Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King
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rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain sciencefiction genres.24
For Norton, the feral city of the future presents the armed forces with a totally new predicament. Since military forces might have to fight in human settlements of a size never seen before, future urban operations will be without historic parallel. Norton is not alone in having such thoughts. On the contrary, the claim of originality is, perhaps, most apparent in recent discussions about war in megacities of 10 million inhabitants or more: ‘While urban combat operations are not new, a megacity presents old challenges at a previously unimaginable scale and complexity.’25 Here, mere quantity gains a quality all of its own. Others have confirmed the sheer difficulty of operating in large urban areas. They claim that the urban environment has become the hardest of all theatres.26 For these scholars and practitioners, the sheer scale and complexity of cities in the early twenty-first century has revolutionized urban operations. For them, urban warfare today is a radical historic departure. While the siege might indeed be old, the twenty-first-century urban battle is fundamentally new.
Other scholars claim precisely the opposite: they reject novelty altogether. In a joint article, for instance, war studies scholar David Betz and British Army officer Hugh Stanford-Tuck maintained that ‘nothing fundamental has changed’ in urban warfare. For them, the basic features of urban warfare endure across the decades, centuries and, indeed, millennia: ‘Even the challenges that might seem new, such as the prevalence of the media, are only superficially different or, at most, an amplified echo of the past.’27 They argue that many of the practices employed by Titus in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE are immediately observable today. For instance, in the second week of the siege, Titus made a small breach in the second wall and sought to enter it with about 1,000 legionnaires. However, because the breach was too small and the Jewish resistance fanatical, there was a serious risk that the assault force, which could not easily retreat, would be massacred. So Titus stationed ‘his archers at the end of the streets and taking post himself where the enemy was in greatest force, he kept them at bay with missiles’. Betz and Stanford-Tuck translate this action into modern vernacular:
That this battle involved swords and clubs rather than M-4s and AK-47s matters little – just replace ‘archers’ and ‘arrows’ with ‘close combat attack’ and ‘armed aviation’ and the scene has an obvious contemporary resonance. Moreover, the tactics of the Jewish rebels differed little from those of, say, Islamic State insurgents in the months-long battle for Mosul in Iraq.
Their point is that urban battles of the twenty-first century are not remotely new; they have all been seen before. Similarly, the British scholar Alice Hills has claimed that ‘city fighting remains essentially unchanged at this level of intensity, regardless of whether conventional or irregular forces are involved’.28
This scepticism is valid. It is all too easy to presume that urban warfare itself is objectively new. The armed forces are themselves vulnerable here. Soldiers have sometimes assumed that, because they are experiencing urban warfare for the first time, it must be a genuinely new phenomenon in itself. Their understandable shock at the horrors of urban combat has induced historical myopia. Some correction may be appropriate. Yet, while it is entirely cogent for leading scholars like David Betz or Alice Hills to argue that there is some continuity in weaponry and tactics, it is less sustainable to claim that there is nothing distinctive about contemporary urban warfare at all. While arrows might suppress defenders like bullets, and bulldozers might knock down walls like battering rams, it is not true that recent urban battles have been conducted in the same way as they ever were. Although certain features of urban combat endure, the physiology of urban warfare has changed. At this point, these commentators may conflate urban tactics with urban warfare itself. Urban tactics are certainly a valid object of analysis. However, to understand urban warfare, it is insufficient to focus on specific weapons or individual techniques; it is, rather, necessary to consider the urban battle as a whole. The moment the focus of analysis moves up to the level of the urban battle, it becomes difficult to ignore a military transformation in the twenty-first century. Urban combat may not be entirely new, but urban warfare today certainly has a distinctive anatomy.
It is possible to identify its special topography by taking a wider view of the urban battle. While the details of each battle are different, urban warfare consists of three fundamental elements: cities, weaponry and forces. Urban warfare is defined by the scale and geography of the urban settlements in which fighting occurs, the weaponry available to the combatants and the size of military forces – and their type. These three factors – cities, weaponry and forces – constitute the atomic elements of urban warfare. Together, they generate a recognizable ‘battlescape’.29 Each historical era has its own characteristic battlescape.
The interplay of these three factors is key to understanding urban warfare. Scholars must try to show how the physical and social topographies of cities interact with military forces and the weapons they use to generate a particular kind of battle. This is challenging. It is difficult to hold all these factors in mind at the same time and to see how they manifest themselves in the urban battle. Moreover, in order to understand urban warfare, it is necessary to transcend disciplinary boundaries. Anthropology, history, geography, politics and sociology are all immediately relevant; indeed, each is indispensable. However, and this is where the true difficulty lies, it is also necessary to have an understanding of military science and security studies, as well as detailed knowledge of military tactics, doctrine and organization. Furthermore, it is important to comprehend the city as a social space, and also to understand how the armed forces organize themselves for warfare. It is often the case that academic scholarship has little apprehension of the armed forces, while military scientists have an inadequate appreciation of cities. This book seeks to transcend these disciplinary limitations by analysing the interplay between cities, weaponry and forces in order to unite social and military sciences. As a result, the analysis is intended to be helpful both to scholars and to students in the social and political sciences as well as to urban policymakers, humanitarians and military professionals themselves.
The central argument of the book is simple. Up to now scholars and practitioners have explained the rise of urban warfare by reference to the global explosion of the urban population. They believe that the expansion of cities has both made urban warfare more likely and also determined its character. In fact, in order to understand urban warfare today, a better approach may, ironically, be to begin not with cities, but with the armed forces themselves. Moreover, it may be best to begin with an apparently banal fact about them, concerning their size. Since the late twentieth century, state armed forces almost everywhere have shrunk radically. This reduction has had profound implications for urban warfare. It has not only made urban warfare more likely, because armies, no longer big enough to form fronts, have been dragged into cities, but it has also transformed the anatomy of the urban battle itself. Urban battles in the twentieth century encompassed entire cities. Mass armies swamped cities, forming large fronts around and through them. Even inside cities, twentieth-century forces typically fought across the entire urban area.
Today, cities envelop the armed forces. Armies are simply not big enough to surround whole cities. Battles for cities now take place inside cities themselves, as contracted forces converge on decisive points. Because forces have shrunk, the urban battle has coalesced into a series of localized micro-sieges in which combatants struggle over buildings, streets and districts. Instead of battle-lines bisecting an entire city, sieges explode at particular locations. The urban battle is punctuated by localized fights.
It is important to understand the character of today’s localized sieges. These sieges do not just involve passive encirclement and blockade; they are not completely static. They also involve massive strikes and aggressive assaults. Is it still legitimate to call them sieges at all, then? The term ‘siege’ refers literally to a military operation in which a city is surrounded and its inhabitants forced to surrender.30 On this account, a siege involves no assault. Yet, in everyday usage, ‘siege’ is normally applied in a looser sense. A siege refers not just to encirclement, but also to positional warfare in general. In a war of position,