Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King

responsible for taking the city. It consisted of seventy divisions organized into four corps.³³ Even at the climax of the battle in November 1942, during the assault on the Barrikady Gun and Red October factories, only LI Army Corps’ eight divisions (389 Infantry, 305 Infantry, 14 Panzer, 79 Infantry, 100 Jäger, 295 Infantry, 24 Panzer and 71 Infantry) were directly committed to urban combat at any one time, while the other divisions were deployed well outside the city defending German lines to the north.³⁴ The Red Army’s deployment was similar. Only the Sixty-Second Army under General Vasili Chuikov fought in the city itself. In the course of the battle, Chuikov commanded thirteen divisions and some additional brigades; it was a very large force but constituted only about 15 per cent of the Red Army’s total forces in the theatre.³⁵ Eight Soviet Armies, consisting of more than sixty divisions, eventually executed Operation Uranus in November 1942, encircling the Sixth Army. While the most intense fighting certainly took place in Stalingrad itself, where combat forces were most highly concentrated, the majority of German and Soviet troops were never deployed into the city. On the contrary, the battle in Stalingrad was part of a larger campaign fought along a front in the field (see Map 2.1).

      It might be thought that Stalingrad was unique. Yet, this would be wrong. Allied campaigns in this period assumed a similar geometry. For instance, during the Normandy Campaign of 1944, Caen constituted the crucial hub of the whole theatre. The city was eventually destroyed by air bombardment. Yet, there was hardly any ground fighting in the city itself. The Allied Front enveloped Caen, which General Bernard Montgomery, the commander of the 21st Army, sought to take by a series of assaults – Operations Perch, Epsom, Charnwood and Goodwood – around its flanks in June and July.³⁶ It is no accident that Normandy was remembered primarily for the difficulty of fighting in the bocage, not for urban combat. The topography evident during the Stalingrad campaign pertained for most of the twentieth century. NATO and the Warsaw Pact prepared themselves for a lineal field campaign along the Inner German border to the very end of the Cold War.³⁷

It is noticeable that military doctrine throughout the twentieth century typically recommended that armies avoid fighting in cities.³⁸ This has often been interpreted today as evidence of the unique difficulty of such battles, both then and now. This is not a complete misreading of military doctrine; urban fighting was demanding, and was recognized as such. However, in fact, twentieth-century military doctrine recommended avoiding cities not primarily because they were so much more impenetrable than field defences – the Western Front in the First World War showed how formidable field fortifications could be. Rather, urban fighting was to be avoided because, with mass armies deployed, the main element of the enemy’s force was almost certainly to be found in the field – not in the town. It was, therefore, a mistake to commit forces to attacking a town, when the centre of gravity was elsewhere. This is why commanders were warned against it: ‘Tactical doctrine stresses that urban combat operations are conducted only when required and that built-up areas are isolated and bypassed rather than risking a costly, time-consuming operation in this difficult environment.’³⁹ Commanders often followed the advice. At Aachen in 1945, for instance, the US Army’s VII Corps assigned only two battalions to clear the city, while concentrating its forces further to the east of the city against the main element of the German Army on the Siegfried Line.⁴⁰ In the Philippines, the Japanese Army did not think that Manila should be defended at all and sought to defeat the American forces in the mountains outside it.⁴¹ At Stalingrad, German generals catastrophically forgot the injunction.

Map 2.1: The Stalingrad campaign, 1942

      Source: Based on map from iMeowbot / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

      The twentieth century seems to confirm Duffy’s thesis. From 1914 to 1991, a correlation between force numbers and urban warfare is observable. Urban warfare was the subordinate form of battle. The mass armies of this era were so large that they formed fronts that encompassed cities and urban areas. Sometimes, armies conducted urban battles, but, precisely because of their immense size, most major confrontations took place in the field where combatants could deploy their full combat power against each other.

Converging on Cities: Twenty-First-Century Warfare

      The military situation is now quite different. Yet, the significance of reduced forces has barely been mentioned in the current literature on urban warfare. If Delbrück and Duffy are correct, though, then it is almost certain that the radical reduction in force sizes evident in the last few decades will have been significant. Clearly, in order to demonstrate the correlation between reduced combat densities and urban warfare, empirical exemplification is necessary. This is not easy. While civil wars have proliferated, there have been few interstate wars in this century, and even fewer between advanced powers. So, the evidence is sparser. Indeed, only two recent interstate wars have involved at least one global power whose forces have been equipped with advanced weaponry: the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the ongoing war in the Donbas.

Neither example is perfect. The Americans fought a very weak Iraqi Army in 2003; it was a mismatch that lasted only three weeks. American forces enjoyed a freedom of manoeuvre that they would certainly not be accorded against a more equal rival. So great care needs to be taken in extrapolating from it. However, Operation Iraqi Freedom also has some methodological advantages. In particular, the invasion becomes particularly pertinent as a data point when it is compared to the 1991 Gulf War. The Donbas, of course, is not officially an interstate war at all; it is a civil war between the Ukrainian government and separatist militias. However, the involvement of Russia has been so pronounced that this conflict is better understood as a hybrid war between two states. So, while significant caution needs to be exercised when extrapolating from these wars, they offer at least some evidence for testing Duffy’s thesis.

      Following Donald Rumsfeld’s imperatives about the ‘Afghan model’, the US-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003 was small.⁴² The total coalition force consisted of about 500,000 personnel, with 466,000 Americans, but the invasion force was much smaller – just 143,000 troops.⁴³ The Land Component consisted of five divisions (four American and one British). The US forces advanced on Baghdad on two parallel axes: the 3rd Infantry Division in the west, the 1st Marine Division in the east. The other three divisions (101st Airborne, 82nd Airborne and 1 UK Divisions) played supporting roles, clearing and holding the lines of communication in the south.

      The Iraqi Army was similarly diminished. In 2003, it consisted of 350,000 troops: twenty to twenty-three Regular divisions, six Republican Guards divisions and one Special Republican Guard division.⁴⁴ Yet, most of these formations played no part in the invasion. The coalition eventually engaged a force of only four divisions, consisting of 12,000 Special Iraqi Republican Guards, 70,000 Republican Guards, supported by 15–25,000 Fedayeen fighters and a Special Security Service: around 112,000 in total.⁴⁵ The Iraqi Army deployed in a highly unusual if not idiosyncratic manner.⁴⁶ Much of Saddam’s force was positioned in the north or east against the Kurds and Iran. Saddam deployed his best Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard divisions to the south of Baghdad, with a view to defending the city in a series of blocking positions outside it. In the end, these divisions fought very poorly. They suffered disastrous desertions before they were even engaged and were easily targeted by US air forces once the war started.⁴⁷ They participated in only one noteworthy encounter: the fight at al-Kaed Bridge (Objective Peach) on 2–3 April 2003, the ‘single largest battle against regular Iraqi forces’.⁴⁸ In this engagement, a single US battalion – the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment – defeated elements of the 10th Armoured Brigade of the Medina Division, the 22nd Brigade of the Nebuchadnezzar Division as well as Iraqi special forces in just three hours – without suffering a single casualty.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, Saddam deployed only the Ba’ath Party and Fedayeen into his cities, primarily to shore up his own regime, though, in the end, they did much of the fighting.

The Americans were worried that Saddam would turn his cities into fortresses.⁵⁰ Certainly,