Читать книгу Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century - Anthony King - Страница 9

Urban warfare is ancient. Its long provenance is widely recognized by commentators today. Yet it has, once again, come to prominence in the early twenty-first century. Clearly, the reappearance of the urban battle has engendered deep concern, not only among the armed forces who have to fight in this dangerous and difficult terrain, but also among politicians, political leaders, humanitarian agencies and, of course, citizens themselves. Many towns and cities have been destroyed – often irrevocably – in recent decades; huge numbers of civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced. The suffering has been truly terrible. There seems little doubt that urban conflict and warfare will continue to proliferate in the coming decades. It will remain a global issue, affecting the lives of millions, threatening major political, economic and cultural centres. If the political and social implications of the rise of urban warfare are so profound, it cannot be dismissed as a technical military issue. On the contrary, precisely because urban warfare always involves large civilian populations, it is imperative that policymakers, scholars, humanitarians, commentators and the general public all understand the realities of such conflicts.

How is it possible to understand urban warfare today, though? This is very difficult. Urban warfare is a complex and diverse phenomenon. No two battles are exactly alike; each one is bewildering in itself. As a general phenomenon, it is even harder to capture the character of urban warfare today with any fidelity. It is a prodigious political, social, military and intellectual challenge. Nevertheless, whatever the obstacles, it is necessary to try at least to comprehend the anatomy of the urban battle.

Contemporary scholarship on urban warfare is the best place to start. Two broad schools of thought are observable in the literature today and it is useful to look at each of them in turn. On the one hand, some scholars and military professionals emphasize the novelty of urban conflict today. They believe that a profound military transformation – even an urban revolution – has occurred, altering the very character of contemporary military operations in cities. Disturbed by the vast metropolises in which forces now operate, they declare that urban military challenge is without precedent. Richard Norton’s 2003 article, ‘Feral Cities’, might be taken as a seminal moment in this catastrophic vision of the urban future:

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense Petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the 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, there is little genuine manoeuvre because combatants struggle for heavily fortified positions. Yet, there are many attacks. On this definition, the siege certainly includes a partial or temporary blockade, but it also involves limited attacks on fortified positions. The inner-urban sieges of the twenty-first century have taken this second form. They involve a local blockade, encirclement and contravallation of enemy positions within the city itself. Yet, they have also included intense, attritional fights over fortified positions.

Inner-urban sieges of the twenty-first century are violent and gruelling. As Mosul has shown, they involve bitter fighting at close quarters between troops, tanks, armoured vehicles and bulldozers. Yet, they are highly complex, involving conventional, hybrid, irregular forces on the ground and aerial platforms flying high above the city. Precision artillery, deployed miles outside the city, information and cyber operations, collaboration with local militias and civil agencies have all become critical to the outcome. Consequently, the urban battle has localized onto specific sites within the city, but it has simultaneously extended out across the global urban archipelago by means of social media and information networks. Peoples across the world are now implicated in the fight as audiences, supporters and sometimes even participants. The anatomy of urban warfare in the twenty-first century has evolved, then. Even while ancient practices endure in the bitter close fight, the urban battlespace has been redesigned. Its topography has both contracted within the city, and also expanded outwards across the world. This book adopts a transdisciplinary approach to describe the architecture of this new battlescape.

There are a number of ways to analyse contemporary urban warfare. It would be possible to examine a single major urban battle and extrapolate the main features of urban warfare from that one event. Or, it would be possible to analyse and compare several urban battles. This book employs a different method. I do not tell the history of one battle, like Mosul, or several battles comparatively. Rather, I examine a suite of contemporary examples in order to identify the general anatomy of urban warfare today. Consequently, the book proceeds thematically, dissecting the urban battle to explore each of its constitutive elements in turn. I begin with an analysis of the rise of urban warfare, arguing for the importance of numbers to both interstate and insurgent urban warfare. We will then look at how reduced military forces have been compelled to change the way they fight in cities, as they are increasingly committed to localised micro-sieges. I will show how fortification, airpower, firepower, armour, partnering with local forces and information operations have become vital in these battles, reconfiguring their topographies. Each of these themes will be discussed in turn to provide a comprehensive picture of the urban battle of the twenty-first century. The book concludes with a discussion of the likely future of urban warfare over the next two decades. It considers how the micro-siege that we have seen since the early years of this century might develop in the next two decades. Will we be fighting in megacities in the 2020s and 2030s? Will robots take over? Or will cities be destroyed by mass conventional or nuclear strikes?