And the worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative .... The general, unable to control his impatience, will order his troops to swarm up the wall like ants, with the result that one-third of them will be killed without taking the city. Such is the calamity of attacking cities.
-Sun Tzu
Avoid urban areas—that always has been the advice given to military commanders, and for good reason. There is the physical challenge of negotiating "concrete canyons" while under fire. There is the technical challenge of employing the weapons, communications gear, and navigation equipment needed to function effectively in a confined and unforgiving environment. Finally, there is the psychological burden of conducting military operations where there are large numbers of civilians and hidden threats.
Only in the past few years have the U.S. armed forces begun seriously to explore how to overcome these challenges. The reasons are twofold: the unfortunate experience in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope and the growing belief that similar operations are the wave of the future. Given these, it is imperative that the services develop new and better ways to operate in urban areas—ways that exploit our asymmetric advantage in joint aerospace power.
Perception versus Reality
For far too long, military leaders have looked at urban operations as a form of high-intensity warfare that is almost always conducted at the tactical level. This view, in turn, has fed other assumptions about urban warfare: It involves massive destruction and heavy casualties among troops and noncombatants; it is manpower-intensive and requires heavy firepower and close combat; and it focuses mainly on seizing and occupying territory or structures. Because of these assumptions, many have come to look at urban operations as something done only by soldiers, Marines, and special operations forces. Multiservice aerospace power seems to play a role, but only a limited and supporting one. Fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft provide close air support, and the latter inserts, resupplies, and extracts ground troops.
This perception is understandable but inaccurate. In fact, operating across the range of urban conflict is not a new phenomenon for aerospace forces. At one end of the spectrum, they performed the city-busting strategic bombing campaigns of World War II. They supported the limited operations of the 1990s, where joint aerospace forces learned how to fight "downtown" effectively and independently. New tools, such as stealth technology, precision-guided munitions, land-attack cruise missiles, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) achieved desired effects—and with minimal casualties and collateral damage.
At the other end of the urban conflict spectrum, aerospace forces participated in peace operations in Port au Prince and Sarajevo. They carried out noncombatant evacuation operations in cities such as Freetown, Tirana, and Monrovia. In the Balkans and Somalia, they performed humanitarian operations while the United States conducted peace-enforcement tasks. These low-intensity operations were possible largely because of rapid air mobility and ability to assess the behavior of others through the use of aerospace intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets.
Given the foregoing capabilities and more, the next deployment to an urban area may well be Grozny-like. But it does not have to be that way. Because land- and sea-based aerospace power can influence missions across the range of urban conflict, U.S. forces can stage operations that are not, by definition, highly destructive, casualty-laden, and merely tactical in nature. Aerospace power can help avoid these traps by employing precision weapons and by using nonlethal weapons to create tactical-level effects—and strategic and operational effects as well—with real-time situational awareness.
Precision Weapons
Operations in future urban environments will be determined largely by what has been termed the urban triad: complex man-made terrain, significant numbers of people living closely together, and the infrastructure needed for the survival of a particular city or, perhaps, an entire country. Each piece of the triad poses unique problems that call for equally unique solutions. Some solutions may be material, others may call for a technological answer; still others may depend on improving the conduct of military operations. Whatever the answer, it is clear that future success in urban operations will not depend on targeting per se, but will depend on achieving desired effects. As for aerospace power, this may mean using precision-guided munitions such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) in the next five years, and "dial-a-yield" weapons thereafter.
In the case of the JDAM, the current 2,000-pound version may not be discriminate enough. A better alternative may be the 500-pound JDAM now under development. This weapon will give future joint task force (JTF) commanders a genuine standoff attack option in urban environments and thereby obviate or minimize the need for costly ground attacks. (With a JDAM-- laden B-2, for example, the JTF will have the option to attack a large number of individual targets during a single sortie.)
Other air-delivered weapons in various stages of development have more potential. The Air Force has demonstrated the ability to target and engage "the fourth window from the left on the third story of the west-side" of buildings from Baghdad to Belgrade. The AC-130 Spooky gun ship offers precision firepower for ground forces—day and night in all weather conditions. Soon, small-diameter and dial-a-yield weapons will further enhance aerospace operations in urban areas. They will reduce collateral damage and, in some situations, enable U.S. forces to adjust—or turn off—munitions while they are en route to the target.
The Nonlethal Option
Obtaining desired effects might not require the delivery of high explosives on targets. In the air war over Serbia, EC-130 Command Solo aircraft were used to wage information warfare. They conducted psychological operations, interdicted the airwaves to provide civil affairs broadcasts to the Serbian people, and amply demonstrated the importance of information warfare in urban operations. Other U.S. national assets can manipulate information to disrupt power-generation facilities, communication centers, financial institutions, and industrial production facilities.
Information—and disinformation—can be used as nonlethal weapons (NLWs). They are becoming an increasingly attractive way to deal with the urban triad. Unfortunately, most NLWs have been conceptualized and developed for tactical use only. Sticky foam, calmative agents, odorous substances, flash bangs, and rubber bullets come to mind. Use of NLWs by aerospace and ground forces to obtain strategic or operational-level effects has not been explored adequately. For example, air-delivered superlubricants could be used in isolating or denying lines of communications. During high-intensity engagements with opposing forces, NLWs might limit combatant casualties or help stem enemy attacks.
Maintaining Situational Awareness
One of the most difficult problems faced in past urban operations—from Stalingrad to Grozny—has been the lack of situational awareness among combatants. This has been cited as a major shortcoming in recent urban experiments carried out by the Army and Marine Corps. While advanced concept technology demonstrations have brought marginal improvements to situational awareness through work on powered optics, automated map production, robotic sensors, and tactical UAVs, additional solutions are needed to resolve urban awareness and line-of-sight problems.
One long-term solution to these challenges is to have UAVs and terrestrial sensors work together with command-and-control aircraft that are part of a greater information grid. This "system of systems" would provide real-time communications, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data to both the JTF and local commanders on the ground.
Another solution will require the services to employ UAVs more creatively. In addition to performing such missions as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and combat resupply, future UAVs could operate as "pseudolites" that boost signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. This would increase the effectiveness of precision-guided munitions in the world's urban canyons and in GPS-jammed environments. A UAV in this kind of role also could assist ground troops in navigating urban areas and directing precision indirect fire or air-launched weapons. Ideally, the immediate benefits of these and other applications will be real-time, decentralized situational awareness and improved command and control. The overall benefit could be decision-cycle dominance over opponents—i.e., U.S. units remain aware, while minute-by-minute the adversary becomes increasingly deaf, dumb, and blind.
Conclusions
It is estimated that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will live in urban areas. Given that cities traditionally have been political, social, religious, military, and geographic centers of gravity, the United States and its allies must plan to carry out military operations there in the future. Potential enemies will move into urban areas—or further entrench themselves—to minimize the technological advantages of industrialized nations. Aside from political considerations, this is a lesson others have learned from the U.S. experience in Somalia, where mounting casualties and the inability to operate effectively in the constrained urban environment forced a withdrawal
The U.S. armed forces should learn from past urban operations as well. They should seek to improve the ways they conduct urban operations and not limit themselves to the purely tactical, manpower-intensive methods of the past. They should exploit new capabilities accrued by joint aerospace power over the last decade and the advantages they can provide in the future, including discriminate precision and nonlethal weapons and the real-time situational awareness that permits their most effective use.
Sun Tzu's advice to military commanders is as applicable today as it was 2,500 years ago. Avoiding combat in cities is certainly the preferred option—but it is unrealistic and irresponsible to think that the United States always will have that luxury. And when it is time to fight, U.S. military planners constantly must weigh the use of land- and sea-based aerospace power—a tool that greatly enhances operational capabilities and survivability.
Major General Berry is the Air Force Director of Strategic Planning. Mr. Ellis works for SAIC and currently is assigned to the Air Force strategic planning directorate.