Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King

estimated 10,000 Russian troops augmented a local force of some 45,000.⁶¹ The summer and winter campaign of 2015–16 subsequently involved about 36,000 Russian, Donetsk People’s Army and Luhansk People’s Army troops.⁶² The Ukrainian regime deployed a similarly sized force of about 64,000 troops. There were probably just over 100,000 combatants operating in a theatre of 15,000 square miles. After the initial battles, the fighting descended into low-grade cross-border skirmishes along a lightly held, 300-mile, militarized frontier, the ‘grey zone’.⁶³ However, the major battles between the Ukrainian Army and the separatist forces in 2014 and 2016 all concentrated around Luhansk and, especially, Donetsk. Indeed, some of the heaviest fighting occurred around Debal’tseve, Avdiivka, and Pisky. Some of the towns which have been the scene of battles have been quite large; Horlivka has a population of 257,000. However, most of the others are much smaller; Ilovaisk has 15,600 inhabitants, Debal’tseve 25,000, Avdiivka 35,000, and Pisky 2,000. Demographics does not seem to be the prime driver in the Donbas; it is not a heavily urbanized area. Rather, in each case, the Ukrainian and separatist forces have tried to seize – or hold – key industrial or transport nodes inside cities and towns. Reduced Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatist forces have converged on these urban locations because they were operationally important, and because neither was large enough to form a front around them.

In recent decades, scholars and military professionals have explained the rise of urban warfare by reference to demographics and asymmetry. On this account, because cities have grown so large and, therefore, offer the best protection for insurgents against advanced weaponry, it is inevitable that war has migrated and will move to urban areas. It has been assumed that interstate war will also converge on cities for the same reasons. It is understandable why scholars have been so attracted by these factors. Demography and asymmetry do seem to explain the rise of urban insurgencies. However, when it comes to interstate war, demography and asymmetry become less satisfactory as independent explanations. In understanding interstate warfare, numbers are also important. The invasion of Iraq and the war in the Donbas are suggestive here. In both scenarios, there were simply too few forces to form the massive fronts that typified twentieth-century land warfare. Combat density – the sheer number of military personnel deployed into a theatre – is likely to play an increasingly important role in the urbanization of warfare over the twenty-first century. Simply because state forces are so much smaller now than previously, it is likely that they will converge on decisive urban terrain. The war of fronts, defined by large engagements in the field, has been replaced by more dispersed operations, which converge on urban areas, where the decisive tactical and operational objectives have been located. As fronts disappear, towns and cities, having become the focus of military operations, are where the major battles now occur.

Notes

      1 1. Louis Wirth, On Cities and City Life: Selected Papers (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1964).

      2 2. Headquarters, Department of the Army, ATP 3-06: Urban Operations (December 2017), 1–3.

      3 3. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 87.

      4 4. Clausewitz, On War, 75.

      5 5. Antonio Sampaio, Illicit Order: The Military Logic of Organized Crime and Urban Security in Rio de Janiero (London: IISS, 2019), 8.

      6 6. Mike Davis, Planet of the Slums (London: Verso), 1–11.

      7 7. Russell Glenn, Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Arroyo Centre, 1996), 2.

      8 8. Ralph Peters, ‘Our soldiers, their cities’, Parameters 26(1) 1996, 43.

      9 9. E.g., Gregory Ashworth, War and the City (London: Routledge, 1991); Michael C. Desch, ‘Why MOUT now?’ in Michael C. Desch (ed.), Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain (Carlisle PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2001), 1–16; Sean Edwards Mars Unmasked: The Changing Face of Urban Operations (New York: Rand Arroyo Centre, 2000); Paul Hirst, Space and Power (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Louis DiMarco, Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq (Oxford: Osprey, 2012).

      10 10. Gian Gentile, David E. Johnson, Lisa Saum-Manning, Raphael S. Cohen, . . . James L. Doty, III, Reimagining the Character of Urban Operations for the US Army (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Arroyo Centre, 2017), 8–9.

      11 11. Michael Evans, ‘Lethal genes: the urban military imperative and Western strategy in the early twenty-first century’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32(4) 2009, 516.

      12 12. Michael Evans, City without Joy: Military Operations in the 21st Century (Canberra: Australian Defence College, Occasional Series no. 2, 2007), 14.

      13 13. David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming of Age of the Urban Guerrilla (London: Hurst and Company, 2013), 74–6.

      14 14. Frank Hoffman, ‘Complex irregular warfare: the next revolution in military affairs’, Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs 50(3) 2006, 395–411.

      15 15. See Chapter 3 for an explanation of the rise of urban insurgencies.

      16 16. Alec Wahlman, Storming the City (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015), 1–2.

      17 17. Alice Hills, Future Wars in Cities: Rethinking a Liberal Dilemma (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 16–26; Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains, 18–40.

      18 18. Saskia Sassen, ‘When the city itself becomes a technology of war’, Theory, Culture and Society 27(6) 2010, 37; Warfare Branch, Headquarters Field Army, Operations in the Urban Environment (Warminster: Land Warfare Centre, 2018), 13.

      19 19. Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History. Vol. 1: Warfare in Antiquity, trans. Walter Renfroe, Jr. (London: Greenwood Press, 1975), 33.

      20 20. Delbrück, History of the Art of War.

      21 21. Delbrück, History of the Art of War. See also Gordon Craig, ‘Hans Delbrück: military historian’, in Peter Paret (ed.), The Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 333, 336.

      22 22. Christopher Duffy, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660–1789, vol. II (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 292.

      23 23. Duffy’s argument is consistent with the debates about the early modern military revolution, a major element of which involved a discussion of the increasing size of European armies after 1500.

      24 24. Jeremy Black, Fortifications and Siegecraft (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 236.

      25 25. Clausewitz, On War, Book Six, chs 10 and 11, ‘Fortresses’ and ‘Fortresses – continued’, and Book Seven, ch. 17, ‘Attack on fortresses’.

      26 26. E.g., Karl Haltiner, ‘The definite end of the mass army in Western Europe?’ Armed Forces and Society 25(1) 1998, 7–36.

      27 27. Relative to the size of the Israel population, the IDF has, in fact, shrunk by about half in the same era.

      28 28. Matt Matthews, We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hezbollah–Israel War (Ft Leavenworth, KS: US Army Combined Arms Centre, Combat Studies Institute, 2008), 50; David Johnson, Hard Fighting: Israel in Lebanon and Gaza (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Arroyo Centre, 2011), 69.

      29 29. S. L. A. Marshall, ‘Notes on urban warfare’, Army Material Systems Analysis Agency, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, April 1973, 8–11.

      30 30. S. J. Lewis, ‘The battle of Stalingrad’, in William Robertson (ed.), Block by Block: The Challenges of Urban Operations (Ft Leavenworth, KS: US ACGS College Press, 2003), 30.

      31 31. David Glantz, with Jonathan House, The Stalingrad Trilogy, Volume 2: Armageddon in Stalingrad: September–November 1942 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009).

      32 32. Lewis, ‘The battle of Stalingrad’, 31.

      33 33. Glantz, The Stalingrad Trilogy, 33, 719–20; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad (London: Penguin 1999), 433–5.

      34 34. Glantz, The Stalingrad Trilogy, 609; Beevor, Stalingrad, 242–3; Lewis, ‘The