Army senior leaders are closely studying current conflicts for clues to how future urban warfare will be fought, but say the service is fundamentally unprepared for the megacity battles some foresee.
Not only has the Army focused on counterinsurgency during the wars of the past 15 years, it is structured and equipped for open-field fighting, said Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Its veteran combat units are used to fighting with overwhelming firepower against relatively unsophisticated opponents under skies clear of enemy aircraft.
In a larger war against a near-peer or state adversary, the Army must be trained and equipped to fight in “very rugged, urban, complex terrain.”
“In that environment, especially with lethality and capability we see with precision munitions, the likelihood of massing forces on a base for any length of time … you’re going to get killed,” Milley said April 4 at a forum hosted by the Atlantic Council at the Army-Navy Club in Washington, D.C. “If you’re stationary, you’ll die. Your logistics lines and lines of communication will be under intense risk.”
In such an environment, the Army could not rely on air supremacy or freedom of communication it has enjoyed during the past 15 years of war. The electromagnetic spectrum, including sensor and communications capabilities will be degraded if not completely disrupted, Milley said.
“I would argue those conditions are intense and very, very Spartan and we are going to condition ourselves to operate – untether ourselves from this umbilical cord of logistics and supply that American forces have enjoyed for a very lengthy period of time … It’ll be brutal. It’ll be hard. It’ll be tough. We have to condition our forces to that and expect that. Anything beyond that is luxury.”
Clues to what such a future conflict would look like are available in current wars like the anti-Islamic State fight in Iraq and Syria. The Army is collecting detailed information about how the battle for Mosul is unfolding, for instance, Milley said. The siege of Aleppo also was closely studied.
Those contemporary battles must be extrapolated to resemble what a war might be like in a modern megacity like Moscow, Beijing or Seoul. Mosul had a pre-war population of about 650,000 people. More than 23 million people now live in Seoul, the world’s fifth-most-populous city.
“Today, you are seeing the previews, you are seeing the movie trailers of future conflict … in Mosul, in Fallujah, in Aleppo,” Milley said. “But, just remember that Mosul is not even a neighborhood in Seoul. So, the scale and scope – you are seeing miniature versions of what might come.”
“It’s incumbent upon me, the Department of Defense and other senior leaders to make sure that we are capturing the lessons of what we see happening today out in the world and not fight the last war,” he added. “We’re doing that on a systematic basis.”