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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
War is urbanising. From Mosul to Mumbai, Aleppo to Marawi, the largest and most intense battles of the twenty-first century have taken place in densely populated urban areas. In the Ukraine War, Russian and Ukrainian troops have converged on urban areas, Kyiv, Mariupol, and Bakhmut, to fight brutal attritional sieges. Meanwhile the Battle of Gaza rages.
Through a close analysis of recent urban conflicts and their historical antecedents, sociologist Anthony King explores the changing typography of the urban battlescape. Whilst many tactics used in urban warfare are not new, he shows how operations in cities today have coalesced into localised micro-sieges, which extend from street level – and below – to the airspace high above the city, as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets and districts. At the same time, digitalized social media and information networks communicate these battles to global audiences across an urban archipelago, with these spectators often becoming active participants in the fight.
Fully revised and updated to include detailed examples from Ukraine and Gaza to illustrate the anatomy of twenty-first century urban warfare, the second edition of this popular text is a timely reminder of the costs and the horror of war and violence in cities. As such, it offers an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction to urban warfare in the new millennium for students of international security, urban studies and military science, as well as military professionals.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
1 Gomorrah
Kyiv
The Urban Revolution
Urban Origins
Understanding Contemporary Urban Warfare
Notes
2 Numbers
Defining Urban Warfare
Demography and Asymmetry
Inter-State War
Force Size
The Decline of Mass Armies
Fronts: Twentieth-Century Warfare
Converging on Cities: Twenty-First-Century Warfare
Notes
3 The Urban Guerrilla
Out of the Mountains
Out of the City
Insurgent Literature
The Battle of Belfast
Force Ratios
Back to the City
Notes
4 Metropolis
The Global City
The City as a System
Urban Sociology
Notes
5 Walls
Concrete
Early Modern Defences
Modern Defences
Twenty-First-Century Defences
Micro-Siege
Notes
6 Air
Volume
Airpower in the Twentieth Century
The Battle of Hamburg
Airspace in the Twenty-First Century
Aerial Architecture
Notes
7 Fire
Flames
Targeting
Airstrikes
Artillery
The Fire Sermon
Notes
8 Swarms
Fractal Manoeuvre
Mouseholing
Close-Quarters Battle
Swarming
The Return of the Siege
Beyond Manoeuvre
Notes
9 Partners
Traitors
Twentieth-Century Partners
Ramadi
Other Proxies
Notes
10 Rumour
The First Casualty of War
Winning the Narrative
A Sceptical Sociology of Information Operations
The Battle of Mosul
Ukraine
Gaza
Notes
11 Armageddon
A Tale of Two Cities
Megacity War
The Smart City
Nuclear Holocaust
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Maps
Chapter 2
Map 2.1
The Stalingrad campaign, 1942
Map 2.2
The battle of the Dnieper, 1943
Map 2.3
The invasion of Ukraine, 2022
Chapter 3
Map 3.1
Belfast, Catholic and Protestant areas
Chapter 5
Map 5.1
Paris, 1870
Map 5.2
Vienna, the Ringstrasse
Map 5.3
The battle of Sadr City, 2008
Chapter 6
Map 6.1
Operation Gomorrah attack plans, 1943
Chapter 8
Map 8.1
Thunder Run, 5 and 7 April 2003
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The ancient walls of Jericho
Figure 1.2
Çatalhöyük
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
The Divis Flats
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Mexico City horizonal urban growth, 1910–2000
Figure 4.2
The city as organism
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
The trace italienne, Fort Bourtange
Figure 5.2
The Atlantic Wall
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Airpower in the battle of Sadr City
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1
Mouseholing
Figure 8.2
Close-quarters battle: the five-step entry method
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1
Captain Patriquin’s stick-man presentation
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
The Russo-Ukraine War: phases
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Army size (active service personnel), 1991–2023
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century
Second Edition
Anthony King
polity
Copyright © Anthony King 2025
The right of Anthony King to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.First edition published in 2021 by Polity PressThis second edition first published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6337-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946812
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Figure 3.1 from Castle, The Journal of the Royal Anglian Regiment; Map 2.2 from Osprey Publishing; Map 2.3 from Alamy; Map 3.1 from Geografski vestnik; Map 5.3 from the Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project; and Map 8.1 from Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon, copyright © 2006, 2007 by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The first edition of Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century appeared in July 2021, although I had completed the manuscript in October 2020. I was pessimistic about the prospects for urban warfare, which I suggested had become the norm for land warfare and was ever more likely in the future. Even so, I underappreciated the scale of the wars which would break out soon after the publication of my book. The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War commenced in late September 2020; the Tigray War in November of that year. Seven months after the publication of my book, Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In April 2023 in Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces attacked the Sudanese Armed Forces in Khartoum, initiating a massive urban battle and wider civil conflict. On 7 October 2023, Hamas militants supported by civilians crossed the border into Israel, murdering, raping and abducting civilians; the war in Gaza began. Four major new wars started within three years.
Concluding the first edition of this book, I suggested that urban warfare had taken a distinctive form in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a trend which was likely to continue. Sieges had defined the first decade of the twenty-first century, and there seemed no reason for that to change in the coming decades. The claim seemed justified on the basis of the evidence in 2020. Yet, if my work on urban warfare is to remain relevant, it is clearly necessary to take account of the appalling new conflicts which broke out so soon after the book’s publication, especially since these wars have involved major urban battles. In the first edition, I discussed the battle of Mosul at length; it was the largest and perhaps most important urban battle of the early twenty-first century at that point, and was a very useful exemplar of wider trends. It seemed even to be the culmination of recent developments. Mosul has subsequently been equalled or superseded by new urban battles, including in Kyiv, Mariupol, Bakhmut, Khartoum and Gaza. Sadly, those battles seem to confirm the predictions I made about land warfare in 2021.
Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century argued that in the previous two decades warfare had migrated to the city. The longest and most intense battles of the era had taken and were taking place in urban areas. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, in particular, seem to confirm the central point of my book: that land warfare is increasingly defined by urban battles. Since the 1990s many scholars, including Gregory Ashworth, Ralph Peters, Mary Kaldor, Michael Evans, Michael Desch and Russell Glenn, have described the urbanization of contemporary conflict. They have proffered two explanations for this trend. Firstly, the urban population was exploding and cities were expanding rapidly. Consequently, since many more people lived in cities, often in miserable conditions, it was more likely that conflict would metastasize there too. Secondly, cities – especially rapidly growing, overcrowded, disorganized ones in the global South – offered non-state adversaries optimal protection from the advanced surveillance and targeting technology of state forces. Cities were the new jungle for insurgents. I agreed with this analysis.
Nevertheless, the commentators almost universally failed to recognize a third crucial factor: the size of military forces. Across the world, armed forces have contracted since the end of the Cold War. In those countries where the objective size of military forces has expanded, such as Israel, India or Indonesia, the civilian population has expanded dramatically. Thus, relative to population, even these armed forces have shrunk. The military participation rate has fallen across the world. Force size seems a mundane and trivial fact, irrelevant to the question of urban warfare. Yet it is not. The reduction of forces meant that states could no longer dominate their towns and cities as they had done in the twentieth century, especially since urban areas were so much larger. Insurgents could thrive in urban terrain. The reduction has been equally significant in inter-state wars. In the twenty-first century, armies are no longer big enough to form the dense fronts which characterized wars in the twentieth century. Reduced military forces have necessarily converged on important objectives. Overwhelmingly, these objectives – centres of political power, critical national infrastructure, transport hubs and bridges – have been located not in the field, but in towns and cities. Forces therefore converged on urban areas, often intrinsically insignificant ones, for operational and tactical reasons. There they fought a series of gruelling attritional sieges, the attackers reducing their enemies position by fortified position. The inner-urban micro-siege had appeared. Urban warfare had condensed into a series of localized battles.
At the same time, even as combat troops engaged in intense sieges inside towns and cities, audiences, supporters and allies were being recruited across the world. The combatants actively tried to engage and, in some cases, to mobilize a transnational network of ethno-political diasporas across a global urban archipelago. In many cases, the mobilizations have been peaceful, but sometimes one urban battle induced confrontations and fighting that coursed along the fissures of global geopolitics to erupt at another site. Urban warfare in the twenty-first century has both localized and globalized.
This was the argument I made seven months before the Ukraine War. The aim of this second edition is to consider whether my thesis about urban warfare in the twenty-first century has stood up to the test of that war in particular, and of the other major conflicts which have been fought since. No one knows when the Ukraine War, or the wars in Gaza or Sudan, will end. It seems certain that the war in Ukraine will continue into 2025, and perhaps beyond. The war in Gaza, even if it does not escalate into a regional conflict, will continue for months; its effects will be felt for years. There seems to be no resolution in Sudan. In each case, there will continue to be major urban fighting, and perhaps, in the case of Ukraine, more major urban battles. Even though these wars are not finished, it is useful – maybe even imperative – to try to take stock of these new wars and to use the evidence from them to assess the thesis I originally proposed. This second edition attempts to do that.
As always, many friends and colleagues helped me with this book. I am grateful to them all. I offer special thanks to the following. In November 2020, I was awarded a Major Leverhulme Fellowship to conduct a project, ‘Urban Warfare: past, present and future’, which allowed me three year’s research leave between 2021 and 2024. It has been invaluable to develop my understanding of urban warfare and its connection to AI, a theme raised in the final chapter of this book. I could not have completed this second edition without the support of the Leverhulme Trust, while also working on a book on AI. I am indebted to them. I am also grateful to the Universities of Warwick and Exeter for honouring that grant and for allowing me to dedicate my time to my studies, even as I left Warwick to join Exeter in September 2023. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Politics and International Studies Department at Warwick, with whom I enjoyed working and whom I was sad to leave, especially Stuart Croft, Richard Aldrich, Stuart Elden, George Christou, Chris Moran, Nick Vaughan-Williams and Christopher Hughes.
I could not have conducted this urban research without the support of the British Army and the Royal Marines, and especially 40 and 45 Commando Royal Marines. My gratitude remains to the many individuals recorded in the first edition. Steven Bowns, Robert Goodin, Peter Dixon and the Royal Anglian Regiment were extremely generous in their support for my research on Belfast in 1972 and the permission to use some images. Steven Bowns deserves a special mention. He provided detailed feedback on the first edition in an email I received in December 2021. Sadly, it was our very last communication. He died tragically and unexpectedly soon afterwards. He remains greatly missed. I would also like to thank Ben Barry, Virginia Comolli and Antonio Sampaio at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Marcus Geisser at the International Committee of the Red Cross, and James Denselow at Save the Children. At Warwick, Jon Coaffee provided very useful guidance.
The US Army was no less helpful. At West Point, the Modern Warfare Institute has provided invaluable support, especially John Spencer, John Amble, Noel Siosson and Liam Collins. I am indebted to Doug Winton not only for some fascinating conversations but also for allowing me preemptively to read his excellent doctoral dissertation on urban warfare, which I look forward to seeing in print and which I would recommend to everyone interested in the topic. I have benefited greatly from the work of Amos Fox and discussions with him. I am very grateful also to Sean MacFarland, Joseph Martin, Joe O’Callaghan and Danilo Pamonag (Filipino Army) for their time and insights. At Polity, I remain very grateful to John Thompson, who initially saw potential in the project; Louise Knight, who has been a brilliant editor on both the first and this second edition; and Olivia Jackson and Tim Clark for their assistance. Randall Collins, Christopher Dandeker and Patrick Bury have supported me throughout the process of this second edition. I would also like to thank Cathy King, my wife, for her support.
1Gomorrah
Kyiv
On the 21 February 2022, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, knowing the invasion was imminent, published a now famous statement on a Russian website: ‘You will attack us in 10:1 and 15:1 ratios. We will not meet you with flowers. Welcome to HELL!’1 Zaluzhnyi’s invocation of hell was carefully chosen. In December 1994 the Russian Army had invaded Chechnya to suppress a separatist insurrection. As the mechanized columns drove into the very centre of Grozny, they believed their mission was complete. Suddenly, over the radio, they heard the words ‘Welcome to Hell’. Chechen hunter-killer teams ambushed the Russian columns with small arms and rockets, driving them from the city and killing many Russian soldiers. Since 1994, the idea of an urban hell had become very familiar to Russian forces and their political masters. In February 2022, just as they prepared for another invasion, Zaluzhnyi wanted to impress on President Putin and his generals how costly any attack on Ukraine – and Kyiv in particular, a city of 3 million – would be. Zaluzhnyi ordered that all the avenues of attack into Kyiv be signposted with the same phrase: ‘Welcome to Hell’. The memory of Grozny, however, did not stop President Putin.
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. 190,000 Russian troops advanced along three main axes: from the north towards Kyiv, from the east towards Kharkiv and the Donbas, and from the south towards Odessa, Kherson and Zaporizhzia. In the early phase of the war, it was obvious that the attack on Kyiv was the strategic thrust. Between 0600 and 0700 on the morning of 24 February, Kalibr cruise missiles struck Hostomel Airport and destroyed the National Guard base there. Thirty-four helicopters, carrying over 200 Russian airborne and Spetsnaz soldiers, then flew into Ukrainian airspace down the Dnieper River towards the airport. The Russians had jammed Ukrainian air-defence radars and the assault was only detected as they approached Hostomel over the dam north of Kyiv. There is some now famous, grainy footage of the assault, taken by local Ukrainians. Two helicopters were downed before they made it to the airport, but the rest landed. The Russian soldiers quickly disembarked, only to be engaged by soldiers from Ukraine’s National Guard 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade. The National Guard killed many Russians as they ran across the coverless tarmac, and brought down two more helicopters. The Ukrainians were overmatched, though, and withdrew. Temporarily, the Russian airborne task force took possession of the airport.
The Ukrainians had been surprised by the air assault operation, but they responded quickly. They had calculated that the main Russian offensive would occur in the east; consequently, most of their 120,000 troops were located in the Donbas region. There were only about 3,000 regular troops in the Kyiv area, mostly from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, based in Bila Tverska, supported by some Special Operations Forces. The 72nd Brigade deployed to the north of Kyiv as soon as the invasion started, and at 1730 attacked Hostomel along with elements of some other Ukrainian units. By 2100, they had retaken the airfield, killing or capturing all of the Russian soldiers. Unsure of the next Russian attack and lacking troops, they withdrew from Hostomel. As that operation took place, nine Russian battalion tactical groups, with ten in reserve – perhaps 10,000 troops in all – attacked from the north. On 25 February, the lead Russian ground forces reached the airfield, while Russian troops deployed north of the River Irpin into Bucha, Hostomel, Chervone and the woods north of Lubyanka, from where they sought to punch their way into the city. The battle of Kyiv had begun in earnest.2
For the next month, the fighting on the Irpin River was fierce. As one commentator noted, ‘the Battle of Kyiv came down to a few key engagements’; of these, the battles for Moshchun and Irpin were critical.3 This area was defended by the 2nd Battalion 72nd Mechanized Regiment and elements of the special forces, augmented by militias, with the help of local civilians. The aim was to channel the Russian forces into kill zones for artillery strikes. In this, the defence of Moshchun proved crucial. Located east of Hostomel and north-west of Kyiv, on the right (southern) bank of the Irpin, Moshchun was a village of 2,800 buildings and a prewar population of 800. It was an obvious axis of advance into Kyiv and became key terrain during the battle. It was defended by a very small force, 5th Company from the 2nd Battalion, which initially dug trenches on the western side of the village. On 27 February, the Russians began their attack. The Ukrainians resisted strongly, inflicting severe casualties on the enemy. On 5 March, the Russians mounted a massive artillery bombardment on Moshchun, before crossing the river by a pontoon bridge and attacking in force. The intensity of the assault increased for the next two days, with a second river crossing. The Ukrainians used drones to target the Russian forces and employed heavy artillery strikes as they crossed the river. Meanwhile, Ukrainian special forces attacked Russian troops behind enemy lines north of the Irpin River. By 7 March, the Russians had taken 5th Company’s positions in the village, forcing the Ukrainians to defend from a series of trenches in a tree-line just beyond the village. The crisis came on 11 March. Russian troops launched a massive attack, advancing through the narrow streets of the village and then trying to outflank the Ukrainian positions in the tree-line. At this point, as the Ukrainian soldiers were wavering, the 72nd Brigade’s deputy commander, call-sign ‘Granite’, arrived to lead the defence. He called in 152mm artillery fire on positions only 200 metres from his troops. By 18 March, Russian troops continued to occupy most of Moshchun, but had failed to dislodge the Ukrainians.4
Meanwhile, 4th Company 2nd Battalion 72nd Mechanized Brigade, commanded by Major Dmytro Zaretsky, were fighting around Irpin and the nearby towns of Bucha and Horenka. Their actions were crucial to the defence of Kyiv. The E373, a four-lane highway which ran straight into the centre of the city, crossed the Irpin to the north-east, extending into Horenka. On 27/28 February, a Russian armoured column mustered by a fuel station on the right bank of the river, preparing to cross it in force. Ukrainian soldiers engaged the first vehicle with a Next-Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon. A seventy-year-old veteran reputedly disabled the last vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade. The convoy was stuck. 4th Company then called in a massive artillery strike; the entire Russian column, consisting of 100 vehicles, was destroyed, blocking the route. The images of the burned-out column became famous. The Russians never tried to cross into Horenka again.5 The fighting in Irpin was not over, however. On 17 March, a Russian tank column again tried to advance along a highway in Irpin. A platoon from the 72nd Brigade held an overpass across the road. Hundreds of local civilians volunteered their help and were put to work constructing an anti-armour ambush. The assault was repelled.6
The Russians had suffered grievous casualties; entire battalions had been destroyed as they attempted to cross the Irpin.7 Perhaps 80 per cent of the Russian airborne forces were killed or wounded in the first months of the war, many in the battle of Kyiv: ‘the army, airborne, and special forces have sustained so much damage that, as a force, they are becoming unrecognizable from one year ago’.8 However, the 72nd Brigade was also taking very heavy casualties. On 21 March, the commander of the brigade asked General Zaluzhnyi for permission to withdraw. Zaluzhnyi refused; if the 72nd Brigade were to withdraw, Kyiv would fall. He ordered the commander to hold out to the last man.9 In fact, by that point, although they did not know it, the battle of Kyiv was almost over. The Ukrainians had already destroyed many of the bridges to the north of the city. On 8 March, they had blown up the Kozarovychi Dam; by the 23rd the entire Irpin Valley was flooded.10 The Russians began to withdraw. Their attempt to take Kyiv had failed.
The battle of Kyiv was by no means the largest urban battle of the twenty-first century; it lasted six weeks and was fought between 30,000 Russian and 3,000 Ukrainian troops. Bucha, Irpin and Moshchun were badly damaged, and Kyiv was bombarded heavily from the air, but the destruction was limited. The battles of Mosul, Khartoum and Gaza were far more devastating. In 2022, however, the battle of Kyiv was the decisive battle in the Ukraine War. The defeat of the Russian forces on the outskirts of the city prevented Putin from achieving his strategic goals: the removal of the Zelensky government and the annexation of the whole of Ukraine. Unlike the battles of Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa and Sirte, the battle of Kyiv was fought between two advanced military powers, employing the heaviest and most advanced weaponry: tanks, artillery, rockets, missiles, aircraft, drones, electronic warfare, digital sensors and complex software. It was a modern battle, but it was an archaic one too. Russian troops in Bucha abducted, tortured and massacred local civilians. The ancient Assyrians would have recognized their actions. The battle of Kyiv was both ultra-modern and barbaric, sophisticated and brutal. It is, therefore, an ideal exemplar of urban warfare in the twenty-first century.
The Urban Revolution
Kyiv may have been one of the most decisive urban battles of the twenty-first century, but it was far from unique. On the contrary, urban warfare has become normal, even the norm, today: ‘Warfare, like everything else, is being urbanized.’11 Of course, since the early 2000s, there has been extensive fighting in rural and mountainous areas in conflicts in Afghanistan, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and in Kashmir and Ladakh. By contrast, in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Yemen, Israel, Libya, Sudan and Ukraine, populations have been caught up in the fighting; in these theatres, wars have taken place inside urban areas.
The rise of urban warfare in the early twenty-first century now has a well-recognized chronology. In October 1993, US Special Operations Forces and Rangers were trapped inside Mogadishu for twelve hours after an attempt to seize a Somali warlord had failed. In stark contrast to the Gulf War, when US Abrams tanks were able to engage Iraqi T-72s in the open desert from several kilometres before the Iraqis had even detected them, the canyons of Mogadishu became a killing zone. Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, and in running gun battles with local militia that lasted for more than twelve hours, eighteen US soldiers were killed and seventy-three wounded.
The battle of Grozny a year later was an even more sobering portent of the urban future. In December 1994, in response to the declaration of Chechen independence by President Dudayev, Russian Army forces advanced into the capital Grozny in order to reassert Moscow’s authority. As mentioned briefly above, the Chechen rebels allowed the Russian armoured columns to penetrate deep into the city. The 131st Mechanized Rifle Brigade, under Major-General Politovsky, reached the central station, where some conscripts, thinking the conflict was over, even bought rail tickets home.12 Yet, the war had only just begun. A brigade commander, Colonel Stavin, later claimed that he heard the words ‘Welcome to Hell’ over his radio. At that moment, with complete surprise, Chechen teams attacked the Russian columns from high-rise buildings, destroying numerous armoured vehicles and tanks, and killing many soldiers, before moving through cellars and sewers to new positions. In the end, the Russians had to mount a systematic clearance of the city, destroying much of it, before the uprising was suppressed in February 1995. Even so, a second bitter battle occurred over the city in 1999–2000, as Russian forces seized Grozny from the rebels once again.
In 1984, Sarajevo was the site of a very successful Winter Olympic Games. However, only a decade later, the city came to haunt the public imagination as a symbol of ethnic war. From May 1992 to December 1995, Serbian forces besieged and bombarded Sarajevo as part of its war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The blockade, watched across Europe on nightly news programmes, inflicted terrible suffering on the citizens of Sarajevo, who had to endure constant sniper and artillery fire. There were some notorious incidents, including the Serbian mortaring of the Markale marketplace on 28 August 1995, which killed forty-three civilians and injured seventy-five more.
By the late 1990s, Sarajevo, Mogadishu and Grozny were being interpreted not just as significant events in themselves, but as the start of a trend. They denoted an epochal turn to urban warfare. The past couple of decades have only affirmed this trajectory. Since 2000, urban warfare has been almost continuous. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, a few engagements took place outside urban areas, but the battles inside Iraqi cities were far more significant. The battle of Nasiriyah on 23–4 March 2003 was notorious. There were other major urban battles, in Baghdad, Samawah and Najaf.
The invasion of Iraq was rapid, but it established the tone for the rest of the campaign. From 2003 to 2008, US-led forces were engaged in an urban counterinsurgency campaign against Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni and Shia militias. The most intense urban battles occurred in November 2004, with the second battle of Fallujah, and in March–May 2008, when Shia militias were finally suppressed in Sadr City and Basra. The US also conducted major operations in Tal Afar in 2005 and Ramadi in 2006. Most of the campaign took place in the towns and cities of Iraq, with US coalition forces fighting to control the streets. Sometimes the situation was relatively benign. In Basra, British troops wore berets on patrol until 2004, but, for the most part, coalition forces wore helmets and body armour and moved in protected vehicles because of the threat from IEDs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. It was a high-intensity urban guerrilla war, with Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and Baghdad the sites of extreme violence and, sometimes, grotesque atrocities.
Other recent conflicts in the Middle East only reaffirm the point. The Syrian civil war is the most important case here. It began as a series of urban protests in the towns and cities of eastern Syria, beginning in Dar’a in February 2011. In the face of extreme repression, however, anti-regime elements formed increasingly effective local militias and began to fight President Assad’s troops. Between 2011 and 2016, fighting took place in most Syrian cities and towns. Major battles occurred in Homs, Damascus, Aleppo, Ghouta, Idlib, Latakia, Hama and many other urban areas. In addition to indiscriminate artillery and air bombardment, the regime periodically employed gas to kill its civilian opponents. Local and international reportage has captured the horror of these sieges.
ISIS’s rise and fall is a case study in urban warfare. In early 2014, ISIS began to ally itself with tribal groups in eastern and southern Syria, in Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, Raqqa and Dar’a. As a result, ISIS took control of Deir Ezzor in July 2014 and from there began to expand its caliphate. It inserted Sunni sleeper cells into towns and cities across the region. These cells mobilized the local Sunni population in support of ISIS’s imminent assaults, and provided intelligence and mounted attacks on the opposition forces holding the towns. As a result, ISIS took Raqqa, al-Bab, Fallujah and Mosul in a ‘lightning push’ in 2014, the towns falling in quick succession, often without significant fighting. Once established in an urban hub, ISIS was then able to dominate the surrounding area.
Almost all ISIS’s offensive operations were urban. The eventual defeat of the group took precisely the same form: most of the fighting took place in cities. The caliphate was destroyed as the US-led coalition reversed ISIS’s own urban gains, retaking Iraqi and Syrian cities in turn. As a British officer noted:
The campaign for the liberation from IS was a series of urban battles. There was no front line. It was just the cities and then the manoeuvre to them. If you looked at the campaign map, it consisted of spots: the fights were in cities and towns. In the Soviet era, there were large fronts, you don’t have those forces now. You are going to go from point to point.13
The Battle of Mosul was the climax of this urban campaign. It lasted for nine months, between October 2016 and July 2017, and was fought between 94,000 Iraqi soldiers and at least 6,000 ISIS fighters, supported by perhaps another 6,000 auxiliaries.
Both the Libyan and the Yemen civil wars have also been heavily urbanized. Following Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, Libya quickly descended into a struggle between General Haftar’s Libyan National Army and the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli. They fought major battles for control of Benghazi in 2012 and Sirte in 2016. Similarly, the Yemen civil war has been highly urbanized, with major battles over control of Sana’a between Houthi rebels and government forces.
The West has been involved in the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere, war has also migrated into cities. The experiences of Israel reflect this process. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli paratroopers retook Jerusalem, but in that conflict and the subsequent Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was primarily engaged in open manoeuvre war in the Sinai desert or on the Golan Heights. The first phase of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was also predominantly characterized by manoeuvre warfare. However, since then, IDF operations have become increasingly urban. Even during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, many of the most intense engagements occurred in the towns of south Lebanon. Despite the fact that this region consists of rural, rocky hills and scrubland, ‘most of the fighting took place in built-up areas’.14 Circumstances have forced the IDF to urbanize.15 The Israeli Defence Force has recurrently fought Hamas in Gaza. In 2008, 2012, 2014 and 2021, Israel engaged in a short, intense operations against Hamas, in response to rocket attacks by the militant group. On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a large-scale military operation into southern Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, many others were raped, and over 200 taken hostage. The IDF has conducted a major urban campaign against Hamas since that time, with the aim of eliminating the organisation. It has invaded and occupied the Strip, killing thousands of militants, but also inflicting heavy civilian casualties and damaging much of Gaza.
In the mid-late 1990s, Russia also experienced an urban warfare revolution: the battles of Grozny in 1994–5 and 1999–2000 suggested that something profound had changed. Russia’s conflicts since the Chechen Wars have only affirmed the point. Since 2000, it has fought wars in Georgia in 2008, in Donbas in 2014–15, and, of course, currently in Ukraine. After years of tension, in August 2008 Georgia deployed a force to suppress the Russian-supporting Ossetian separatists who had been shelling Georgia. On this pretext, President Putin initiated a major operation to regain control of South Ossetia and drive out the Georgian troops. The fighting in the ensuing Russo-Georgian War was concentrated in the cities of Gori and Tskhinvali. Similarly, in the Donbas in 2014–15, most of the fighting took place in urban areas. Donetsk Airport, for instance, was the site of two major battles in 2014–15. However, the Russian experiences in the Ukraine War dwarf all these operations, including even the battles of Grozny.
One of the most striking features of the Russo-Ukraine War has been its urbanized character. Military operations have converged on urban areas where the most intense combats have occurred. The battle of Kyiv was plainly the single most important urban operation in the war. It was strategically decisive and defined the course of the conflict. While much fighting has taken place in the field, the major battles of the war have occurred in and around towns and cities, as Russian and Ukrainian forces sought to take and to defend them.
Table 1.1: The Russo-Ukraine War: phases
Phase
Major Operations
Signature Battle
Phase 1: 24 February 2022–1 April 2022
Invasion
Battle of Kyiv
Phase 2: 2 April 2022–29 August 2022
Russian consolidation east and south
Battles of Mariupol/Severodonetsk
Phase 3: 30 August 2022–11 November 2022
Kharkiv counter-attack
Battle of Izyum/Kherson
Phase 4: 12 November 2022–20 May 2023
Winter stasis: attrition in Donbas
Battle of Bakhmut
Phase 5: 21 May 2023–9 October 2023
Ukrainian counter-offensive
Battle of Robotyne
Phase 6: 10 October 2023–13 May 2024
Russian winter offensive
Battle of Avdiivka
Phase 7: 12 May 2024–
Russian summer counter-offensive
Battle of Slovyansk/Kharkiv
Until now, the war has unfolded in seven distinct phases: the invasion and the battle of Kyiv (24 February to 1 April 2022); the struggle for the Donbas and the south (2 April to 29 August 2022); the first Ukrainian counter-attack (30 August to 11 November 2022); the winter campaign (12 November 2022 to 20 May 2023); the Ukrainian counter-offensive (21 May to 9 October 2023); the Russian winter offensive (10 October 2023 to 12 May 2024); and the Russian summer offensive (13 May 2024 to …). Three phases – the first, second and fourth – have been defined by major urban battles; in the other four phases, operations have revolved around villages, towns and cities (see Table 1.1).
In the opening phase of the war, the Russians aimed to take Kyiv by a coup de main within the first days of the conflict, precipitating the collapse of the Zelensky government. However, the assault failed and an intense battle followed around the city of Kyiv, in the northern suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, and around Chernihiv and other satellite towns to the east. The Russian forces suffered massive losses in these engagements and were forced to retreat.
Urban fighting dominated the second phase of the war. Following the defeat around Kyiv, Russian commanders concentrated their forces in the Donbas and in the south, attempting to seize Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzia and Kherson. This led to a series of attritional urban fights in the spring and summer of 2022. The battles for Mariupol and Severodonetsk were the largest and most intense combats during this phase of the war, resulting in heavy casualties and massive destruction in both cities, but there were others, including in Rubizhne in March to May 2022.
On 29 August, Ukrainian forces launched a counter-attack, initially targeting Kherson and subsequently focusing on Kharkiv. The operation proved remarkably successful. Tellingly, there was little close urban fighting; indeed, in the east there was hardly any fighting at all. The Russians were so depleted there that the Ukrainians advanced with ease. Rather than fighting for urban areas, as the Ukrainians had done with such success in the spring, Russian troops abandoned the towns east of Kharkiv, including Izyum and Krupyansk, in September 2022. The absence of an urban battle in his phase was significant. The Russians could have forced the Ukrainians into major battles at Izyum and Krupyansk; militarily speaking, they should have. However, they failed to defend those towns precisely because they had been so heavily engaged in urban battles in the spring and summer. They simply did not have enough troops left. The Ukrainians were able to take Izyum and Krupyansk with ease only because they had defended Kyiv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Severodonetsk, Lyman and Rubizhne so tenaciously. In early November, Russian troops withdrew from Kherson, after a much slower, more attritional Ukrainian operation. There was little close urban fighting, but the Ukrainians heavily bombarded Russian positions in and around the city. The retaking of Kherson, the only regional capital occupied by the Russians, marked the end of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. There was certainly less urban fighting in this third phase of the war, but that was only because such fighting had been so significant in the previous months.
As winter set in, both sides faced challenges with dwindling ammunition supplies and troop numbers, leading to a temporary stalemate as the battlelines solidified. Nevertheless, even in the fourth phase, the war was defined by urban combat. Ukrainian forces focused on seizing Svatove and Kreminna, while the Wagner Group continued its brutal struggle for Bakhmut. That battle persisted until 20 May 2023, when Russian forces finally secured the town. It was not as decisive as the battle of Kyiv. On the contrary, it was a brutal stalemate, compared by many to the battle of Verdun in 1916. Yet it lasted much longer than any other battle in Ukraine and involved the most troops: the Ukrainians deploying around 30,000 to Bakhmut, and the Russians probably around 60,000.
On 4 June 2023, after Bakhmut had fallen on 20 May, the Ukrainians launched their long-awaited counter-offensive. It was a formidable undertaking as the Russians had constructed an elaborate system of field defences, the so-called Surovikin Line. The fighting remained intense throughout the summer. The Ukrainians attacked on three axes: to the east, around Bakhmut; to the south-east from Velyka Novosilka; and to the south from Orikhiv. They initially employed nine new NATO trained and equipped brigades as the spearhead in these operations.16 However, although the Ukrainian forces retook small parcels of terrain they were unable to penetrate the Surovikin Line. There was some criticism of the Ukrainian commanders. They failed to concentrate their forces and made some tactical errors. But the counter-offensive was always going to be very difficult: the Ukrainians lacked air superiority, they were fighting with inexperienced forces, and they had no effective divisional or corps-level headquarters with a cadre of professional staff officers to orchestrate the operation. The result was a series of small tactical battles, many of which were successful but none of which were decisive. Although the two southern axes were predominantly rural, there was considerable fighting in and around small urban areas.
After a great deal of effort, in August 2023 the Ukrainians eventually took Robotyne, a village of about a hundred buildings to the south of Orikhiv, as well as some hamlets to the south-east of Velyka Novosilka, Marivka and Staromayorske.17 There was no major urban battle, though there was much fighting in the built-up areas of these settlements. The city of Melitopol was the Ukrainians’ strategic objective: as a crucial logistic hub through which major roads and rail lines ran, its seizure would have cut supply lines to Russian forces. There should have been a major battle for the city. In reality, however, even if the Ukrainians had succeeded in breaching the Russian defensive lines, it is unlikely they had sufficient troops to take a heavily fortified Melitopol; indeed, it is questionable whether they could have taken Tokmak, a much smaller town to the north-east. The very fact that there was no major urban battle is evidence that the counter-offensive failed.
In early 2024, as the Russians mounted a major counter-offensive, Ukraine, short of ammunition and soldiers, went on the defensive. There was significant fighting in the field, as Ukraine tried to hold lines from Kreminna to Avdiivka. But the Russians concentrated their forces on urban centres, especially Avdiivka, on which the Ukrainian defences were anchored. In April 2024, Avdiivka fell. Throughout the summer of 2024, the Russians pressurised several towns in the Donbas, including Chasi Yar to the west of Bakhmut, Pokrovsk, and Toretsk to the south. From May 2024, Kharkiv has been threatened. Russian forces made a significant incursion across the border north of the city, and they have subjected the city to heavy air and artillery bombardments. It is very unlikely that they have to forces to take Kharkiv; it is a very large city. But the operations against it have potentially pulled Ukrainian resources away from the Donbas, facilitating Russian attempts to seize Chasi Yar, Pokrovsk and Toretsk. It is likely that for the rest of 2024, Russian forces will grind forward, taking Ukrainian towns. The Ukraine War has by no means been an exclusively urban conflict, yet it has been defined by major urban battles. The decisive actions have been taken in and around towns and cities, as the combatants have tried to seize or defend these critical pieces of terrain.
Across Eurasia and the Middle East, then, warfare has urbanized. However, the urbanization of warfare is a truly global phenomenon. In India, on 26 November 2008, ten terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba group entered secretly by boat into Mumbai. Armed with automatic rifles, grenades and suicide vests, they rampaged through some of the most prominent landmarks of the city, including the Taj Hotel, for four days, killing 174 civilians and security personnel. The Mumbai attack highlighted the vulnerability of Indian cities to such assaults; in response, the Indian Army has been improving its capacity to mount urban operations. In the Philippines in recent years, the armed forces have been engaged in two major urban battles against Islamicist jihadists: in Zamboanga in 2013 and in Marawi in 2017. The battle of Marawi was a brutal and intense engagement; local militants from the Maute group reinforced ISIS jihadists led by Isnilon Hapilon to seize control of the main buildings in the centre of the town. The jihadists were eliminated only after bitter fighting with the Filipino Army, led by the special forces.
In 2017, Mosul was the largest and perhaps most significant urban battle of the twenty-first century, certainly for Western forces. It has now been joined by Kyiv, Bakhmut, Gaza and Khartoum. These battles are not aberrations. Urban combat has become a central, maybe even the defining, form of warfare in the twenty-first century. In the twentieth century, armies prepared to fight in the field; today, it seems almost inevitable that they will fight in cities.
Urban Origins
The rise of urban warfare is deeply troubling. The scale of human suffering and the destruction it has inflicted have often been terrible. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to suggest that urban warfare itself is new. Urban warfare was a regular occurrence in antiquity. Indeed, the siege and the sacking of cities were central themes in classical literature, as the Iliad and the Odyssey demonstrate. Roman literature is also replete with depictions of urban warfare. Unlike the Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid was not primarily a poem about battle. Yet, some of its most powerful passages describe the sacking of Troy, the most famous siege of all:
There we found the fighting so heavy that it seemed there were no battles anywhere else, that this was the only place in the city where men were dying. We saw Mars, the irresistible God of War, Greeks rushing to the palace, men with shields locked over their backs packing the threshold, ladders hooked to the walls and men struggling to climb them right against the doorposts, thrusting up their shields on their left arms to protect themselves while their right hands gripped the top of the walls.18
Virgil took his imagery from Roman siege techniques; his observations of the details of the escalade are striking. His moving depiction of the destruction of Troy seems to be a subtle interrogation of the hypocrisies of Roman imperialism.
Yet, written between 29 and 19 BCE during Augustus’ Principate, Virgil’s account of urban warfare was anything but new, even then. On the contrary, by the first century BCE, siege warfare was a prominent, even primary, form of warfare. The Old Testament, composed between about 1200 and 165 BCE, records the sacking of many cities, including Nineveh, and, of course, Jericho: ‘And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.’19 Archaeology affirms the literary evidence. According to the archaeological research, humans first started to inhabit urban settlements at the beginning of the Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago; Jericho has been dated to 9000 BCE. Similarly, in Anatolia, Çatalhöyük seems to have been inhabited from 7500 to 5700 BCE.20 Both display signs of militarization. Jericho was surrounded by a rock-cut ditch and three-foot-thick walls (see Figure 1.1).21 The original Jericho was destroyed in c. 5000 BCE. Although Çatalhöyük is not so obviously fortified, it was plainly a stronghold. The settlement consists of a series of tightly packed, baked mud houses, accessible only through the roof by means of a ladder, and with blank exterior walls (see Figure 1.2). Moreover, wall paintings of what may have been a warrior have been discovered inside the settlement.22
Figure 1.1: The ancient walls of Jericho
Source: Daniel Case/CC BY-SA, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.
Fortified settlements may have pre-dated agriculture and the state. However, the first true cities emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. The first city-states appeared in Sumer, an area that is now southern Iraq but was then a coastal, estuarine area bordering the Gulf. Ur, for instance, was founded about 2100 BCE; at its peak, it had 35,000 inhabitants.23 There were approximately twenty other rival city-states in existence at this time. The subsequent history of Bronze Age Mesopotamia consisted of the cyclical rise and fall of agrarian empires, centred on the cities of Akkad, Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and Elam. Warfare – and above all siege warfare – was a central element of the almost constant conflict between these empires.
The Assyrian Empire of the seventh century BCE illustrates this process. Between 711 and 627 BCE, Assyria attained dominance in the region under a succession of powerful kings: Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. The recent battle of Mosul raged around their palaces in Nineveh. From the late eighth century, Assyrian kings engaged in a series of successful campaigns against their Elamite and Babylonian rivals, defeating them in battle and sacking their cities. The extraordinary murals in Ashurbanipal’s palace include detailed depictions of successful sieges. Having taken Babylon, Ashurbanipal attacked Elam and eventually besieged and took the royal city of Hamanu. One of the friezes shows Assyrian soldiers climbing ladders, while others, protecting themselves with shields, undermine the walls. The corpses of Elamite soldiers sink in the river.24
Figure 1.2: Çatalhöyük
Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project.
Siege warfare and urban fortification, then, reached a very high level of development in the Mesopotamian Bronze and Iron Ages. Similar developments are observable in other major pristine civilizations of the Americas, China and India. All agrarian city-states were able to generate hitherto unachievable concentrations of military power. They built and fortified very large cities, but were also able to besiege, assault and sack their enemies’ cities. Later, around the fourth century BCE, states developed sophisticated siege engines and catapults. The power of the Roman Empire, for instance, rested not only in the superiority of the Roman legions in open battle but in their unique ability to build fortifications in the field and to take apparently impregnable fortresses like Alesia, Maiden Castle and Masada. Urban warfare certainly reached a higher level of sophistication and intensity in the era of great ancient agrarian empires in the Middle East and Mediterranean from 3000 BCE to the fall of Rome in 476 CE. However, urban warfare was already established when the Greeks and Romans perfected the art of siege warfare.
Urban warfare is, then, as old as cities themselves. The sad conclusion must be that from the moment humans, as aggressive, intelligent and highly social primates, began to live in urban settlements, they also began to fight each other for them and to kill each other in them. Indeed, while it might be comforting to preserve a pacific vision of early human urban evolution, evidence suggests that warfare was in fact always an integral part of city life. From the outset, urban settlements were primarily defined by the walls that surrounded them and protected their inhabitants. The city may well have been the cradle of civilization; but it was also the crucible of war.
Understanding Contemporary Urban Warfare
Urban warfare is ancient. Its long provenance is widely recognized by commentators today. Yet it has, once again, come to prominence in the early twenty-first century. Clearly, the reappearance of the urban battle has engendered deep concern, not only among the armed forces who have to fight in this dangerous and difficult terrain, but also among politicians, political leaders, humanitarian agencies and, of course, citizens themselves. Many towns and cities have been destroyed – often irrevocably – in recent decades; huge numbers of civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced. The suffering has been truly terrible. There seems little doubt that urban conflict and warfare will continue to proliferate in the coming decades. It will remain a global issue, affecting the lives of millions and threatening major political, economic and cultural centres. If the political and social implications of the rise of urban warfare are so profound, it cannot be dismissed as a technical military issue. On the contrary, precisely because urban warfare always involves large civilian populations, it is imperative that policymakers, scholars, humanitarians, commentators and the general public all understand the realities of such conflicts.
How is it possible to understand urban warfare today, though? This is very difficult. Urban warfare is a complex and diverse phenomenon. No two battles are exactly alike; each one is bewildering in itself. As a general phenomenon, it is even harder to capture the character of urban warfare today with any fidelity. It is a prodigious political, social, military and intellectual challenge. Nevertheless, whatever the obstacles, it is necessary to try at least to comprehend the anatomy of the urban battle.
Contemporary scholarship on urban warfare is the best place to start. Two broad schools of thought are observable in the literature today and it is useful to look at each of them in turn. On the one hand, some scholars and military professionals emphasize the novelty of urban conflict today. They believe that a profound military transformation – even an urban revolution – has occurred, altering the very character of contemporary military operations in cities. Disturbed by the vast metropolises in which forces now operate, they declare that the urban military challenge is without precedent. Richard Norton’s 2003 article, ‘Feral cities’, might be taken as a seminal moment in this catastrophic vision of the urban future:
Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense Petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain sciencefiction genres.25
For Norton, the feral city of the future presents the armed forces with a totally new predicament. Since military forces might have to fight in human settlements of a size never seen before, future urban operations will be without historic parallel. Norton is not alone in having such thoughts. On the contrary, the claim of originality is, perhaps, most apparent in recent discussions about war in megacities of 10 million inhabitants or more: ‘While urban combat operations are not new, a megacity presents old challenges at a previously unimaginable scale and complexity.’26 Here, mere quantity gains a quality all of its own. Others have confirmed the sheer difficulty of operating in large urban areas. John Spencer claims that the urban environment has become the hardest of all environments.27 For these scholars and practitioners, the sheer scale and complexity of cities in the early twenty-first century has revolutionized urban operations. For them, urban warfare today is a radical historic departure. While the siege might indeed be old, the twenty-first-century urban battle is fundamentally new.
Other scholars claim precisely the opposite: they reject novelty altogether. In a joint article, for instance, war studies scholar David Betz and British Army officer Hugh Stanford-Tuck maintained that ‘nothing fundamental has changed’ in urban warfare. For them, the basic features of urban warfare endure across the decades, centuries and, indeed, millennia: ‘Even the challenges that might seem new, such as the prevalence of the media, are only superficially different or, at most, an amplified echo of the past.’28 They argue that many of the practices employed by Titus in the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE are immediately observable today. For instance, in the second week of the siege, Titus made a small breach in the second wall and sought to enter it with about 1,000 legionnaires. However, because the breach was too small and the Jewish resistance fanatical, there was a serious risk that the assault force, which could not easily retreat, would be massacred. So Titus stationed ‘his archers at the end of the streets and taking post himself where the enemy was in greatest force, he kept them at bay with missiles.’ Betz and Stanford-Tuck translate this action into modern vernacular:
That this battle involved swords and clubs rather than M-4s and AK-47s matters little – just replace ‘archers’ and ‘arrows’ with ‘close combat attack’ and ‘armed aviation’ and the scene has an obvious contemporary resonance. Moreover, the tactics of the Jewish rebels differed little from those of, say, Islamic State insurgents in the months-long battle for Mosul in Iraq.29
Their point is that the urban battles of the twenty-first century are not remotely new; they have all been seen before. Similarly, the British scholar Alice Hills has claimed that ‘city fighting remains essentially unchanged at this level of intensity, regardless of whether conventional or irregular forces are involved’.30
This scepticism is valid. It is all too easy to presume that urban warfare itself is objectively new. The armed forces are themselves vulnerable here. Soldiers have sometimes assumed that, because they are experiencing urban warfare for the first time, it must be a genuinely new phenomenon in itself. Their understandable shock at the horrors of urban combat has induced historical myopia. Some correction may be appropriate. Yet, while it is entirely cogent for leading scholars like David Betz or Alice Hills to argue that there is some continuity in weaponry and tactics, it is less sustainable to claim that there is nothing distinctive about contemporary urban warfare at all. While arrows might suppress defenders like bullets do, and bulldozers might knock down walls like battering rams, it is not true that recent urban battles
