Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King

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Figure 1.2: Çatalhöyük

      Source: Çatalhöyük Research Project (http://www.catalhoyuk.com/).

      The Assyrian Empire of the seventh century BCE illustrates this process. Between 711 and 627 BCE, Assyria attained dominance in the region under a succession of powerful kings: Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. The recent battle of Mosul raged around their palaces in Nineveh. From the late eighth century, Assyrian kings engaged in a series of successful campaigns against their Elamite and Babylonian rivals, defeating them in battle and sacking their cities. The extraordinary murals in Ashurbanipal’s palace include detailed depictions of successful sieges. Having taken Babylon, Ashurbanipal attacked Elam and eventually besieged and took the royal city of Hamanu. One of the friezes shows Assyrian soldiers climbing ladders, while others, protecting themselves with shields, undermine the walls. The corpses of Elamite soldiers sink in the river.²³

Siege warfare and urban fortification reached a very high level of development in the Mesopotamian Bronze and Iron Ages, then. Similar developments are observable in other major pristine civilizations of the Americas, China and India. All agrarian city-states were able to generate hitherto unachievable concentrations of military power. They built and fortified very large cities, but were also able to besiege, assault and sack their enemies’ cities. Later, around the fourth century BCE, states developed sophisticated siege engines and catapults. The power of the Roman Empire, for instance, rested not primarily in the superiority of the Roman legions in open battle but in their unique ability to build fortifications in the field and to take apparently impregnable fortresses like Alesia, Maiden Castle and Masada. Urban warfare certainly reached a higher level of sophistication and intensity in the era of great ancient agrarian empires in the Middle East and Mediterranean from 3000 BCE to the fall of Rome in 476 CE. However, urban warfare was already established, when the Greeks and Romans perfected the art of siege warfare.

      Urban warfare is, then, as old as cities themselves. The sad conclusion must be that from the moment humans, as aggressive, intelligent and highly social primates, began to live in urban settlements, they also began to fight each other for them and to kill each other in them. Indeed, while it might be comforting to preserve a pacific vision of early human urban evolution, evidence suggests that warfare was in fact always an integral part of city life. From the outset, urban settlements were primarily defined by the wall that surrounded them and protected their inhabitants. The city may well have been the cradle of civilization; but it was also the crucible of war.

Understanding Contemporary Urban Warfare

Urban warfare is ancient. Its long provenance is widely recognized by commentators today. Yet it has, once again, come to prominence in the early twenty-first century. Clearly, the reappearance of the urban battle has engendered deep concern, not only among the armed forces who have to fight in this dangerous and difficult terrain, but also among politicians, political leaders, humanitarian agencies and, of course, citizens themselves. Many towns and cities have been destroyed – often irrevocably – in recent decades; huge numbers of civilians have been killed, wounded or displaced. The suffering has been truly terrible. There seems little doubt that urban conflict and warfare will continue to proliferate in the coming decades. It will remain a global issue, affecting the lives of millions, threatening major political, economic and cultural centres. If the political and social implications of the rise of urban warfare are so profound, it cannot be dismissed as a technical military issue. On the contrary, precisely because urban warfare always involves large civilian populations, it is imperative that policymakers, scholars, humanitarians, commentators and the general public all understand the realities of such conflicts.

      How is it possible to understand urban warfare today, though? This is very difficult. Urban warfare is a complex and diverse phenomenon. No two battles are exactly alike; each one is bewildering in itself. As a general phenomenon, it is even harder to capture the character of urban warfare today with any fidelity. It is a prodigious political, social, military and intellectual challenge. Nevertheless, whatever the obstacles, it is necessary to try at least to comprehend the anatomy of the urban battle.

      Contemporary scholarship on urban warfare is the best place to start. Two broad schools of thought are observable in the literature today and it is useful to look at each of them in turn. On the one hand, some scholars and military professionals emphasize the novelty of urban conflict today. They believe that a profound military transformation – even an urban revolution – has occurred, altering the very character of contemporary military operations in cities. Disturbed by the vast metropolises in which forces now operate, they declare that urban military challenge is without precedent. Richard Norton’s 2003 article, ‘Feral Cities’, might be taken as a seminal moment in this catastrophic vision of the urban future:

      Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense Petri dish of both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain sciencefiction genres.²⁴

For Norton, the feral city of the future presents the armed forces with a totally new predicament. Since military forces might have to fight in human settlements of a size never seen before, future urban operations will be without historic parallel. Norton is not alone in having such thoughts. On the contrary, the claim of originality is, perhaps, most apparent in recent discussions about war in megacities of 10 million inhabitants or more: ‘While urban combat operations are not new, a megacity presents old challenges at a previously unimaginable scale and complexity.’²⁵ Here, mere quantity gains a quality all of its own. Others have confirmed the sheer difficulty of operating in large urban areas. They claim that the urban environment has become the hardest of all theatres.²⁶ For these scholars and practitioners, the sheer scale and complexity of cities in the early twenty-first century has revolutionized urban operations. For them, urban warfare today is a radical historic СКАЧАТЬ