Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Great Equalizer: Irregular Warfare in the City

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

Subscribe to the IWI monthly newsletter by going to www.irregularwarfare.org! This episode explores the interplay between urban spaces and irregular warfare. Our guests are John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and Sergeant Major Charles Ritter, deputy commondant of the Noncommissioned Officer Academy at the US Army's JFK Special Warfare Center and School. They begin by examining how demographic and economic shifts are increasing the importance of urban centers around the globe. They then explore the realities of urban combat and discuss the ways that densely populated areas and local politics can complicate irregular warfare activities, including the question of whether urban spaces favor the insurgent or the government. They end by discussing how the United States can address shortcomings in its force structure and training to optimize its approach to urban conflict in the twenty-first century. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

But it is the highest order question is how was the second most powerful military defeated by a few thousand military and tens of thousands of civilians in a city of three million? And it wasn't that they didn't know how to fight inside buildings. It was that urban includes the buildings, the people and the infrastructure. And in Ukraine, the actual government turned the infrastructure into a weapon and then weaponized the people. Man, this stuff has been written down forever. Like T.E. Lawrence's old saying of, hey, don't try to do too much with your own hands, right? Let the Arabs solve the Arab problem.

Because what you think is going to be practical and work is not going to actually work in reality for them, right? We keep trying to apply these Western solutions to other people's problems throughout the world and it never works because everybody thinks differently than we do. When it comes to regular warfare in an urban environment, it's no different. We go into these urban environments and we try to apply our mindset to fixing this problem, and it always bites us in the ass. Welcome to episode 64 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell, and my co-host today is Ben Jebb. Today's episode explores the interplay between urban spaces and irregular warfare.

Our guests today begin by examining how demographic and economic shifts are increasing the importance of urban centers around the globe. They then explore the realities of city combat and discuss the ways that densely populated areas and local politics can complicate irregular warfare activities. Finally, they end by discussing how the U.S. can address shortcomings in its force structure and training to optimize its approach to urban conflict in the 21st century. John Spencer has served over 25 years in the Army as an infantry soldier and currently chairs the Urban Warfare Studies Program at the Modern War Institute at West Point and is host of the Urban Warfare podcast. His new book, Understanding Urban Warfare, which he co-authored with Dr. Liam Collins,

serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Sergeant Major Charles Ritter is a Special Forces soldier and currently serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Sergeant Major Charles Ritter is a Special Forces soldier and currently serves as the Deputy Commandant of the Non-Commissioned Officer Academy at the U.S. Army's Special Warfare School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is also the producer of the Pineland Underground podcast and has over 12 combat deployments with extensive experience in leading U.S. soldiers in urban environments. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton University Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point,

dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with John Spencer and Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter. conversation with John Spencer and Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter. John Spencer, Chuck Ritter, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. We're very excited to have you join us today. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Kyle. So our motivation today is to understand the interaction between urban warfare and irregular warfare in modern and future conflict. John, you recently wrote a book with Liam Collins, who's also a previous guest on the podcast called Understanding Urban Warfare, which addresses this

topic. In your book, you specifically cite a statistic that in 1950, 30% of the world's population lived in cities, but by 2020, it had nearly doubled to 56%. So I'm guessing that's a demographic driver toward urban conflict. The world is urban. Most of the developed world is over 80% urban. In 2008, we went as a globe, more urban than rural. Urban combat or the application of force to achieve political objectives in urban areas is unavoidable. It is harder and harder to find somewhere that violence is going to happen that is not urbanized. But I want to point out that there's a definition for urban. Just by the US

military's definition of urban, it means that you have man-made terrain, so buildings. And that's usually where some people think about. But it also means that you have a population and you have the infrastructure to support a population. So just in that saying, we're going to continue to fight wars, to fight battles, to fight all elements of warfare in urban areas where there's going to be a lot of mixture of combatants, non-combatants, participants, partisans, you name it. That complexity is the dominant feature of our present. Think about Ukraine, think about anywhere around the feature of our present. Think about Ukraine. Think about anywhere around the world and our future.

Yeah, and a concept that you cite in your book also is David Kilcullen's four emerging trends, which include population growth, which you cited, urbanization, literalization, and network connectivity. Can you just explain a little bit about literalization and network connectivity and how that might drive future conflict? Right. So David's a close friend, and that's one of the chapters in our book, revisiting his book called Out of the Mountains, which was written over a decade ago. And those themes of the world's become more urbanized, more littoralized as in of the major urban areas or any nations that they have to be near water. They're usually around coastlines, and there's a figure that's really debatable whether that is around the world, but they're connected, and they need that littoral aspects in the actual population survival and the growth of a city, which now you have places in Asia and other places around the world where cities are merging into other cities along

coastlines. So that increased littoralization as people move towards the littoral, to the coast of a nation is very prominent. And then the aspect of connectedness is the evolution of globalization, right? Is that it's really hard, although there are some still up in the world, that a city is not connected in the people of the city to the local, regional, national, and global community, whether that's economic or through the information space, which I know you guys have talked about often, but it's connected. Every time you enter an urban area, as a military practitioner or as a political leader, it's connected in unmeasurable ways. So to both the global economy, to the global community, to itself, and that's what we've experienced. And that's nothing new. It's just the increased nature of that starts to compress in wars and in combat. Chuck, you've had multiple combat deployments spanning the globe as an Army Special Forces

non-commissioned officer. How prominent has the role of urban combat been in your experience? And from your perch as the leader of the NCO Academy at Fort Bragg, how are you training our future leaders for urban warfare? So obviously I'm an educator now, but I'm a practitioner, right? So over 12 combat deployments, I'd say the majority of our operations, if we're going to use John's definition of urban, have been in an urban environment. Because again, a lot of what we consider rural in the United States is urban when you're over there because it's very connected to houses. It might not be a city, but it's a small village.

And it's a very dense population by our standards if everybody was living together and the vast majority of what you're doing are in those environments even if you're not doing it directly maybe i'm not on the ground with a bunch of people blowing doors kicking in doors doing whatever but i'm influencing that urban population somehow because the reality is and i'm sure we'll get into the rural versus the urban guerrilla, maybe you're living in the rural areas, but everything happens, the decision making happens in urban areas. So that's what you have to influence, right? Can I ask Chuck, I mean, you are there kind of at the heart of where the Army Special

Operations Forces do training and educating. Are you seeing that urban warfare has made itself into the curriculum for the special operations community? Or, you know, John brings up in his book that there is no national urban training center for the Army. Are we doing this right? The majority of the courses aren't dealing with urban training, right? When you go to Robin Sage, it's all in rural areas, training to operate with guerrillas in this environment that's not necessarily in a city or a village. But I would say in the 18 Alpha course, which are special forces officers, they're doing a very good job of planning around the urban environment to where all your key terrain is in an urban

environment. And then they're not using the term threshold of violence. They're using the term threshold of resistance, which is saying, okay, if I'm going to orchestrate these strikes or i'm going to orchestrate these um college students doing this like if we go back to like like serbia 1999 2000 right like we mobilized that for it's called the optor right there like this uh this college group of people that became the biggest resistance force in the country we toppled uh milosevic right like that was successful that. But then the threshold of resistance is at what point does the government say, okay, this is being orchestrated by somebody, right? And who is it? They are teaching that and they do go through that with the special forces officers. It's not prevalent throughout the

rest of the course. It's probably something that we need to wrap our heads around and maybe fix a little bit. I'll ask the same question at the broader military level, John, because you don't just look at the army. I'm sure you're familiar with kind of across the services, how the United States is preparing for urban warfare. The U.S. military needs an office dedicated to the urban environment. There isn't one. There's not one office in the Pentagon that is dedicated to only urban environments. In 2014, we had the Joint Forces Command, which had an office that was the Office of Urban Operations, which was closed when Joint Forces Command closed. And you no longer had that executive agent, highest level thinking about achieving national interests when it's specific

to the urban environments. There's a lot of issues with that. And you know from the book, when you get down to services, right? We all have mountain warfare school, Arctic warfare school, you name it, of all the special environments. What happens when urban is not the special environment? Urban is the most likely inevitable environment of combat. I'll just say that with that, with the urban schools that we do have, they're all focused on counterterrorism, right? So I don't know of one urban school that we have that's not focused on direct action, counterterrorism type operations. Right. Which is kind of mind blowing, right? Many urban battles of history were lost before they were started. They were lost in planning. And I can think of no other battle than the Battle of Kiev in 2022. Russia lost that battle on planning for an urban operation.

It didn't lose it in clearing rooms or any tactical aspect. Of course, it lost tactical fights, but that was a failure in planning. No, and we don't plan for that at all. And I think relative to mass in the urban environment is that, when I look back to my infantry days, we went like, oh, well, if you get this many people in a building, then you can't continue because then you need backup. That's not the reality in the urban environment. Your relative mass now becomes something where you have to be spread out and be very decentralized if you're in a kinetic environment to achieve victory.

And they need reconnaissance too, which I don't think the Russians, you know more about this than I do, but I don't think when they went to Kiev, they had a whole lot of insight into what they were even getting into on the front line. But it is the highest order of question is how was the second most powerful military defeated by a few thousand military and tens of thousands of civilians in a city of three million. And it wasn't that they didn't know how to fight inside buildings. It was that urban includes the buildings, the people, and the infrastructure. And in Ukraine, the actual government turned the infrastructure into a weapon and then weaponized the people. So we've discussed the different trends that seem to point to urban combat as being here to stay for the foreseeable future.

And urban warfare is definitely one of those concepts that draws a lot of attention in the academic world. So from a theoretical perspective, is there an important distinction between urban guerrillas and rural guerrillas? And what are some of the differences between waging conflict in urban terrain versus rural spaces? The rural space has always offered an insurgent a safe haven and the ability to project combat power outside of the mountains. In the urban areas, the state usually has a lot of power to employ against a smaller insurgent force. So historically, urban insurgencies don't win, but history is still being written.

Never separate the political aspects of an insurgencies don't win, but history is still being written. Never separate the political aspects of an insurgency. And I know this is what you guys study, but I think the age of the urban insurgent is just still being started, right? As the urban insurgent understands how to influence the people to impose power outside of what used to be considered an insurgent primary tool. Information is the primary tool of an insurgent and the information is influencing these massive population in a very condensed area. So I think that the story is still to be written there. Yeah. I mean, we're talking about the impact of the rise of urban warfare and just urban spaces on a regular warfare campaigns. John, you mentioned that insurgents

tend to lose in cities historically, although you say that that could always change, right? But they are able to kind of reestablish themselves and continue the fight through the use of rural safe havens. From the perspective of countering insurgents, how important is it to hold the city versus holding the periphery or holding the rural spaces? Yeah. So I have my own personal experiences from that. It depends on what you consider the, and I don't like to use some of these terms, but the source of power of the insurgent or the state. Whether I need to control the center depends on what the military objective is of both sides, right? So like when Russia was attacking Ukraine,

with all the elements of military power, there was one objective, to get to the center, to get to the seat of political power. So in a city against an insurgent, of course, the center is usually the seat of political power. So controlling that is important because you are protecting at the same time you are attacking. That's nothing new in counterinsurgency you have to protect populations while you identify the insurgents so i i would vote absolutely the center and i'll say that when you talk when you think about the center too i'm going to go back to califar i was there as a special forces young e6 with hr mcmaster's third armored cavalry regiment the geographical center of the city was this place called the Castle.

It was the highest point in the city, and we controlled it. And out of the entire Armored Calvary Regiment, they did not control that city. The insurgent did, and they controlled it very well for about eight months until finally McMaster said, hey, I've lost 60-plus people. I'm tired of this. I'm going to build a Burma on the city.

We're going to bring in two battalions of Kurdish forces. We're going to start from the south. We're going to give you seven days to get out. We're going to clear the city, right? So when you wrap your heads around control as well, it's not what you think it is. You can physically have forces everywhere and still not control that urban area.

Yeah, I mean, this is the element of key terrain. The cities usually become the strategic, operational, and tactical objective because of what's in them. This belief that warfare is about military versus enemy and the environment doesn't matter as much isn't facing the reality of the wars that we fight or will have to fight. And that's where I come into play with the urban environment. It is an actor in the war as much as the actual enemy. And we know that, right? The population, the influence and the will, the control of the government, it's urban. A concept that came out in our last episode was that when the French wanted to help the Malian government, they were able to kind of take over the cities like pretty quickly with just large injections of force. But then what happened is all of the insurgents went out to the rural areas. And now we have this grinding insurgency that's been going on, you know, since 2015, essentially.

And when it comes to Western countries exerting their power, are we good at taking over the cities because we can apply force, but do the rural areas provide particular trouble as far as combating insurgents? Or you might, I don't know, John, if you have examples where actually even with force, we can't take over cities because insurgency, because turning over the population is too difficult. The issue with understanding past battles is first starting with the political objective. We have absolutely struggled in urban areas. First Battle of Fallujah, things like that, where we don't understand both the population at the level we need to, we don't understand all the power actors, and we don't understand the actual urban terrain. So there's plenty of times that we have approached an objective in urban environments and gotten it wrong. There are many that we've also gotten done very well, right? The application of joint forces, nobody's going to do better than the US

military, like the drive to Baghdad, the fall of Kabul, you name it, in these opening elements of a war. But you're right. It's the day after that we usually don't get right because of understanding the urban environments, how they're interconnected and in every country it's going to be different. Militaries and policymakers want a framework. They want a model, right? Whether that's a model of international relations, whether that's a model of nuclear warfare or an application of taking a city, people want a model which, okay, this is all hard, but I want a model, whether it's the way to attack a city, to defend a city, whether it's a way to conduct a regime change, everybody wants a model in their head and they want that model to be simplified.

That's the problem with urban warfare is as the world becomes more complex, we still want to avoid all of our training, all of our war games. Most of them are rule-based. We are interacting in the rule across the dot mil PS spectrum, the doctrine the the training the actual policies because that's the issue with urban warfare is that the application of force will be constrained and militaries don't often want to take that into factor from day one i want to hit on what you said about models right so we are very good at overruling firepower like our drive to bagged i would say we are unmatched with our ability to use combined arms to achieve an objective. But then we get to that after part where we want those models.

We always apply these Western models to what victory looks like, and that's where we become overwhelmed because not only do you have the political, but then you have religious and you have tribal affiliations in all these areas. On top of our definition of urban versus their definition of urban is completely different. And it confuses us and we can never seem to wrap our head around it, even though we can go all the way back to like T.E. Lawrence when he described it. We always seem to just ignore that. Right. And then we can't comprehend it for some reason. can't comprehend it for some reason. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think one of the best examples I've ever, I use when I, when I present about this stuff is a, it's a map of Baghdad that was found on Zakhari. They called it, you know, pocket litter. It was a map of Baghdad, which once they,

it made it up the Intel chain, got to general Petraeus. It completely changed the application of us military forces because the enemy understood the capital city better than we did. Its support networks, the way it worked, and they had actually drawn that out. You don't often need to attack into a city to influence a city. It's such a great example of the city will matter. We are enemy centric. So we want to understand the enemy because understanding the city and all its essential services to who owns power at the moment, how those powers could be co-opted, that's hard, right? That's a harder level of war fighting. It's actually the future though. That complexity, that difficulty is the future.

And that's why chuck i really like the question about you know most of our urban training military wide focuses on shooting and breaching not understanding an urban environment yeah i'll just give an example here in talifar iraq we were at the castle in the middle of the city we're planning on doing some direct action operations but we stopped because a mini civil warvil war broke out in the city, and my first inclination was like, okay, maybe this is religious. No, it wasn't religious at all. It was two Sunni populations fighting each other because they were tribal,

and they thought that the other one had ratted them out to the U.S. population, and they fought for like four or five days. It was ridiculous, and then they stopped fighting, and we finally went in there. But to this day, I can't wrap my head around that. Even talking to the Iraqis, like, explain this to me. Like, I can't explain it to you. You're not going to understand it. So there's a level of intricacy that just makes urban combat infinitely more complex,

which is kind of what we've been talking about. And I'd like to tease that out just a little further. For John, for insurgents, criminal groups, and other non-state actors, could you just go over some of the basic advantages and disadvantages of fighting in an urban area versus a more rural space? Urban areas are called the great equalizer. That's just a term, again, to simplify things so other people can understand it. So an insurgent, a non-state actor can level the playing field by pulling a powerful military into an urban area. Why is that? One, because the physical terrain degrades military capabilities. It degrades strike

capabilities. It degrades intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. It degrades literally the ability for a military to do what it thinks it wants to do, combined arms maneuver. If you're the military attacking into it, like us, the joint force, all the things that make us so powerful, not all the things, many of the things get degraded. They don't get neutralized or taken away. They get degraded. But I think really to answer the question is understanding. The enemy will likely understand the environment better than the person who's entering the environment. I had a combatant commander tell me once that at the combatant command level, he did not have

intelligence portfolio on the major cities within his theater of operations, just not the way it works. They don't have a single portfolio packet on understanding a city in itself. Even if it's a capital city, a mega city, I traveled the world and gone to country teams. Well, who understands the city? Well, that's not... I'm country focused. I don't do that.

But who are the power brokers? Who are the list of key individuals? When key terrain becomes actual individuals, like city managers and gang leaders, those could be key terrain. So the advantage is understanding the environment. Whoever does understand it better has an immense advantage. I just want to give a practical example of that understanding piece.

So Tagab, Afghanistan, 2013. It's a valley. They say, you're going to go and you're going to clear this village. We thought we understood the village very well. We had the best imagery. We looked at it. We thought we knew what we're getting ourselves into. We landed.

We cleared through this village up until from 11 o'clock at night to 6 o'clock in the morning. But once we landed, we're like, hey, hey This is not we thought it was gonna be and we had a heavily rely On some of our other sensor platforms to guide us in because we didn't know it as well as we thought we did We got to our final battle positions. They were untenable So it took us a couple hours to find places that we could use for battle positions And what we thought we had that was good Was not because at 7 o'clock in the morning The enemy was throwing hand grenades over our walls. They had gotten so close,

which a battle ensued in which I took three PKM rounds at one point in time where we thought that I was about to outflank an enemy ambush line. But the reality was because I didn't understand the city as well as they did, they were able to ambush us. And then that whole battle that day from my medevac to the rest of the day, we did not win that battle. They had us fixed because they fully understood the terrain. And even the best imagery in the world that we have the access to did not help us understand it better than they did.

So do you think it's fair to say that a lot of the things you've just mentioned, which create this fog of war, i.e. the local knowledge required, the micro-terrain considerations, things like that, i.e. the local knowledge required, the micro-terrain considerations, things like that, are they somehow exacerbated in an urban environment that makes it, if not impossible, then definitely very difficult for an external force to just come in and occupy cities? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And it's exacerbated by our Western ideals, too. So on a more macro level, it's hard for us to understand, oh, there's tribal, there's religious, there's political, and things that are just beyond comprehension, right? And then when you get down there in the micro level, I mean, those people lived there for thousands of years, right? Again, it's different than our urban definition, what they have versus what we have.

So when you get in there, it's very unfamiliar. No matter how many times you've been in there every urban environment downrange is very different it's just it's almost overwhelming to the western mind i agree and that's why doctrine to the date although now it it kind of rewards it but it's avoid and bypass avoid and bypass the urban areas in the pursuit of the enemy has always been the goal in matter of matter of fact, it even says now, avoid if you can't. But I'm saying the urban will be the objective. And I guess avoiding and bypassing a city, it depends whether you're talking about a large-scale combat operations mission or whether you're talking about essentially some kind of a regular warfare context

where the population is essential. If 50% of our populations are more living in cities, it's not like it seems like it's something that you can avoid and bypass, especially if that's the political heart of the country. Right. I personally don't separate conventional and the regular because once you enter the urban terrain, I think we have myths about what is conventional. This is your guys' expertise, but in Ukraine, if you can mobilize a population, right, that's not total resistance. It's called total defense. I know you guys have had a couple of great podcasts about that.

It's hard to put it into actual action, but if it is put into reality where you have tens of thousands of combatants, you're weaponized, you gave them weapon capability, then it won't be avoid and bypass the urban terrain. It'll be stop. And that's what happens. You get stopped. We use things like speed and power to overwhelm a combatant. But I think even in a large-scale combat operation or a low-intensity conflict, the understanding of urban terrain is the future. Whether that's like I did in Baghdad, trying to help reduce the level of violence by co-opting gangs. We just happened to call them sons of Iraq, but they were gangs that we paid to bring security to large sections of urban environments. We discussed how difficult it is to operate in urban terrain, right?

So from a pragmatic perspective, I'd like to get your take on how practitioners can organize and plan for fighting in an urban scenario. And more specifically, I'd be curious to know how you can possibly balance decentralized operations while trying to maintain centralized command and control. Great question. Fighting in urban terrain will automatically break up formations and make it a decentralized fight where the commander has to ensure that the intent is very clear, whether that's to seize, hold, clear, our words matter. That's the nature of, and again, the planning course we run is for, is for staffs who have to write those intents. But the other element I think is understanding what you will need. So absolutely it'll become decentralized, but urban fighting, urban warfare is not an infantry fight. Although we like to dominate the conversation, it is a combined arms fight. Even in the highest intensity fights, it is the commanders who understand how to integrate all the arms, artillery, fire, all the fires, armor, engineers, infantry to achieve the

objective they've been given. That takes study. That takes understanding what capabilities work. So when you decentralize teams and you build decentralized teams, you've given them the proper capabilities, right? Whether that's a drone that can see around a corner or crossing a street, which those tactical problems become operation stopping events. That's an understanding of what it takes to fight in urban terrain. And it could be, and this is the complexity of when I went to Kiev recently, it could be understanding and how to integrate other forces because that was the

complexity of a conventional or a special forces guy who was just joined by a hundred civilians saying, I'm ready to fight. There's no talking to command that there's an intent of win. And they had that ability to integrate all those different capabilities to achieve whatever the goal is they've been assigned. Yeah. So back to that intent piece,

that's the part where a lot of officers fail. You can't go mission command gone wild like Russia did in Ukraine where you had all these BTGs with no centralized intent doing whatever, right? And it's one of the reasons why they fail. But in an urban environment as a commander, if you're in charge, you have to provide that intent, which has to be very specific. You need to visualize it out and very specifically, hey, this is why we're doing it. If you do not do these key tasks, you will fail. This is what it

needs to look like at the end of the day. Here's your constraints. Here's your right and left limits, which operates on terms of graphics, right? Hey, this is your element. You're going to go in here with these 120 locals and here's your boundaries. Here's the line where you're not going to fire across until you communicate with this person over here here's your phase lines um you can still operate in there as decentralized as you see but then here's the ccr as well here's what i want to know here's what i want to know and as john said here's the resources i'm going to give you that it's going to take to do this right and here's the risk i'm willing to accept all right you guys go and plan execute but it can't just be mission command gone wild which we have seen in special operations which is like hey go conduct special operations like okay well

what the hell do you want me to do like well i'm not going to tell you but i'll yell at you when you do something i don't want you to do right um which as a whole for officers in the military just sitting down okay let me visualize this out and let me communicate this in a way to where it doesn't it's not so constrictive to where it can't be decentralized but it gives enough to where these individuals can decentralize and get to the end state everybody understands what that is right so when you get on the battlefield everybody's got the basically same vr goggles you can see like okay here's my left and right limits here's the faint lot phase lines i know i'm not going to go across this until this

x happens here's the loa blah blah blah basic'm not going to go across this until this X happens. Here's the LOA, blah, blah, blah. Basic army stuff, which works, right? It works as long as you're not too cool for it. Yeah. I mean, I guess you're talking about the need to make sure that there's a centralized intent for the application of violence, right? So we achieve kind of the commander's intent. What I realize as you're talking, it's not just the application of violence. So this also would probably apply to if you have a large city and you have a bunch of, let's just say, special operations teams throughout it, you'd also need to make sure there's a centralized intent to how they're engaging the political dynamics, right? And so I think you're right. A lot of teams get the guidance of, hey, go do great things, go do special operations. But

if there's no master plan for how to control different neighborhoods and different groups within the city, then it would be a risk of essentially decentralizing to the point of failure. Right. Let me give an example for Afghanistan real quick, and I'll probably get yelled at by this after the fact we do this. But in 2017, I went all around the country and asked all these people that were doing awesome things. And they don't have any. It's like, what is the Resolute Support Commander's intent? And nobody can answer the question. support commander's intent and nobody could answer the question so whether you agree with it or not you had all these little tactical elements doing awesome things that were never nested to something centralized that was achieving some kind of in-state political goal in afghanistan right

but thinking back to iraq i think it was the same way i can't think of one thing right now where we've been nested to a point to where you have a centralized intent that allows to deep truly decentralized execution, but it's got to start at the political level. What is the political instate in verbiage that's specific enough to where I understand it, but also ambiguous enough to where it doesn't constrain me? The urban environment is going to make everybody uncomfortable in the application of force to achieve political objectives. We've learned a lot of lessons from the past, even from counterinsurgencies to high-intensity combat. The problem is that we haven't had a culture-changing event. I can trace the evolution of urban warfare tactics to

events. We should be watching the wars that have happened in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, the potential for war in Taiwan, and gather very strong ideals about how the requirements of leaders across the DoD are going to sterilize that down to where it's simplified. But in the urban terrain, if we haven't done the work to understand the environment, it goes back to thinking that there is a blue force and a red force without an environment. In the urban environment, it will put all those concepts and your intent to the test. Because like Chuck was saying, once I hit that line, now there's all these other things,

power dynamics, an evolving mission. If you touch an urban environment, it changes in unknown ways. And we've seen this even geopolitically in wars. Once you've entered that urban terrain, and it may not be all of them, but that one specifically, that just started a cascading elements that reaches the national level. You're not even going to be in an urban environment without the world being able to watch the individual actions of units or individuals, the fight for the narrative. Like all these ideals that we talk about,

they come to the forefront in urban terrain. John, something you mentioned, which really stuck out to me was that cities are unique and that they are densely populated areas that often represent the political heart of a certain region or country. And you can't just wish away that population density or civilian considerations, right? So how does one truly address the civilian population and the local politics in an urban setting? So this is where it gets hard. Again, people want a framework, right? They want a framework in which something historically has happened, whatever the mission is, if it's regime change or if it's stability building. In the urban environment, it is different, right different because of those two other factors other than just

the terrain, the people and the infrastructure. You deal with it by building expertise. Doctrine is only as good as people read it. And there's decent urban operations. There's actually no joint urban operations because somebody made the decision not to continue it because it's too nebulous. There used to be a joint urban operations integrating concept of how to integrate joint capabilities in urban terrain to achieve the full spectrum operations. It's too hard. So how do you do it is a really tough question and why even when we teach this course out in California, we wanted, okay, let's focus only on offense and defense because stability is a likely operation as well.

But we need to build expertise and just developing the course. Like I learn every day. This stuff is hard. Like understanding of any city, how a city works is like PhD level stuff, right? There's urban sciences at colleges all around the world. is like PhD level stuff, right? There's urban sciences at colleges all around the world. The commander doesn't need to know everything, but he needs to know how to apply whatever the operation is and then cut down on the time it takes to understand, right? Same thing for policymakers or state department, you name it. There are no urban experts out there and that's

a real problem. So with that, I want to circle back around to one of your first key points, John, which was planning and why Russia lost the Battle of Kiev. And what you're talking about here is the key terrain in urban environments where planning has to be multi-layered, right? Yeah, you can go in your key terrain when it's just enemy centric is one thing, but once that stops, now what's the key terrain once you're there and it's extremely complex and it's really hard to get your head wrapped around it no matter how many times you plan it but it has to be multi-layered right by phase your most likely most dangerous course of action is going to be completely with different with each phase but

so is your key terrain and what does that look like for in every urban environment is going to be completely different and it's it's hard to wrap your head around. It's even harder when you have a Western mindset and you're in places that don't have the same mindset that we do. No, it makes 100% sense. I don't think anybody was fooled on what the Russian objective in Ukraine was.

It was the capital city. You had to topple the regime. You didn't have to encircle it, do a deliberate attack and start clearing every building. You just had to get inside of it. You had to penetrate it. Russia had a plan, like Mike Tyson. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And they didn't have the subordinate branch and sequels to what to deal with when they faced a resistance. But that's the problem is people want a framework, like a deliberate attack.

There are urban war games where people, okay, I'm going to isolate the city. I'm going to penetrate, get a foothold, start clearing. Well, I can think of six other ways to take a city. And there are historically six other ways to do it. Russia had about three plans and all three of those plans didn't work, but they didn't have the flexibility then to mass on its priority objective. It was attacking actually seven different cities all across the country, so it messed up on its primary objective. So some of the principles of war, some of the elements of operational art, they just totally jacked up. But that's, again, about understanding. They didn't understand what it would take to penetrate Kiev and raise the Russian flag over the Capitol building.

Murphy had more to play in their operation in the Battle of Kiev than anything else, let alone, which I know, irregular warfare. The US intelligence thought that Kiev would fall in 72 hours because they didn't have an understanding of the plans in place and the population being armed. They handed out 20,000 AK-47s in one day to civilians. They completely changed the entire operating environment with that one act. So gentlemen, we've talked about the increased role of urbanization. We've talked about implications for irregular warfare of this

rise in urban spaces. And we've gone into some specifics about how we organize and fight in urban terrain, both in irregular warfare and in conventional context. I'd like to give you the chance to close out by identifying some of the biggest implications for policymakers and practitioners from this discussion. Yeah, I would biggest implications for policymakers and practitioners from this discussion? Yeah, I would just say for policymakers, we have to realize that it's not a counterterrorism fight for the future of especially irregular warfare. So when we're putting these fiscal authorities in place or we're putting what we want to do, we have to understand that we have to align those very specifically because on the ground, I have to look at all that stuff and ensure that it's legal, right? And the policy maker, like, oh, we got this. It's in Title X. It's what it is. But it goes back to that legal specific verbiage of what's constraining me from doing what I want to do. And if you look at all

of Title X, there's nothing about irregular warfare in there right now, even though it's in our military manuals. So then it comes down to the legalities of what we can actually action on the ground. So for me, for policymakers, it's to check on U.S. military capabilities in urban terrain. The National Defense Authorization Act twice had a very large segment in there about developing an urban operations research center. We have one for the Arctic. We don't have one for the urban. To include a complete relook at professional military education to ensure that enough value is being given to urban operations, whether that's modernization strategies, urban warfare is the largest gap that I can think of

in U.S. military capabilities, period. Scaling down from the kind of the policy level, what kind of recommendations do you have for military practitioners of all levels of how to think about and prepare themselves for the future of urban warfare? I'll start with that. So when you just open up our aperture, right, the future of urban warfare, when we're not in a kinetic environment or we're not in the overall, we're not in a complete state of war, is very psychological operations oriented, right? That meso aspect is important of how are you influencing. As special operators, that's what we do. We influence, at least when we define as civil affairs, psychological operations, and special forces. We influence, at least when we define a civil affair, psychological operations and special forces.

We have surgical means. We have heavy hitting means. But for us, we're the dirty deeds done dirt cheap. We influence, right? We need to wrap our heads around that. Not everything's direct action. Not everything's counterterrorism anymore. So how do we go about planning for that?

Then how do you multilayer that key terrain and urban environment to where you can actually understand what it is that you need to accomplish and having those multiple decision-making trees where you know, okay, now we're in this element. We're not, we're not kinetic. Now we're kinetic or we're in between, or now the government's kind of caught on to what we're doing, whatever it might be, understanding that and planning to a point to where everybody understands the end state, but everybody understands your contingencies so people can operate in a decentralized environment and do that at a lower level. And as a commander in the modern force, that's far more than we ever had to do back when I was a young Green Beret.

The complexities of the modern battlefield, I can't even comprehend. I was overwhelmed as somebody in the battlefield as a young guy. I can't even comprehend. I was overwhelmed as a combat, as somebody on the battlefield, as a young guy. I can't even imagine the modern battlefield, what you have to comprehend and make decisions on right now.

Yeah, so for me, for the policymakers, it's a resource and priority thing for the military. For the practitioner, there's a lot more control. It literally becomes a time thing. Make urban operations the starting point, not the special environment. Right now, the woods and the desert is our starting point,

or maybe in the swamps. If you make urban the starting point, you'll start to break apart the mental frameworks, which may not apply for the war that we'll be fighting. So this is actually on the practitioners and practitioners like General Milley have multiple times said in major quotes that we have to change, train, man, and equip for urban environments as the starting point. A practitioner could do that tomorrow. Chuck, just a quick clarifying question because I'm always fascinated by these discussions centered around fiscal authorities and what practitioners are legally allowed to do and not to do. Were you essentially arguing that a lot of the permissions and authorities for Title X actors are basically a legacy of the GWAT and that they're somehow tied to counterterrorism objectives, which may no longer be applicable?

Well, it's your fiscal authorities plus your ex-org, right? So when you get on range, you got to look at both of them. But right now, if you look at everything in the NDA, and you look at Triple Three, which is Title 10, and 127 Echo, and there might be another one in Title 10 now, but they all have very specific counterterrorism verbiage. So unless you are going to lie about what you're doing, you can't spend that on any kind of bill of capacity

for any kind of irregular warfare in the future. They're antiquated for sure. You can't spend that on any kind of bill of capacity for any kind of irregular warfare in the future. They're antiquated for sure. So if we don't fix them and you want the U.S. military to do something in an irregular warfare environment in the future, you're telling them they have to lie about what they're doing. There's no way around it with the current construct. So leaders are essentially being asked to use the existing legal and fiscal architecture in place to address a problem that is no longer inherently tied to counterterrorism? Exactly. I mean, you can still leave that in there, but this is where specificity, which sometimes we lack, this is where it hinders you and maybe a

little bit more ambiguity there to allow people to spend those monies on items that you actually want them to use and accomplish. If the onus is always on the team or the company to figure out this impossible thing that's been dictated to them, like, hey, this is what I want you to do. I'm not going to really give you the resources or the legal means to accomplish it. But then when you don't do it, I'm going to yell at you. I'm giving you the go-mars, right?a Tonga was a great example of that, I think. But man, this stuff has been written down forever. Like T.E. Lawrence's old saying of,

hey, don't try to do too much with your own hands, right? Let the Arabs solve the Arab problem because what you think is going to be practical and work is not going to actually work in reality for them, right? We keep trying to apply these Western solutions to other people's problems throughout the world, and it never works because everybody thinks differently than we do. When it comes to regular warfare in urban environment, it's no different. We go into these urban

environments and we try to apply our mindset to fixing this problem, and it always bites us in the ass. So the latest national security strategy posted this morning, and I would say as a guy who studies urban warfare, if I'm in any type of enemy of the United States, my number one objective will be to pull you into urban terrain. Whether that's just to control the information space and influence the global community, pull US forces into urban terrain because you're not going to compete militarily with the U.S. military. So if it's a pure competitor or an irregular non-state actor, and we've seen this in modern history, I pull you into urban terrain, maybe I won't be able to last forever, but I will be able to compete. And you'll be able to do the number one thing of an insurgent, which is to erode and degrade your competitor, right? That's where you're going to do it. John Spencer, Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter,

thank you for joining us today to discuss the role of urban warfare in irregular warfare. We truly appreciate you sharing your time. This has been an excellent conversation on irregular warfare. Thanks, Kyle. Well, thanks for having me. And I'll just say that the present and the future of warfare is urban. Thank you for joining us for episode 64 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Laura and Matt discuss battlefield evidence collection and irregular warfare with Winthrop Wells and Brigadier General Ken Watkin.

Following that, we'll explore the role of Chinese political warfare in Southeast Asia. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you do not miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all-volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of Thank you. found at irregularwarfare.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare podcast. It really helps to expose the show to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government.

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