Urban Warfare

Urban warfare refers to combat occurring in a built environment of some significant size. It is sometimes referred to as Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) or as Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA). It is widely considered to be particularly challenging. Partly this is because of the inherent complexity of the built environment, which taxes the ability of commanders to apprehend the battlespace, to lead their own forces effectively, and to judge the location and intent of enemy forces accurately. Partly it is because of the presence of civilians and sensitive civilian infrastructure (i.e., places of worship, hospitals, museums, etc.) in the battlespace, which limits the choice of tactics and weapons available to commanders for fear of violating laws of armed conflict. Partly it is because cities are nodes in global networks of trade and communications, as a result of which the consequences of tactical decisions may propagate widely and quickly to significant strategic effect. Sun Tzu advised fighting in cities only if “absolutely necessary, as a last resort,” a rule to which statesmen and commanders have tried to adhere to this day. However, on account of long-term trends in demographics, urbanization, and connectedness the major armed forces of the world have been preoccupied with a postulated unavoidability of urban warfare. Military doctrines and strategies often now start from the assumption that the future of land operations will increasingly be centered on urban terrain. The literature on urban warfare is quite segmented by discipline, normative outlook, particular areas of concern, and some fundamental points of disagreement. Researchers in urban studies detect in the growing military focus on operating in cities a “new military urbanism” that is by nature neo-colonialist, xenophobic, and “anti-urban.” The job of activist scholarship, in this view, is to expose and confront this development. In war and strategic studies, by contrast, scholars are interested in solving the challenges of urban warfare, including through the use of theories derived from disciplines like urban studies, anthropology, geography, and informatics. There is a further division between analysts who see urban warfare as an essentially modern phenomenon whose meaningful history stretches not much further back than the Second World War, and those who see war and the city as interlinked with relevant lessons going back as far as the origins of both.