Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King
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which were simply too small to threaten them or their lines of communication.23 Fortresses and cities could be enveloped or overwhelmed by increasingly large hosts.24 The implication of Duffy’s thesis is quite radical. On this account, in any era, campaign geometry is substantially a function of the size of the armies involved. The weaponry available to Napoleonic armies was better, but not radically different from that fielded by General John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, at the battle of Blenheim in 1708. Yet, siege warfare had become less important. Written in response to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Clausewitz’s On War demonstrates this shift very clearly. It is striking that, although he wrote an entire book on the ‘Engagement’ (battle), he devoted only three chapters of On War to fortresses and none specifically to cities and siege warfare. Eleven pages of a 600-page treatise referred to urban warfare.25
Duffy suggests that the operational significance of urban warfare in the early modern period was dependent on the size of armies. This is a deeply significant claim. If the early modern period is taken as indicative, it is possible to propose a wider hypothesis about urban warfare. In any historical era, the smaller the armies, the more important cities become; urban warfare attains priority as military forces contract. By contrast, the larger the armies, the more likely that open warfare in the field will predominate over siege-craft. As forces expand, cities become less operationally significant. The frequency and importance of urban warfare is, therefore, substantially a function of the size of military forces.
The Decline of Mass Armies
Duffy’s thesis about numbers is particularly pertinent to the question of urban warfare in the early twenty-first century because military forces are smaller now than they have been for centuries. Since the 1970s – and especially in more recent decades – large, state, Western forces have all but disappeared; the mass citizen army, which was the norm during the twentieth century, has been displaced by smaller all-volunteer forces. Military scholars began to note this important transformation of Western armed forces in the 1970s. By that point, some Western forces had already begun to abolish conscription.26 Following the Cold War, conscription and the mass army became increasingly obsolete, so that by the 2010s, all major Western powers had abolished national service. As a result, Western forces have declined to about half or a third of their Cold War size (see Table 2.1). After the end of the Cold War, the active-duty US Army, for instance, contracted from 700,000 to 480,000 personnel and it is set to contract further. It is true that some European countries, such as Sweden, have recently reintroduced limited conscription, but these selective drafts in no way reverse the general trend.
Table 2.1: Army size (active service personnel), 1991–2019
*The italicised figure includes the DDR’s Nationale Volksarmee
Source: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 1991; International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 2019.
American and European commentators have often worried about this reduction of state forces. Yet, in fact, the trend is global. China and Russia have both displayed the same pattern. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s Army is now proportionately far smaller than its Western rivals. In 1991, the Soviet Army consisted of 1.4 million active soldiers and a reserve of a further 2.75 million. Today, the Russian Army fields 280,000 personnel, of whom 195,000 are regular professionals; it is approximately 20 per cent of its Cold War size.
Because of the objective decline in troop numbers, states have necessarily deployed much smaller forces on recent operations than in the twentieth century. They simply cannot mount mass operations anymore. This is even true for the IDF. Although the IDF remains a large conscript force, which has apparently maintained its size since 1991, only small elements of it were ever deployed on Israel’s recent campaigns.27 During the First Lebanon War of 1982, 78,000 troops were deployed. By contrast, 10,000 Israeli troops fought in the Second Lebanon War of 2006; only in the very last few days of the war, after a series of defeats, did the IDF increase the deployment to 30,000.28 Similarly, Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza in 2008 also involved a relatively small ground deployment of about 10,000 troops. If Duffy’s thesis is correct, then the reduction of combat densities on the battlefield should be expected in and of itself to increase the frequency of urban fighting. Reduced state forces necessarily converge on cities and towns.
Fronts: Twentieth-Century Warfare
In order to understand the significance of declining force sizes to urban warfare today, it is useful to consider the twentieth century, as both comparison and contrast. Urban warfare was, of course, by no means irrelevant during this period. In the First and Second World Wars, armies sometimes fought directly for possession of major and capital cities such as Antwerp, Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Manila, Warsaw and Berlin, as well as a host of smaller towns and cities such as Brest and Aachen. The grand strategic aim of the protagonists in both wars was to defeat their opponents’ field armies and to occupy their capitals. Cities were typically the operational and strategic objectives and, sometimes, serious fighting took place in them.29
However, throughout the twentieth century, armies were so big that they campaigned in the field. In the First World War, Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the United States raised, respectively, armies of 12 million, 8 million, 11 million, 8 million and 4 million. In the Second World War, they fielded armies of 12 million, 5 million, 10 million, 4 million and 8 million respectively. In each major land campaign, the mass citizen armies of these nations formed fronts. There were three reasons for this. Fronts allowed armies to bring all their combat power to bear. It was also necessary to form a front in order to avoid being outflanked by the huge hosts that opposed them. Finally, but no less importantly, mass armies could be supported logistically only if they spread out across a large rail and road system; fronts protected their rear areas. The implications for urban warfare were profound. Because armies gathered on large fronts, twentieth-century armies predominantly fought for cities, outside them.
Perhaps the best example of the distinctive topography of twentieth-century warfare is provided by the most famous urban battle of the Second World War: Stalingrad. Stalingrad has rightly fascinated and appalled military historians and novelists alike. Not only was it one of the most savage engagements of the war, but it is plausibly held as the turning point of the conflict in Europe. Much of the historiography of Stalingrad has focused on the urban combat between August and November 1942. This is totally understandable. The fighting that took place inside the city was among the most intense of all the urban battles that took place during the Second World War. It was the first time that mass industrial armies, fully equipped with modern weaponry of machine guns, tanks, artillery and airpower, had been involved in a sustained battle against each other inside a city.
Stalingrad has been taken as the avatar of modern urban warfare, then. At the tactical level, this may be true. Yet, the Stalingrad campaign also exemplified the wider geometry of twentieth-century warfare. While they were the most intense and important actions, Sixth Army’s operations in Stalingrad were only part of much wider German Army campaign on this front. Sixth Army was part of the Wehrmacht’s redesignated Army Group B (formerly Army Group South), which orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign across a front, hundreds of miles north and south of Stalingrad. Stalingrad itself was not a particularly large city; in July 1941 it had a population of 900,000.30 Most of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B, which consisted of the Fourth Hungarian, Third Rumanian, Fourth Rumanian, Eighth Italian, Fourth Panzer, Second and Sixth Armies (1.5 million men), was deployed not into Stalingrad, but into the field around it.31 Army Group B comprised seventy-four divisions in total. Only the twenty-seven divisions of the Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army were ever committed to the fight in and around Stalingrad itself. The rest were deployed