– Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chief of Staff of the Army
This week marks one year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine kicked off a war that has offered up a wide range of lessons on the conduct of large-scale combat operations in the twenty-first century. In those twelve months, the war has touched all corners of Ukraine and...
On March 31, 2004, four American contractors from the private military company Blackwater bypassed a Marine checkpoint in two trucks and drove into the city of Fallujah. They likely had no idea that they were heading into a hornet’s nest. The two vehicles were met...
The Russo-Ukrainian War has been a prime case study for Western military tacticians and planners. Russian failures in the face of Ukrainian resistance have provided leaders and analysts with an insight into modern conventional combat that shorter wars, like the...
Off the eastern coast of central Greece sit high cliffs that once served as a narrow access point from the sea to its cities. Popular legend has it that in 480 BCE a small band of Spartan warriors, led by King Leonidas, defended the mountain pass against a much larger...
In late February 2022, a company-sized Russian airborne column of armored personnel carriers and armored reconnaissance vehicles made its way south on Vokzalnaya street through the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. The forces were part of the Russian airborne brigade that had...
As Russian forces continue to surround Kyiv and conduct urban operations throughout Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have turned to drones to supplement their combat power. Whether being used in a reconnaissance role or to deliver lethal munitions, drones such as the TB2...
“For some unknown reason,” reported the New York Times on Christmas Day 1943, “the Germans are trying to stage a miniature Stalingrad in hapless Ortona.” The fighting in this seaside town on Italy’s Adriatic coast was so fierce, so intense, and so challenging that the...
Any future war against a peer or near-peer enemy will contain some measure of urban combat. A broad base of historical, demographic, sociopolitical, and military analysis makes that fact abundantly clear. As a result, militaries must be required to conduct both urban...
On the morning of October 24, 1973, Major General Avraham Adan issued orders to his subordinate brigade commanders to attack the Egyptian city of Suez. The Yom Kippur War was eighteen days old, and the Israel Defense Forces sought to capture the city before a...
Ask the average division staff officer how many brigade combat teams it takes to seize a city of one hundred thousand people crammed into twenty-five square kilometers and you will likely get a blank stare or a wild guess. This reaction comes despite the realities of...
in January 1968, North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive, a series of coordinated attacks aimed at demonstrating to the governments in Washington and Saigon that continuing the war was futile. One of the offensives chief targets was the...
Earlier this summer, we published the first case study in a new series focused on important and instructive urban battles. It examined the World War II Battle of Stalingrad and identified a range of lessons that can be extracted from it. Our second case study, just...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Ze’ev Orenstein. He is the director of international affairs at the City of David Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the history and physical environs of...
Observers watched the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War closely, searching for indicators of the character of warfare on tomorrow's battlefields. The lessons extracted have covered advanced technology and unmanned platforms, proxy dynamics, the ongoing relevance of armor, and...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Colonel Kevin Felix. He served thirty years in the US Army as both a field artillery and foreign area officer. His last assignment in the Army was as the chief of the Future...
Earlier this month, the Modern War Institute published an opinion piece, “The Tyranny of Battle Drill 6,” by retired Colonel Richard Hooker. In the article, Hooker argues that due to a culture of specialized urban tactics, conventional infantry soldiers should...
There has been no shortage of attention paid to the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. Commentary and analysis have produced a range of claims about what the six-week-long war means for the future of combat. What has been almost completely left out of these discussions is how...
How is breaching—a tactical task engineers specialize in—uniquely challenged by the complexity of cities? And why is it important that US Army units have this specialized capability within their formations? This episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast tackles...
Earlier this year, a video of 10th Mountain Division soldiers conducting live-fire room-clearing training—the famous “Battle Drill 6”—went viral. In the video, the soldiers repeatedly “flagged” each other, pointing loaded weapons at fellow soldiers during the drill....
Mentioning the phrase “urban warfare” to anyone who thinks seriously about the subject of war will almost certainly bring a specific image to the listener’s mind. Whether a military member, a national security professional, a scholar, or a generalist with only a...
There are more than 180,000 US soldiers serving in more than 140 countries around the world. During the height of the war in Iraq, there were more than 170,000 deployed in just that country alone. Much of the work soldiers did in Iraq—and do in combat zones around the...
Training to win in the urban space is one of the greatest challenges for any military. Dismounted small units are the key force within the urban battlefield and how goes their large number of small actions goes the fight. For individual training the basics of close...
Editor’s note: This podcast episode was created in partnership with the One CA podcast and the Civil Affairs Association. In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by returning guest retired Colonel Leonard DeFrancisci....
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Daphne Richemond-Barak. She is an assistant professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy and heads the international law desk of the International Institute...
In this episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Major Jayson Geroux. He is a member of the directing staff of the Tactics School at the Canadian Army's Combat Training Centre. Maj. Geroux is an urban warfare instructor and scholar who...
Editor’s note: This podcast episode was created in partnership with the One CA podcast and the Civil Affairs Association. In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Colonel Leonard DeFrancisci. He served thirty-two years...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Major General Ross Coffman. He is the director of Army Futures Command's Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team—one of eight cross-functional teams working toward the...
In three previous episodes of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, host John Spencer spoke with the commanders of the operations groups of the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana,...
In this episode of MWI's Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Col. Rich Creed, the director of the Army’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies, he has commanded Army...
In a recent article, author Paul Barnes argued against assertions made by Professor Anthony King of the University of Warwick a few months ago in an episode of the Royal United Services Institute’s Western Way of War podcast. During the conversation, Dr. King stated...
In this episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Charles Knight. He is a senior lecturer in terrorism, asymmetric conflict, and urban operations at Charles Sturt University and a senior researcher at the University of New South...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Rob Taylor. He is the company director of 4GD, a UK-based organization that specializes in developing unique close-combat training facilities—what the company calls "SmartFacilities"—and...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, Dr. Louis DiMarco, a professor of military history at the US Army Command and General Staff College, presents a short lecture on the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, Iraq—one of the most significant urban battles of the...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Daphne Richemond-Barak. She is an assistant professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy and heads the international law desk of the International Institute...
From October 16, 2016 to January 4, 2017, US-backed Iraqi security forces conducted a full-scale city attack to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State. The operation was the largest conventional land battle since the attack on Baghdad during the US-led invasion in 2003...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Lt. Gen. James Rainey. He currently serves as the commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 2004, he was the battalion commander of 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry...
Two years ago, the Modern War Institute's John Spencer wrote an article titled "A Soldier's Urban Warfare Christmas Wish List." As the chair of urban warfare studies at MWI, he had spent a lot of time thinking about tasks soldiers would be required to perform in urban...
In 2018, I created a soldier's urban warfare Christmas list. I limited myself to items that could (mostly) fit under a tree. I have learned since then—or maybe I have just become greedy. Either way, this year I want twelve days of Christmas, with a gift each day that...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Alex Giles. He is the chief commercial officer for ICENI Labs, a UK-based science and technology research firm with the mission to develop and deploy cutting-edge solutions for a safer...
This episode takes a slight departure from the format typical of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. John Spencer is the podcast's regular host, but in this episode MWI editorial director John Amble, takes that role and Spencer joins as the guest. With more than twenty...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Master Sgt. Michael Kidd. He is an experienced leader in Army EOD—explosive ordnance disposal—with over sixteen years of service. The job that EOD personnel do is vital, and Master Sgt....
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Deane Baker, an associate professor and co-convener of the Future Operations Research Group in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences in the University of New South Wales,...
In two previous episodes of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, host John Spencer spoke with the commanders of the Operations Group of the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California and the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana....
This is a special episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. The Association of the United States Army hosts a podcasts called Army Matters, which often brings together a select group of thought leaders to discuss a topic of pressing interest to the Army. One...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Samuel Bendett. He is an analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses where he is a member of the Russia Studies Program. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New...
It was all about speed. Russian Army planners assessed that their combined-arms battalion tactical groups could cover the two hundred kilometers from the Belarus border to Warsaw quickly, in a few days, taking the direct approach along European Route 30. The Russians...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Sokwoo Rhee. He is the Associate Director of Cyber-Physical Systems Innovation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the US Department of Commerce. He is...
There are more than 180,000 US soldiers serving in more than 140 countries around the world. During the height of the war in Iraq, there were more than 170,000 deployed in just that country alone. Much of the work soldiers did in Iraq—and do in combat zones around the...
In previous episodes of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, host John Spencer has spoken to leaders from the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, about the urban operations training units...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Saskia Sassen. She is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired until 2015. She is the author...
By almost any metric, the United States has the world’s most powerful military. 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. The Army, as the military’s chief...
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...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Sgt. Maj. Joe Vega. He works for the US Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group and is one of the most knowledgeable and experienced experts in underground warfare. He has been working...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Command Sgt. Maj. 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...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by three guests. Col. Michael Simmering is the commander of the Operations Group at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California. Lt. Col. Andrew Steadman, the senior...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Spencer is joined by Maj. Gen. Roger Noble. An officer in the Australian Army, in 2016 he served as the deputy commanding general of the Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command – Operation Inherent...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Col. Douglas Winton, chair of the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. In their conversation, Col. Winton discusses the topic of his PhD...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Dr. Richard Norton. He is a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College and a retired US Navy commander. 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. 1st Class William Rothrock, shares three stories from his deployments to Afghanistan, and all of them...
In this episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Col. Patrick Mahaney. He is the cofounder and director of the National Center for Urban Operations. A career Special Forces officer, he retired from the US Army after thirty-two...
In the fourth episode of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by retired Lt. Col. Rob MacMillan. In 2008, Lt. Col. MacMillan was serving as the battalion operations officer of 1-68 Armor in 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. The...
“Contrary to what is often supposed, urban warfare is not more difficult than other types of warfare.” That’s what a recent article published in the Texas National Security Review argues. The authors believe, in fact, that urban environments are “neutral,” not to be...
In the third episode of MWI’s new Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Sahr Muhammedally. 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. But they weren’t like the Iraqi soldiers at other checkpoints. They didn’t really wear uniforms, their bearing was distinctly un-military, and they looked mean. These guys are shady, I...
In the second episode of MWI's new Urban Warfare Project podcast, John Spencer is joined by Col. Rich Creed, the director of the Army’s Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 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 2017—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. Last year John Spencer offered a wish list of tools the US Army does not...
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...
Over 100 years ago, during the summer of 1919, dozens of members of that year’s West Point graduating class were sent to Europe to tour World War I battlefields. They walked on ground left deeply scarred by the conflict that had ended just months before, and met...
The US Army’s Mosul Study Group released a report—What the Battle of Mosul Teaches the Force—in September 2017, a mere month and a half after the Islamic State was ejected from the city. The report purported to provide lessons derived from the battle. However, the...
Cities matter. They matter for fighting climate change, for fighting pandemics, and, as the Urban Warfare Project continues to demonstrate, they matter for the future of fighting itself. The heightened importance of urban spaces results from demographic developments,...
Last month former Staff Sgt. David G. Bellavia became the Iraq War’s first living Medal of Honor recipient. The details of the extraordinarily brave event read like every soldier’s nightmare. A “house of hell” filled with enemy insurgents prepared to die in almost...
In 2007, UK and coalition forces in the southeastern Iraqi city of Basra faced a series of tactical challenges. Those challenges—like the ones US forces would confront that year and the next further north in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood—offer insight into some...
If we are entering an era where military forces will increasingly be called upon to operate in cities (and we are), it follows logically that the Army should begin preparing for urban terrain. But a quick scan of the global contemporary operating environment reveals...
Future combat will take place in dense urban areas and likely in megacities, or so we are told. These are the new “truths” that are taking hold in the US military. According to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, who is likely the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs...
Combat in urban areas is the most destructive type of warfare imaginable. Densely populated terrain, complex systems of systems that support human life, military weapons not optimized to these conditions, and asymmetric close-quarters battle tactics all make warfare...
“Sir, what do you want us to do about the tunnel?” one of my squad leaders asked. We were conducting platoon attacks at the massive Range 220 complex at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California as part of a training exercise in 2017. Nowhere...
The age of urban warfare is already here. It cannot be avoided any longer. And the urban environment includes not just what is on the surface, but also super-surface and subsurface levels. Most major urban areas include an entire world of underground transportation,...
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2017. There are no urban warfare units in the US Army—not a single unit designed, organized, or equipped specifically for the challenges of operating in cities. There are no research centers dedicated...
This episode of the MWI Podcast is a very special one. In it, you'll get to hear the very first episode of the newest podcast series we're launching at MWI. Over the past couple years, we have deliberately spent a lot of time and energy on the particular set of...
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” That’s how a US Army major during the Vietnam war described the decision to use massive amounts of firepower, to include aerial bombs and artillery, while attacking approximately 2,500 Viet Cong who were besieging...
Many of the challenges of urban warfare are not new; nor, unfortunately, are the options soldiers have to confront these challenges. The US Army has a long history of fighting in cities and its tactics, techniques, and procedures have been refined mostly from the hard...
The Wall Street Journal's "The Future of Everything" podcast aims to examine how science and technology are revolutionizing the world as we know it. In this episode, host Jennifer Strong looks at how rapid technological change overlays on global urbanization patterns...
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on October 17, 2017. It will take months, possibly years, to fully understand how the senseless attack in Las Vegas will change American society. Hotels are considering metal detectors, X-ray screening of...
Ask any group of infantry soldiers what they train to prepare for urban operations and the answer will usually be: Battle Drill 6, “Enter and Clear a Room.” Battle Drill 6 is one of the fourteen drills, defined by doctrine, that infantry platoons and squads are...
Large, dense urban areas are both the engines of our economic prosperity and the locus of future national security challenges. As the world continues to grow more and more urban, challenges to the political stability and security in many cities around the world...
The world is urbanizing, and doing so quickly. By 2030, 60 percent of the global population will live in cities. At the same time, the US military remains committed to maintaining the capability to conduct an immensely wide range of operations—from humanitarian...
The world is urbanizing, and doing so quickly. By 2030, 60 percent of the global population will live in cities. At the same time, the US military remains committed to maintaining the capability to conduct an immensely wide range of operations—from humanitarian...
In 2001, when U.S.-backed Afghan fighters forced the Taliban out of Kabul, the capture of the city was largely a symbolic victory. In many ways, the more meaningful fight would rage in Afghanistan’s rural areas, scattered with villages from the ruggedly mountainous...
Editor's note: Each week, we ask a practitioner, scholar, or observer of war to list the top books that have influenced the way they think about war and strategy. We all watch global trends with the hope of predicting the future. The military rightfully makes...
Diplomats, donors, and investors gathered last week in Kuwait for a conference dedicated to rebuilding Iraq. As the country emerges from the destructive war against ISIS, Iraqi authorities will need over $88 billion for reconstruction efforts. Some of the worst damage...
Fifty years ago this week, during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a US Army major famously remarked to a journalist, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Pilloried for its callousness, one fellow officer who claimed to have been present even said it...
For the first time since the Korean War, the U.S. military has to worry about enemy bombs dropping on them in combat. This threat doesn’t come from multibillion-dollar next-generation aircraft dropping precision-guided bombs on open battlefields. Instead, it comes...
Mosul has been wrested from the three-year-old grasp of ISIS. In Raqqa, the cityscape is one of ruin and devastation as efforts to dislodge the group continue apace there, as well. However, a fundamental question remains. Each city has thus far survived the...
Mosul is destroyed. Many of the estimated 875,000 residents displaced by the fighting can’t return home because their houses are among the piles of rubble left behind. Mosul joins cities like Stalingrad, Hue, Grozny, and more recently, Aleppo and Raqqa—all destroyed...
In this episode of the Modern War Institute podcast, MWI editorial director John Amble speaks to Dr. Russell Glenn, a senior adviser for plans and policy to the deputy chief of staff, G-2, of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Dr. Glenn has spent nearly...
The battle for Mosul represents the future of warfare—and it wasn’t pretty for America’s allies. A ragtag army of a few thousand Islamic State fighters managed to hold the city for months against some 100,000 U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces. The ISIS fighters...
As Iraqi forces liberate Mosul, now is a good time to reflect on what lessons this recent round of urban combat means for the United States. After defeating ISIS’s mobile defenses of car bombs and suicide vests in Mosul’s suburbs, Iraqi forces attacked into prepared...
The Army does not have a school for learning how to operate in dense urban terrain. Beyond simply training soldiers for such a complex setting, one of the reasons the Army should establish such a school is to create a laboratory for innovation. Units in an urban...
We've published a number of articles on the unique characteristics of military operations in dense urban terrain. We also recently launched the Urban Warfare Project, which will continue to develop as a dynamic home for even more content we have in store. In...
The world is urbanizing, and doing so quickly. By 2030, 60 percent of the global population will live in cities. At the same time, the US military remains committed to maintaining the capability to conduct an immensely wide range of operations—from humanitarian...
As the global population evolves toward a denser, more urban-centric environment, the battlefield landscape will likely follow suit. Where the US armed forces of the twenty-first century once militarily dominated the rural landscapes of Afghanistan and the deserts of...
“The Army will never need to fight in a megacity.” Over the past few months, MWI has published several articles exploring combat in megacities and examining the Army’s preparation for such an operating environment. The response these articles have produced has brought...
Train as you fight. It’s the first of the Army’s ten principles of training, meant to ensure that the Army will develop and execute tough, realistic training. As long as we train as we fight, no soldier should confront a situation or an environment for the first time...
In 2013, David Kilcullen, an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus during the Iraq War, was asked how the US military reduced violence in Baghdad by 95 percent. “We did it by killing the city,” he responded. “We shut the city down. We brought in more than 100 kilometers of...
A few weeks ago, I published the article “It’s Time to Create a Megacities Combat Unit.” This article received both criticism and support. Some of the supportive messages suggested that I take the next step and offer an organizational solution. If trends in both...
MWI’s Maj. John Spencer was interviewed for this episode of the BBC program The Inquiry, which examines the ongoing battle for Mosul and the challenges of urban warfare.
The conclusion of a two-part story about the first operational deployment of a purpose-built Army unit designed specifically to fight in megacities.
In 2029, a purpose-built Army unit designed to fight in megacities gets its first test.
Global population growth and migration trends make it increasingly likely that the US Army will find itself fighting in megacities in the future. In order to be prepared for the challenges this will pose, the Army should create a unit manned, equipped, and trained entirely for this purpose.
Ground forces face a unique problem in complex, urban terrain: a lack of concealment. But the technology already exists for a unique, low-cost, and rapidly deployable solution that could immediately enhance the combat effectiveness of US forces in an urban battlespace.
Maj. John Spencer argues that the miles of concrete walls that lined streets and surrounded bases in Baghdad demonstrate that the most effective weapon in an urban counterinsurgency is concrete.