The Four-floor War is Something to Avoid
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
“The worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities”
– Sun Tzu
It is said that when Alexander the Great conquered fabled Babylon, the already ancient metropolis was so vast in size and population that it took his army three days to reach the center of the city. Alexander’s path in Babylon, it is written, was strewn with flowers and welcoming crowds; the Babylonian elite, having experienced two thousand years of bloody Mesopotamian history, were shrewd enough to see the writing on the wall.
Those beside Alexander who have enjoyed such good fortune when fighting in cities have been few.
Cities however remain and battles are sometimes fought in them. What to do? A Marine general believes he knows:
ORLANDO, Fla. — US land forces will eventually find themselves locked in fights within huge, dense urban environments where skyscrapers tower over enormous shanty towns, and these troops need more realistic training to operate within these future megacities, a US Marine general is warning.
“I’ve trained in every environment, jungle, the desert, the mountains, cold weather, but I’ve never really trained well in an urban environment,” said Brig. Gen. Julian Alford, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory commander, earlier this month at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida.
[….]
“We are going to have these megacities that are ringed with these shanty towns and we are going to fight there because it will be the people who are uneducated, unemployed, the young men who are not married and they are mad about their lot in life,” Alford said.
“We talk about the three-block war, but we are moving quickly to the four-floor war,” he added. “We are going to be on the top floor of a skyscraper . . . evacuating civilians and helping people. The middle floor, we might be detaining really bad people that we’ve caught. On the first floor we will be down there killing them. … At the same time they will be getting away through the subway or subterrain. How do we train to fight that? Because it is coming, that fight right there is coming I do believe with all my heart.”
Well….yes, but a necessity is not always to be regarded as a virtue.
This is not a criticism of Brigadier General Alford, whom I’m certain is a smart man tasked with thinking through warfare in all possible environments to which a President might order young Marines. If he wasn’t seriously contemplating the risks and problems of urban warfare then the general would not be doing his duty. Heck, I hope he’s thinking about how Marines would fight in Antarctic mountains or in the Taklamakan.
That said, it would be most unwise for a great power whose political elite cringes at the death of enemy combatants in numbers and can no longer tolerate even incidental enemy civilian casualties when attacking enemy formations, to develop enthusiasm for plunging large numbers of American general purpose forces into a third world “megacity” of tens of millions where they might have to fight their way out. Putting troops in a vast warren of insurgency in some hellhole shantytown labyrinth with the highly restrictive ROE now so fashionable with Beltway chattering ninnies who reek of what military historian John Keegan termed “….the air of the seminar” would be to court defeat.
Assuming we do not have some kind of Jacksonian revolution in Washington that revives a tolerance for Stalingrad level casualties, the liberal use of heavy artillery and close air support, then urban warfare is better left to Special Operations punitive raids, drones and the intelligence community’s clandestine officers. Urban warfare on the large scale is seldom worth the cost, unless you need to exterminate an enemy force or impose unconditional surrender – and if you capture a “megacity”, you “win” the privilege of providing basic services to millions of desperately poor people who seethe with anger over your presence. Great.
The best way to win a war in a “megacity” is to stay the hell out of it.
January 20th, 2016 at 2:49 pm
Reminds me of this skirmish on a four story apartment building in Samarra when four paratroopers took on forty jihadis
http://spectator.org/articles/44593/longest-morning
January 20th, 2016 at 5:24 pm
Mark-
.
I generally agree.
.
The Marine Corps’ romance with urban combat goes back a few decades. Gen. Chuck Krulak popularized the “Three Block War” in almost the same breath as he mentioned “The Strategic Corporal.” Blocks are really only in cities, you know–it was an implicit argument that the fight would be in the city. You also have much of SWJ’s start as an Urban Operations-related website and working group.
.
All of this is a bit ironic given the Corps’ small size and finite resources. You’d think we’d want to desperately avoid this sort of thing.
.
Really, we should be aiming to control the maneuver space…the areas around the cities (both coastal and landlocked areas, as well as cyber, air, and space). Avoid the populations as much as possible. And generally practice a campaign plan whereby you force the enemy to come to you, and come without their enslaved and commingled human shields.
.
Going into a city should trigger Clauswitzian thoughts–thoughts of thinking of the type of war you’re engaging in. If are maneuvered into a position where the only way to “win” is to fight in those awful places, then we have already lost.
.
Nate
January 21st, 2016 at 12:20 am
Sounds like General Alford has read David Kilcullen’s book Out of the Mountains.
January 21st, 2016 at 2:16 pm
The problem is there is really no way around taking, holding and controlling the major cities if you want to take a country. If you want to control Iraq controlling Baghdad is unavoidable. Same thing goes with Afghanistan and Kandahar and Kabul. Same with Seoul, Mogadishu, Algiers, Misrata and on and on. If we ever get around to destroying the Islamic State before they destroy every trace of civilization in their country, we will have to take, hold and control Raqqa.
January 22nd, 2016 at 3:24 am
Hi Nate,
.
We are definitely on the same page.
.
Hi carl
.
I agree holding cities is important to take a country, but we can only take and hold cities by using effective tactics. That doesn’t mean indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants but it does mean using sufficient force efficiently and aggressively to reduce the likelihood of the enemy deciding to engage in bitter, block by block, house to house fighting and to shorten the period of fighting if that does happen.
January 22nd, 2016 at 6:16 pm
Strategically, the difference between fighting a 4-floor war instead of a 3-block war is enormous. In a 3-block war there are still (by still I mean if you are fighting tactically an insurgency and not yourself) 2 “ends” fighting towards a single “end”.
*
An “end” being the difference between the end at the start and the end vision of what the outcome of the war looks like.
*
In a 4-floor war this possibility of a single end coming out of two ends is no longer the case. In a 4-floor war, as the Marine general describes it, both ends look the same. They have to look the same, because the “end” on the top floor is fighting the “means” to the end, on the bottom floors. If the top end didn’t look like the foundation, then you would not have a “building” to begin with.
*
A 4-floor war, metaphorically speaking, would look like a war between China and the USA, where the parts and assembly for one’s iphone comes from the megacities of the other’s, while the way of creating the iphone (consumer spending), still comes from individuals in the USA.
*
Non-metaphorically speaking, it would be like the lumberjack earning the means of his/hers existence by falling trees, while sitting in the branches and admiring the view. A hell of a “way” to make a living.
*
Structurally speaking the difference in the tree metaphor and the 4-floor metaphor is that, with the tree metaphor, although the tree would be dead, the foundation would still be there. Whereas, in the 4-floor metaphor, the foundation would be destroyed, if the end had its way. I am not sure the top-floors could withstand such a calamity, of losing so many people with the same end, and survive. Likewise, where would the foundation go and why would they come back, if the top end was gone? Obviously they didn’t need the top floors to begin with.
*
Those Marines sure know their vertical and horizontal fighting.
January 22nd, 2016 at 8:07 pm
Carl-
.
To defeat Daesh, we need not take Raqqa. I have written about this elsewhere. Instead, hold a nice apocalyptic battle near Dabiq. That would destroy Daesh on the moral, mental, and physical levels.
.
I will grant that occasionally occupying cities is important. But that does not mean we must always seize them any more than we were required to seize every Japanese-infested fortified island in the Pacific in WW2.
.
I’m actually willing to do some urban combat–I don’t have a problem in principle with it–but only if it’s required. I will submit that most urban fights haven’t done much to advance us toward victory any more than attacking to seize Rabaul would have.
.
Nate
January 23rd, 2016 at 1:03 am
“To defeat Daesh, we need not take Raqqa.”
*
Although the point is moot, I am not sure that I completely agree with that statement. It is who we would have left behind that is the point.
*
For instance, I think McChrystal’s strategy would have worked in Afghanistan, but many questions would have been left behind in his departure, if it had worked. The least of which would have been ROE.
January 23rd, 2016 at 2:22 am
Let me think of this from a different direction:
It’s a lot easier to train in unpopulated areas than where there are people. Building a city to train in is… building a city.
This is why the marines haven’t trained in a city?
January 24th, 2016 at 6:12 am
Caution has to be taken when forming broad preferences about warfare dos and don’ts.
The Bing Fa attributed to Swen Wu does caution against laying siege to walled cities. However, this statement was rooted in the state of siege warfare in the late Spring and Autumn/early Warring States period. The Bing Fa attributed to Swen Bin, purportedly a something great-grandson of Swen Wu, written in the mid-to-late Warring States period, is packed with counsel about besieging walled cities. Siege warfare was far more advanced in the time Swen Bin is supposed to have lived and sieges more frequent.
Given that war has tended to favor defense over offense and then for a prolonged period, the siege (derived from the Latin word for “sitting”) is probably a more common wartime experience than battle. Heuristics for how cities should be dealt with are among the earliest writings on war.
The United States should prepare to fight and occupy large population areas. As with the U.S. military’s constant attempts to disavow any interest in fighting guerrilla war, the quickest way to signal your enemies where it’s best to fight you is elevate where you won’t fight to a matter of principle.
The U.S. military has a long history of training for the war it wants to fight only to find itself in the war it doesn’t want to fight. While he that prepares for everything prepares for nothing, systemic attempts to go la, la, la and pretend many types of warfare can be ignored or will be magically whisked away by technology and other pixies has historically been the biggest killer of American soldiers. Americans KIA by neglected urban warfare training dates to Monterrey 1846. Fortunately, some Texians knew how to work Mexican defenses.
Given that, in the last century of conflict, the US has been better at holding cities than the countryside, fear of urban warfare is probably overblown. There’s a reason one of the key principles of pacification is concentrating the population in restricted areas: a population concentrated is a population controlled. Cities are voluntary concentration centers. They are man-made and subject to the logic of human activity. Once the exits are seized, they’re reasonably straightforward to hold. We should probably prefer urban combat to the whack-a-mole pleasures of fighting irregulars in the countryside (Afghanistan, cough, cough).
Iraq’s 60% urbanization rate plus the fact it’s a flat friggin’ floodplain are just two of the many pieces of evidence that demonstrate that the #1 reason that easy war was hard was U.S. military incompetence, though much of that incompetence is a continuation of U.S. political incompetence with the addition of uniformed means. Don’t be surprised the next time U.S. military creates a fiasco: at this point they’re the self-fulfilling prophecy that can’t shoot straight.
January 24th, 2016 at 2:55 pm
Nate: Agree fully that city fighting is to avoided if possible. I just don’t think it will be a matter of choice and will be far more often required than we would like.
.
The thing with a nice set piece battle of annihilation against DAESH at Dabiq is they have to accept it. Those guys are all kinds of smart and I don’t think they would fight there unless they were sure of victory. They know the Koran and the Hadiths and all the rest as well as anybody and could easily justify fighting or not fighting as they chose. Raqqa I believe they would have to try and hold.
.
Zen: I think we actually did that in Iraq. We took Baghdad with a relative minimum of fuss in 2003. We immediately dropped the ball but we did an efficient job of seizing the place. Perhaps how we did that should be studied a bit.
Zen:
January 25th, 2016 at 2:31 am
“Given that, in the last century of conflict, the US has been better at holding cities than the countryside, fear of urban warfare is probably overblown.”
*
But isn’t the reason we are better at holding cities than the countryside is that we turn the cities into little Americas, which quickly dissolved when the Americans leave? Countrysides are not so easy, because you actually have to work the land inside those countrysides, and, in these times, a consumer economy doesn’t work that well when there is actual work to be done? So we are comparing apples with oranges? The fact that we control cities has nothing to do with our inability to control countrysides?
January 25th, 2016 at 2:43 am
“Don’t be surprised the next time U.S. military creates a fiasco: at this point they’re the self-fulfilling prophecy that can’t shoot straight.”
*
I don’t think the U.S. military created the fiasco, which was rooted in the fact that we didn’t give the enemy anything to negotiate with.
*
In contrast, the English gave the North American colonies much to negotiate with and it seem to work out much better.
*
I am just thinking that it was the strategy used by the Commander in Chief and his administration that didn’t give them anything to negotiate with and not the maneuvering of the military, which only the military had control of.