Megacity Warfare

An article from ARMY Magazine.

“Dense urban terrain favors the defender,” said Col. Kevin Felix, chief of the Future Warfare Division at the Army Capabilities Integration Center. That’s why “in the past, in the central plains of Europe, you would fix and bypass a city,” he said. 

The world is changing, though, and that doctrine is being re-examined. The Army has become convinced that urban combat soon will be unavoidable, and when it happens, it will occur on a scale that the Army has never experienced. The reason? Megacities, or cities with a population of 10 million or more. 

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The rise of megacities creates “all kinds of challenges” for the Army, Rothenberg said.
The Strategic Studies Group warned that the battles in Baghdad were “small in comparison to the challenges ahead.” By 2030, the group’s report said, there will be 37 cities that are two to four times bigger than Baghdad. 

Many—likely most—megacities won’t be a problem for the Army. New York, Tokyo, London and Beijing will no doubt remain stable, thriving economic and cultural centers. Other megacities, however, will struggle, choked by overcrowding, pollution, poverty, crime and ethnic strife. 

For many residents of those megacities, basic necessities will be scarce. Drinkable water, electricity and housing will be in short supply. Medical care will be sporadic and food supplies inadequate. “Many emerging megacities are ill-prepared to accommodate the kind of explosive growth they are experiencing,” according to the report. 

Governing will be difficult as gangs, criminals and rival militias carve out their own territories and challenge municipal authorities. Stark inequality between the rich and the poor, and racial, ethnic and cultural differences will all contribute to instability. 

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Some equipment and technology that give the Army its margin of superiority on today’s battlefields won’t be as effective in megacities. Tanks and armored vehicles will have trouble negotiating cramped streets and alleys. Long-range weapons and sensors designed to detect enemies at a distance will be less useful in close urban quarters. Surveillance drones won’t be able to see insurgents hiding in buildings or in underground tunnels. Helicopters will be vulnerable to shoulder-fired missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Artillery will kill too many civilians to be a viable weapon. And logistics—getting food, medicine and other supplies in and casualties out—will be problematic, said Ben FitzGerald, director of the Technology and National Security Program at Center for a New American Security.  

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“A city can ingest an invading army, paralyze it for weeks on end, and grind it down to a state of ineffectiveness,” Shunk warned, quoting Christopher R. Gabel in Combined Arms in Battle Since 1939, released by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1992. 

Felix, of the Future Warfare Division, calls that “the tyranny of scale.” Megacities are gigantic. “You can’t just pour brigade after brigade into a megacity. They’ll just get swallowed up,” he said after a megacity war game last August. 

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Megacities will call for “more ISR, lots of tactical ISR,” Goure said, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors, as well as “much more precision firepower,” communications equipment that’s designed to operate in urban canyons, more effective IED defeat systems and better close-combat weapons. 

Meanwhile, the Army’s urban warfare doctrine needs to be rewritten, the Strategic Studies Group said. Attempting to isolate a megacity by controlling its perimeter won’t work. “Physically controlling an urban population consisting of tens of millions of people spread over hundreds of square miles with military forces numbering in the tens of thousands” is unrealistic, the group said. In addition, “virtual isolation” is unlikely because of the vast connectivity available through cellphones and the Internet. 

“Ground maneuver from the periphery is also unrealistic,” the group went on to say. The combination of urban congestion and the enormous size of megacities “makes even getting to an objective from the periphery questionable, let alone achieving an operational effect,” the group said. “The scale of megacities, in essence, defies the military’s ability to apply historical methods.”

However, another group argues that the military can avoid having to control a city--simply send troops in as needed to fix a particular problem, a la, Blackhawk Down. Anyway, read the whole thing.

The military has known of this issue for some time. The field manual on Urban Combat discusses this very issue from at least the early 1990's version. Thus, it is been confusing to me that seemingly little attention has been paid to the urban warfare of WWII and the lessons learned there, especially the liberal use of hand grenades.