare.

In fact, the episode's guest, retired Sgt. Patrick Mahaney. He is the cofounder and director of the National Center for Urban Operations.

Rob MacMillan. In , Lt. She works at the Center for Civilians in Conflict CIVIC , a nongovernmental organization that seeks to convince parties to armed conflicts to recognize the I passed a checkpoint manned by a group of young men armed with assault rifles. These guys are shady, I A graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies, he has As the world becomes more urban, we need to be prepared for cities to become battlefields.

That's why we launched the Urban Warfare Project in —to explore the unique challenges that military forces face when forces to operate in dense urban terrain. Today we're A key message of this site is that contemporary armies are unprepared for the challenges of operating in cities. In some respects, though, we are actually much less prepared now than in the past. Several times each semester, the Modern War Institute convenes what it calls War Councils—interdisciplinary panels that explore an issue related to modern war from a variety of perspectives.

These War Councils provide cadets and faculty the opportunity to engage with