American and British military tacticians rarely tire of invoking the name of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher of war, credited with laying the groundwork for everything from ”decapitation strikes” to the policy of ”shock and awe”.
But as coalition troops push north for an assault on Baghdad, through stubborn opposition from the most highly trained of President Saddam Hussein’s fighters, it is another aphorism of Sun Tzu’s that may be ringing in the ears of their commanders. ”The worst policy,” he wrote, brooking no argument, ”is to attack cities.”
There is nothing encouraging about the list of bloody, high-casualty urban entanglements that strategists on both sides of the Atlantic have been scrutinising for lessons they might apply if drawn into a street-by-street fight for the Iraqi capital.
From Stalingrad, Manila and Seoul to Beirut, Grozny and Mogadishu, the history of what the United States marines call Mout — military operations on urbanised terrain, known to the British as Fibua (fighting in built-up areas) — is one of massive civilian and military casualties with incendiary effects on public opinion back home.
The Pentagon’s gravest nightmare in Baghdad would be what is coming to be known as a ”mega-Mogadishu”, hundreds of times worse than in 1993, when rebel fighters triumphantly dragged the corpses of US servicemen through the Somali capital, prompting a humiliating withdrawal.
Its own bible on the topic, the 150-page doctrine for joint urban operations, reminds readers of the bloody, drawn-out battle for the Vietnamese city of Hue in 1968, which resulted, after four weeks, in the US seizing control of just seven city blocks.
”Nearly all operations in urban areas … take significantly longer than expected,” the doctrine warns.
In training exercises in the swamps of Louisiana, where the marines have built a mock city to practice urban combat, soldiers playing the enemy routinely ”kill” or ”injure” 60% of the invading force.
”The Iraqis have chosen to try to fight in an urban area because they can — it’s the one area where our advantages are somewhat negated,” said Colonel Gary Anderson, a retired US marine who has trained soldiers for urban combat.
The narrow streets of Baghdad would render useless much of the advanced technology championed by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, while bringing into sharp focus the coalition’s political need to avoid major civilian casualties. It would be, as one US colonel put it, like a knife fight in a phone booth.
The biggest advantage the Iraqi forces will have is a relatively intimate knowledge of the ”unseen battlefield” inside homes and buildings, on rooftops and beneath the streets.
”It’s no secret that our intelligence-gathering capabilities are very limited [in Baghdad],” said Colonel Randy Gangle, who, as director of the Centre for Emerging Threats and Opportunities, a marines think-tank, has devised much of the forces’ urban training.
To attempt to counter this, marines in Baghdad are expected to deploy the Dragon Eye, a hand-launched miniature airplane with a 115cm wingspan that can peer around corners.
US strategists freely acknowledge that they are borrowing much of their thinking from the British, with the experience of three decades in Northern Ireland and 10 years of peacekeeping from the Balkans to Africa.
The British model views the city not as a single military objective, but as a series of bite-sized chunks. After the first chunk is taken, forces move in to consolidate their control, setting up strongholds used as launchpads for the attack on the next chunk.
”It’s very much like viewing the city as a chessboard,” said Garth Whitty, a retired lieutenant colonel and now a defence analyst. ”You move into one square, you hold it and you use it as a base to move on to the next square. You have to be patient.”
Gangle said gathering intelligence to counter the Iraqi regime’s tactic of
basing military command points among civilians was already happening in Iraq.
”The key is starting to develop intelligence from the population — patrols can go in, and clandestinely talk with people and say, ‘We don’t want you to expose yourselves, but we do want you to tell us who the bad guys are, and we’ll go deal with them.’ As people begin to realise that they can provide information without repercussion, the effect will grow exponentially. It’s not this room-by-room, building-clearing thing that we used to do.”
The benefits of firepower are limited: blasting buildings with artillery or air strikes may take out any enemy positions, but it also creates debris that has to be negotiated and which offers cover for enemy forces. This means urban warfare is infantry-intensive.
”It’s rifles and bayonets stuff,” one senior British trainer said. Troops ”get tired fighting at this sort of intensity. It’s not just physically exhausting, it’s mentally exhausting.”
In Iraq, there will be one major difference from previous urban warfare situations: the stated objective of minimising civilian casualties.
”You have immediately changed the rules to your disadvantage because you have to be more selective about targets but also you subject your people to greater danger,” Whitty said.
The controversial alteration to US rules of engagement seen outside the cities of Iraq — where troops are cleared to fire on approaching civilians if they fear a suicide attack and cannot make them halt — would be much more fraught inside Baghdad. ”It’s one thing to have a defensive position and say, ‘You may not come any closer,”’ said Gangle, ”but it’s a different scenario when you’re patrolling a city and people are coming into close contact all the time.”
In this chaos, it will be virtually impossible for commanders to keep track of everything going on on the ground, so the British approach is to devolve command to the lowest possible level. Tactical decisions on the ground will be taken by the patrol commanders. ”The principle is intent,” Gangle said. ”You expect, even if you lose contact, your subordinates to continue to operate within your intent.”
But some British military experts argue that the Americans may be less prepared for this kind of structure since their training focuses on implementing a gameplan decided by senior officers.
”The British troops will have got their heads around what is expected of them before they hit the ground,” said John MacKinlay, a former senior British officer. ”The American GI, by contrast, will have been brought up in a total war machine.” — Â