A single pipe broken by a high-impactexplosiveweapon can deprive 100,000 people ofwater. That same weapon may also destroy the neighbourhood’ssewage system, causing thousands to fallill and placing further strain on already overstretchedhospitals. Local economies collapse and populations flee, leaving fewerdoctors andengineers, and nomoney to pay the salaries of those who remain. The acute pain caused by one attack triggers a ripple effect of long-term suffering that leaves no part of life unscathed. ~Red Cross
As previous work has pointed out, thenuking of a sufficiently large city would be enough to generate a global-scale nuclear autumn. TakeLos Angeles, for example, a city that extends for 500 square miles. The explosion and resultingfires would send an estimated 5.5 million tons of ash and soot into thestratosphere, causingsunlight,temperatures, andrainfall to temporarily decrease around the world. Globally, this would result in diminished growing seasons for the next half-decade, and temperatures would be the lowest in a thousand years. In some parts of the world, rainfall would be down by as much as 80 percent.
Cityfighting also places enormouschallenges on ground forces. Fighting in urban terrain generally favors the defenders, who can placesnipers inwindows and hide down narrowalleys. Even with precision munitions, it is difficult to use air and artillery power in a dense urban battle. Much of the fighting falls on the shoulders of the individualsoldiers, who have to clear the city block by block.
A single pipe broken by a high-impactexplosiveweapon can deprive 100,000 people ofwater. That same weapon may also destroy the neighbourhood’ssewage system, causing thousands to fallill and placing further strain on already overstretchedhospitals. Local economies collapse and populations flee, leaving fewerdoctors andengineers, and nomoney to pay the salaries of those who remain. The acute pain caused by one attack triggers a ripple effect of long-term suffering that leaves no part of life unscathed.
TheUS now has training camps featuring imitation “Arab” urban districts, and has picked up theIsraeli practice of entering a dense neighbourhood not via thestreet, but by crossing throughhomes – a parallel pathway to the street, running from one interior room to another by carving holes in contiguouswalls, and dealing with the inhabitants as they come across them. They have learned, above all, that the city itself has become an obstacle. And while it is true that they can simply bomb a city to pieces – as we’ve seen with the bombing ofAleppo and other cities bySyria’s government and its allies – we have not recently seen the totaldestruction of theHiroshima nuclear attack or thefire-bombing of Dresden.
Urban warfare remains characterized by slow, massivedestruction. Yet 50 years ago, there were no computers, no internet, no GPS, no UAVs, no digital communications, no night-vision devices, and no precision strikes. Two facts account for the lack of change in tactics. First, cities are constructed ofsteel andconcrete, with streets providing the open spaces, which are usually linear. Any fighter in the open is quickly cut down. No technology can accurately detect and count humans insidebuildings andtunnels. So the attacker must advance by blasting through the sides of buildings and slowly, slowly search every room. Second, tens to hundreds of thousands of civilians can be trapped in the cities. Theterrorists inMosul have prevented the civilians from leaving in order to use them as shields.
