r/CredibleDefense • u/DrEuthanasia • 7d ago
How much does urban warfare change based on urban development, and is this reflected in training and doctrine?
Cities around the world can look very different. North American cities have straight and wide streets, even in the downtown core (with some exceptions). They tend to have very tall cores, and huge swathes or suburbs. Compare this to Europe where streets are often narrow and winding, and where you have low-rise/medium density for most of the city. This would undoubtedly change the way fighting would occur.
On top of that, different construction materials will change what positions can actually be used for cover, since a 2x4 and some drywall/sheathing won't be stopping anything compared to a 6" concrete or masonry wall.
It seems to me like a country would have to account for the design and construction of the cities in which they plan to fight, but do any actually do this?
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u/MichaelEmouse 7d ago
You'd pretty much have to do your training in a video game. You might have some building blocks of mid sized buildings or a 10 storey building or something but large chunks of an entire city is probably prohibitive.
And it does change a lot. Large buildings are often made extensively with concrete. They tower over large areas. Cities are the modern equivalent of castles.
As we saw in Ukraine, Fallujah, Mosul and Gaza, they often end up being turned into ruins which is another challenging environment to operate in.
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u/Kantei 5d ago edited 5d ago
To piggyback this, I just want to highlight one area of the front in Ukraine where both sides have been battling over for months now.
It's not a city, it's not even a settlement.
It's a highway interchange in the middle of the fields.
But, because its ruins have become both a vantage point and a somewhat concealed shelter, both sides are treating it akin to how armies in the past would treat fortified hills. The Russians had captured and held it for weeks, but sometime in February 2025, the Ukrainians launched an assault operation to specifically take back this interchange (or what remains of it).
Now imagine this in an urban agglomeration where there are multitudes more of even larger interchanges.
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u/DrEuthanasia 6d ago
None of what I've seen from those theatres has really been higher than 15 stories, I can only imagine how difficult a taller building would be to deal with.
Interesting thought about the video game, shouldn't be all that hard to cobble together.
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u/girl_from_venus_ 7d ago
I have quote limited experience with it, but from what I've done,seen or heard no NATO country does adequate training for actual cities.
MOUT towns are that - small towns at best.
You can see some exercises and planning done for combat in actual cities but it's very limited and barebones due to the disruption it causes.
Would be interesting to know if someone knows of any public info regarding proper city training, maybe in older abandoned parts of towns somewhere?
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u/DrEuthanasia 6d ago
Did we just have to learn by doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Kind of explains part of the nightmare that was Fallujah if there was no actual training for it.
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u/Duncan-M 5d ago
No, we didn't just learn by doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was tons of urban training before Fallujah, the USMC had urban warfare training areas built on every major base since the mid-1990s. Urban warfare was the most common type of training done before an Iraq combat deployment. And the units who participated in OP Vigilant Resolve and Phantom Fury were highly experienced, they didn't show up in Iraq two days before the ops kicked off.
Fallujah was a nightmare because they used a whopping 4-5 maneuver battalions to clear the whole city, with far too little armor support, fighting against hardcore jihadists who were often using highly dangerous martyr tactics to defend buildings from the interior, aka fighting more akin to the Japanese in WW2 than the Germans.
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u/sluttytinkerbells 2d ago
Is there any sort of training for a city like New York or Shenzhen?
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u/Duncan-M 2d ago
They call those Mega City operations. There are studies done, analysis, some limited training mostly by SOF, but it's impossible to roll in a division or corps to train in a city.
Mega City ops were considered hot button a few years ago but the top brass decided to not invest. Every bit about it is too daunting to prepare for.
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u/westmarchscout 5d ago
There are several out-of-the-way industrial areas in LA that you could shut down for a few days. When my mom, who has a phobia of driving, was learning, my dad would take her to one of them. But that wouldn’t prepare you for a dense microraion of brezhnevkas or anything.
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u/Mountsorrel 7d ago
The basic principles of FIBUA will still apply but you would see more use of armoured vehicles - the centre of Berlin had the kind of wide open boulevards you are talking about and armour was used more there in 1945.
Verticality and sub-surface access become more important but ultimately you train your officers to be able to adapt to any tactical situation as it arises and apply the tools they have available as the situation dictates.
I would imagine for skyscraper-dense areas you’d just use fires and bypass them; digging an enemy out of there would take a disproportionate amount of troops and casualties for any benefit gained when you could bring the whole place down with arty and air.
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u/DrEuthanasia 6d ago
It just seems so completely messy to me, but any major war of the future will have this type of fighting. And having to level every office and condo building would be such a massive undertaking that I agree, they'd just neutralize if needed or bypass.
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u/Roy4Pris 5d ago
Sniper positions on the 89th floor, picking off enemy soldiers left, right and centre. Tank barrels unable to elevate sufficiently to target the position. Sniper could fire and relocate a hundred metres vertically and fifty horizontally. Yeeesh. No thanks.
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u/sparkynugnug 7d ago
Google the podcast “Urban Warfare Project” with John Spencer. Excellent source of information about the methods, theory, and practical examples of urban combat.
I think I’ve listened to every episode and I don’t recall that he’s specifically addressed this question, but you can infer some helpful information. The Jan 1 2024 episode “Urban Warfare 101” covers the basics of urban warfare and might be a good starting point. I’ve coped the description below:
“Over several dozen episodes, the Urban Warfare Project Podcast has explored many of the unique challenges of urban warfare. But what is urban warfare, exactly? The simple answer is that it’s simply combat that takes place in the man-made terrain of cities. But going deeper, what are the variety of urban patterns and urban functions, for example, and how do they influence the conduct of military operations? What about building types and construction materials? And how do all of these variables inform the way militaries conceptualize urban environments? These questions and others form the foundation of our understanding of urban warfare and are addressed in this special episode.”
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u/Duncan-M 5d ago
Small differences in cover and concealment will not drastically change urban warfare tactics, techniques, and procedures, and especially won't change the fundamentals and principles.
Very rarely will training perfectly replicate combat, it's nice if it does but the reality is that it needs to be good enough to act as baseline for later adoptions. So for example, you do urban training on what appears to be an MENA or an Eastern European town, and you're deployed to Western Europe or CONUS, the terrain will be different. But that is where intelligence assessments come into play and prepping/rehearsing for combat operations, where you would suddenly take note of the differences and include those observations in the planning cycles.
The most difficult aspects of urban warfare that can't be replicated in training involve scaling up operations, because no urban training centers are large enough to handle beyond a battalion or brigade sized formation. Whereas many cities would warrant division or corps-sized formations. Which means the larger formation HQs, specifically the command and staff who need to know how to conduct those operations at their own level, aren't getting trained. That also includes enabler units, specifically logistics. How many logisticians know offhand how much of each class of supplies will be needed per day, per unit? A lot of that isn't in manuals either, the information isn't known, which means it'll need to be learned in battle.
This is the same problem with mechanized operations too, Combat Training Centers (CTC) like the National Training Center, Joint Readiness Training Center, Joint Multinational Readiness Center, etc, aren't big enough or aren't used for large-scale training exercises. So the brigades and under generally know what they're doing, but the division and above HQs don't.
That said, a lot of that sort of training can be done with Tactical Exercises Without Troops (TEWT), though not all of them. For some of them, even though the lower level tactical units will really just be going through the motions and not getting much training value, will provide a critical role for higher HQs who need real examples of the common difficulties they will face in regards to the facets of a division command or larger.
This is the exact problem Russia and Ukraine especially before the start of the 2022 invasion, they hadn't prepared for large-scale combat operations because they didn't do large-scale training exercises, so they couldn't scale up operations in combat to allow for synchronized operations, it was too hard. Consecutive operations are typically favored over concurrent operations because they are easier to plan and execute.
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u/tujuggernaut 6d ago
or suburbs
I'm not sure what fighting subdivision to subdivision would look like, other than trying to level every house, of which there are a lot. Armor would be probably be effective. And if you're fighting in subdivisions, things have probably hit the fan so hard the defenders would be pressed to mount anti-armor counter.
Obviously the areas with concrete are completely different, offering shelter even after bombed out.
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u/DrEuthanasia 6d ago
Fighting house-to-house through a subdivision could be difficult for armor, but depending on street size and terrain variances you might be able to protect it from AT. But any round would shoot straight through those houses like butter.
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u/Roy4Pris 5d ago
McMansions are built of cardboard and plastic. Tanks would drive straight through them like the opening scene in Sicario.
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u/feetking69420 4d ago
Trying to imagine this in my local and I don't think that would really work. Vehicles would fall straight into the basements, which almost every suburban house has here. I don't think Mcmansion style homes are the most structurally sound either with all their open spaces, the house collapsing on an armored vehicle would almost certainly immobilize it even if there was a concrete slab instead of a basement.
It would probably be best to try and raze the whole area, maybe saturate neighborhoods with incendiary cluster munitions or drones carrying thermite? It would be a daunting task though, no doubt. There's just too many structures.
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