Eli5: Why is Urban warfare feared as the most difficult form of warfare for a military to conduct?
In: 1719
Let’s take to similarly sized plots of land, say 100 feet square (100 feet on a side) in different environs.
In the Gobi desert, it would take you about 5 seconds to scan and say ‘No one is there that can attack us’.
In Yellowstone National forest, you would take less than an hour to search for caves, look around all the trees and boulders and look up in the trees and say ‘We have a bear, three squirrels and not much else to attack us..’
At 432 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan…well, you have 85 floors, 147 apartments, 122 1-6 bedroom condos, 25 studio units, 5 floors of penthouses, golf training facility, dining rooms, fitness center, pool, saunas, steam-rooms, private meeting rooms and library to search. You’re going to say, “Oh shit!”
Plus, you have civilians that 1) will always get in the way and 2) may possibly be enemy combatants. Not to mention that ottoman over there may or may not contain a significant amount of high explosive and ball bearings.
So many reasons! I’ll put it this way though, imagine busting through a door in an unknown room in an unknown building, with an unknown number of fighters/civ pop on the other side.
If you are in defence of the room all you have to focus on is the doorway/entry.
If you are attacking the room you have a whole load of information to take in and rely back.
You don’t just have the doorway to aim at.
As you approach the door you may get shot at through the door or walls.
As you enter the door your focus is facing forward, then sweeping left or right as you step into the room. The enemy doesn’t have to pick a target. All they have to do is fire at the doorway!
Which is why the first person through the door gets the nickname “the sandbag.”
If you enter you can fit 2 people through a door but the enemy can have X amount of people in the room in an unbelievable amount of defensive positions. (See pic(picture is a well done but basic! Defended house))
https://www.google.com/search?q=defended+house+military&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwidoreZ3bD5AhV_g84BHWu9A8oQ2-cCegQIABAC&oq=defended+house&gs_lcp=ChJtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1pbWcQARgAMgIIKVAAWABg3Q1oAHAAeACAAX2IAX2SAQMwLjGYAQDAAQE&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-img&ei=25btYt3IOv-Gur4P6_qO0Aw&bih=512&biw=320&client=ms-android-tcl-rvo2b&prmd=nisv#imgrc=jOtAWMQY2yTSjM You may step into the room and take fire from 3 enemy to you front. If you get lucky enough that you drop those 3 you may get popped from behind the door!
This is why clearing from the doorway is preferable. However this is structure and situation dependent
If you’re lucky and not worried about civilians, and providing the structure is thick enough that you don’t frag yourself through the walls. The best way is to grenade prior to entry if possible. However even if possible this doesn’t guarantee results.
Unless you’re willing to just flatten entire city blocks, it is a nightmare of ambushes. More sightlines than you can cover, and angles of attacks that you are unfamiliar with since you didn’t live in the city day in and day out.
A misconception in the public of what it’s actually like sometimes. Thanks Hollywood and videogames. If you are attacking a fortified building, every inch of the inside is sandbagged. They squeeze through sandbags room to room through tiny little rat tunnels. Can you imagine wiggling through a tunnel trying to assault a room with three guys in it just waiting for you? 90% casualties.
Attacking a non fortified area of mud huts or wood and plaster can result in a lot of friendly fire as projectiles travel straight through it. Throw a grenade in a building and all that flak comes straight through the walls at you and your team. That’s always fun. Or the enemy just starts shooting through the walls when your stacking up for entry. 90% casualties.
Then there are other challenges. Your air support cant see through walls. You cant just bomb the area because of the dense civilian population. Tanks and other light armoured vehicles have problems navigating the tight city/village streets. 50ton vehicles don’t just drive through buildings like you might think, basements are always an issue. Sniper support is equally stunted, snipers can’t shoot what they can’t see. Machineguns do actually have their uses, 200rounds of 7.62 can make a decent hole for soldiers to use for entry.
a) 3D. In most terrain hard cover (cover that’s thick enough to resist gunfire) is limited to a plane, a surface. In a city every building using concrete or double-bricked walls is hard cover against small arms (anything from pistols to light machineguns). That’s a lot of positions to attack you from. Also, there could be tunnels below you anywhere (formed from cellars, service tunnels and in older cities sewerlines and catacombs).
b) Any concrete or brick building can be turned into (with the help of explosives or even just musclepower and handtools) a ratnest of connecting fortified fighting positions. Unpredictable and allowing the defender to move from position to position while protected while preventing the attacker from doing the same.
c) Chokepoints everywhere. It’s very easy to get cut off in a street if the buildings form a continous facade, like they do in many european cities as doors can be blocked (which often can be done covertly by filling up the space behind doors with rubble/concrete or boobytrapping doors). Frequently the whole first floors of all buildings will be filled up with rubble or booby traps to make it harder for an attacker to get around (forcing an attacker to get above street level to move inside buildings.
d) Adding the risk of collapsing structures. Earth is solid and reliable. Buildings are not, not when people are using explosives, bombs and big guns capable of collapsing floors and compromising structural integrity.
e) Fights will frequently be very close-quarters, the deadliest and most unpredictable form of combat as things can change very quickly, automatic fire is comparitively effective and it’s impossible to get a good overview.
Some of this can be bypassed by mouse-holing (a urban warfare tactic where you avoid the street and just blast your own way using breaching charges), but that’s an art in itself and very resource intensive.
It basically boils down to a question of topology. There is no environment on Earth that is more full of durable, irregular nooks, crannies and crenellations than the human built environment. Any irregular terrain is difficult to assault, if defended resolutely. The more irregular the more difficult.
Maybe some natural geographic area with massive cave systems or something, but even then I doubt it. Not when you take into account all the tunnels, subtunnels, sub-subtunnels, and basements and outbuildings and so on of a modern urban environment.
In short, it makes something extremely unpredictable even more so and involves the possibility of non-combatants which forces someone (with a moral/ethical code) to analyze their target before firing and can also cause distractions (noise, movement) that can cost you valuable time or even your life.
Close Quarter Combat (CQC), specifically breaching and HVT extraction, are almost always handled by elite tactical units who train extensively on how to safely and swiftly execute a CQC situation.
The SEALs will literally kick you off the squad if you fuck up more than one or two times *in training* because they know that might cost them their lives in the real world. Tbh, you won’t even get invited to join a SEAL team until they have seen you in action and know you mesh well with the squad, from what I’ve read.
It’s not for everyone, that’s the truth. I couldn’t do it. Takes another type of beast to be calm cool collect in those situations lol I get sweaty and shaky and nervous when I have to tell the lady at the drive thru my order is messed up
Just think of the most devious shit you could to to “Kevin McAllister” the shit out of your home then add training, weapons and a dedicated force defending your home and you have urban warfare and why it’s the most difficult for attackers
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If you’re clearing a building, you’re in a tight area, with corners, ledges and narrow corridors. In an urban environment, you’re surrounded by potential sniper nests, and there’s no way to tell exactly where the shots are going to come from.
While you can normally make a judgement call (‘okay, the snipers are hidden in the mountains, so let’s keep an obstacle between us and them’), an urban environment means that you’re surrounded by tall buildings, any one of which could house a whole bunch of snipers. Narrow, long streets mean that they can hit you from miles away just by leaning out a window, and you’ll probably *never* find them.
Sewers and subways are also nasty, because they can literally go anywhere in the city, so the enemy can hit you at random and then just disappear into the underground.
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