- 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 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."
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- 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 US marines
call Mout - military operations on urbanised terrain, known to the British
as Fibua, for fighting in built-up areas - is one of massive civilian and
military casualties with incendiary effects on public opinion back home.
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- 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 American servicemen through the Somali capital, prompting a
humiliating US withdrawal. Its own bible on the topic, the 150-page doctrine
for joint urban operations, published in September, reminds readers of
the bloody, drawn-out battle for the central Vietnamese city of Hue in
1968 which resulted, after four weeks, in the US seizing control of just
seven city blocks. And there are troubling reminders of conflicts in Beirut
and Lebanon, where battling forces sometimes fought room-by-room for control
of individual hotels and apartment blocks.
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- "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.
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- "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 fought
in Somalia and has trained soldiers for urban combat.
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- The narrow streets of Baghdad would render useless much
of the advanced technology championed by 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.
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- 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 thinktank, 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 45in wingspan that can peer around corners.
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- American strategists freely acknowledge that they are
borrowing much of their thinking this time round from the British, with
the experience of three decades in Northern Ireland and 10 years of peacekeeping
from the Balkans to Africa.
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- The British model views the city not as single military
objective, but as a series of bite-sized chunks, perhaps as small as a
single building or a street. 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. At the same time, it is essential to
build relationships with the local population in the chunks already taken.
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- "It's very much like viewing the city as a chessboard,"
said Garth Whitty, a retired lieutenant-colonel and now a defence analyst
at the Royal United Services Institute in London. "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."
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- Col 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 clan destinely 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."
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- The benefits of firepower are limited: blasting buildings
with artillery or air strikes may take out any enemy positions, but it
also creates debris which 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."
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- 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," Mr Whitty said.
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- 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 cannot make them halt and fear a suicide attack - 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 Col Gangle,
"but it's a different scenario when you're patrolling a city and people
are coming into close contact all the time."
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- 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, usually corporals
or lance corporals. "The principle is intent," Col Gangle said.
"You expect, even if you lose contact, your subordinates to continue
to operate within your intent."
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- 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.
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- "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 and now a research fellow at Kings College's
centre for war studies. "The American GI, by contrast, will have been
brought up in a total war machine."
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- The disastrous consequences of getting it wrong were
illustrated in the Russian military's attempts to take the city of Grozny
in 1994 and 2000.
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- General Alexander Vladimirov, vice-president of the Association
of Military Experts and an infantry specialist, said Russian experiences
during Grozny's first assault in December 1994 showed how vital it was
to properly reconnoitre the city before an assault, using scale models
based on satellite photographs. "Our reconnaissance was absolutely
ineffective in Grozny in 1994," he said. "We did not work out
where the enemy had placed the snipers, machine guns and RPGs. I think
the same thing will apply to Baghdad." The failed first operation
against Grozny led to its carpet bombing in January 1995.
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- For the second siege, five years later, a humanitarian
corridor was left open so the population could flee. "We warned them
to get out," said Gen Vladimirov, and "honestly told them we
would flatten the city. We waited for a long time."
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- And yet despite extensive planning by the Russian army,
based on their past mistakes, Russian assault groups were still cut to
pieces as they entered Grozny in 2000 by rebels targeting their tank columns,
picking off vehicles one by one.
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- Babylon, 5th century BC
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- According to Greek historian Herodotus, Persian forces
under their king Cyrus captured Babylon in 539BC by diverting the Euphrates
and entering the city's 350ft-high walls through the river bed while its
inhabitants were busy holding a festival.
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- Seventeen years later, the Persian king Darius required
a more dramatic ploy to retake Babylon when its inhabitants rebelled against
his rule. A Persian called Zophyrus came up with a drastic plan. After
cutting off his own ears and nose and lacerating his body, he went to the
Babylonians and told them Darius was responsible for his injuries, then
volunteered to help them defend the city.
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- With Zophyrus' help the Babylonians repelled assaults
on three of the city's five gates. But this was all part of the ploy to
make them trust him. When the real Persian assault was launched on the
fourth and fifth gates, Zophyrus let Darius's forces in and the city was
taken.
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- Stalingrad, 1942
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- After a month of intense fighting in September 1942,
the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army seized control of 90% of Stalingrad.
But on a frontline on the banks of the Volga, the defence of the city was
fierce, with Red Army troops and civilians fighting from fortress-like
concrete buildings.
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- While the Germans were bogged down the Soviets secretly
built up forces around their flanks. In November a counteroffensive was
launched which, within five days, sealed off the Germans inside the city.
By the time the 6th Army surrendered on January 31 1943, 200,000 of its
number had been killed.
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- Berlin, 1945
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- More than 70,000 Red Army soldiers were killed in the
final battle for Berlin, but the 90,000 defenders and the civilian population
bore the brunt of the horror.
-
- After the Wehrmacht's 9th Army was massacred in a forest
south of Berlin as it retreated to defend the capital, more than 1 million
Red Army soldiers, equipped with 6,000 tanks and 40,000 artillery pieces,
punched their way into the city. Though the Germans put up resistance using
bazookas against the vulnerable tanks, the result was a foregone conclusion.
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- On April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker,
and by May 2 the Reichstag had fallen and Berlin surrendered.
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- Hue, Vietnam, 1968
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- The North Vietnamese army captured Hue, 45 miles south
of the demilitarised zone, in a surprise attack during the Tet offensive
in January 1968. As the former imperial capital, the city was of enormous
cultural significance.
-
- This, and the city's South Vietnamese population, made
the Americans reluctant to bombard the North Vietnamese positions. In their
bid to retake the city, the US became embroiled in some of the most intense
street fighting of the war. After three weeks, air strikes and artillery
shelling were eventually used to repel the North Vietnamese force, but
not before an estimated 10,000 people had been killed and many of the city's
historic buildings destroyed.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,928456,00.html
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