Newsweek
February 21, 2000
The New Urban Battlefield
U.S. troops don't do cities. But someday they'll have to.
By John Barry, Newsweek
The battle of Grozny was long and bloody-for Russian attackers
as
well as the Chechen defenders. But you won't see any
condescending
head-wagging in the U.S. military. As one senior Pentagon
official
said last week, "I'm not so sure that we'd do a whole lot better
than
the Russians." That's a problem; in the view of many military
analysts, the killing grounds of Grozny offer a hellish view of
tomorrow's warfare.
The U.S. Army used to have a simple way of dealing with cities:
avoid
them. The cost in street-fighting casualties was just too steep.
That
was one reason that, in 1945, the Army didn't try to take
Berlin, a
battle that Gen. Omar Bradley told Dwight Eisenhower "might cost
us
100,000 men." Bradley was right. The Red Army, which did fight
its
way into Berlin, lost 102,000 men doing so; 125,000 German
civilians
died in the battle, and 150,000 to 200,000 German troops. If
cities
couldn't be avoided, U.S. military doctrine had a fallback plan:
flatten them, which is what, in 1968, 8,000 shells from offshore
warships did to the Vietnamese city of Hue.
Neither option now exists. In a 1996 essay in Parameters, the
journal
of the Army War College, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters argued, "The
future of
warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and
sprawl
of houses that form the broken cities of the world." The article
hit
a raw nerve. Three years earlier, in a battle in the back alleys
of
Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Rangers were killed and 73 wounded-a
60
percent casualty rate. All the high-tech equipment that the
Rangers
were meant to have at their disposal-satellite images,
laser-guided
munitions and the like-were largely useless in the teeming
streets.
After Vietnam, the military spent billions of dollars developing
the
kill-at-a-distance weapons that looked so good in the desert
fighting
of the gulf war. Trouble is, such weaponry does no good when an
enemy
soldier is just a few feet away. A 1994 Pentagon study after
Mogadishu baldly concluded, "Our current capability
was developed for a massive, rural war... Since the future looks
much
different, new capabilities will have to be developed."
What might those new capabilities be? In the last couple of
weeks a
company of U.S. Marines has been trying to find out. The Marines
have
been "fighting" their way through the houses and office blocks
of
Fort Ord, Calif., an Army base abandoned in 1994. If the results
mimic those at a similar exercise last spring, they won't be
encouraging. In "attacks" on a naval hospital in Oakland,
Calif., the
Marines took casualty rates as high as 70 percent.
For the new urban warfare, the military needs new equipment. On
its
long wish list: handheld sensors to detect an enemy in the next
room,
and the sort of trolley that mechanics use to go under cars.
Why? To
rescue wounded buddies. In Grozny, Chechen snipers deliberately
aimed
at the legs of Russian soldiers, waited patiently for a rescue
squad-then shot them, too. Some gear on the wish list is high
tech-like robots-but none has the big price tags that attract
lobbyists and congressmen. Still, unless the money is found, the
price will likely be paid in American blood.
--------------------
Newsweek
February 21, 2000
<bold><bigger>The New Urban Battlefield
</bigger></bold>U.S. troops don't do cities. But someday they'll
have
to.
By John Barry, Newsweek
The battle of Grozny was long and bloody-for Russian attackers
as well
as the Chechen defenders. But you won't see any condescending
head-wagging in the U.S. military. As one senior Pentagon
official said
last week, "I'm not so sure that we'd do a whole lot better than
the
Russians." That's a problem; in the view of many military
analysts, the
killing grounds of Grozny offer a hellish view of tomorrow's
warfare.
The U.S. Army used to have a simple way of dealing with cities:
avoid
them. The cost in street-fighting casualties was just too steep.
That
was one reason that, in 1945, the Army didn't try to take
Berlin, a
battle that Gen. Omar Bradley told Dwight Eisenhower "might cost
us
100,000 men." Bradley was right. The Red Army, which did fight
its way
into Berlin, lost 102,000 men doing so; 125,000 German civilians
died
in the battle, and 150,000 to 200,000 German troops. If cities
couldn't
be avoided, U.S. military doctrine had a fallback plan: flatten
them,
which is what, in 1968, 8,000 shells from offshore warships did
to the
Vietnamese city of Hue.
Neither option now exists. In a 1996 essay in Parameters, the
journal
of the Army War College, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters argued, "The
future of
warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and
sprawl of
houses that form the broken cities of the world." The article
hit a raw
nerve. Three years earlier, in a battle in the back alleys of
Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Rangers were killed and 73 wounded-a
60
percent casualty rate. All the high-tech equipment that the
Rangers
were meant to have at their disposal-satellite images,
laser-guided
munitions and the like-were largely useless in the teeming
streets.
After Vietnam, the military spent billions of dollars developing
the
kill-at-a-distance weapons that looked so good in the desert
fighting
of the gulf war. Trouble is, such weaponry does no good when an
enemy
soldier is just a few feet away. A 1994 Pentagon study after
Mogadishu
baldly concluded, "Our current capability
was developed for a massive, rural war... Since the future looks
much
different, new capabilities will have to be developed."
What might those new capabilities be? In the last couple of
weeks a
company of U.S. Marines has been trying to find out. The Marines
have
been "fighting" their way through the houses and office blocks
of Fort
Ord, Calif., an Army base abandoned in 1994. If the results
mimic those
at a similar exercise last spring, they won't be encouraging. In
"attacks" on a naval hospital in Oakland, Calif., the Marines
took
casualty rates as high as 70 percent.
For the new urban warfare, the military needs new equipment. On
its
long wish list: handheld sensors to detect an enemy in the next
room,
and the sort of trolley that mechanics use to go under cars.
Why? To
rescue wounded buddies. In Grozny, Chechen snipers deliberately
aimed
at the legs of Russian soldiers, waited patiently for a rescue
squad-then shot them, too. Some gear on the wish list is high
tech-like
robots-but none has the big price tags that attract lobbyists
and
congressmen. Still, unless the money is found, the price will
likely be
paid in American blood.
</XMP>
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