Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare From Stalingrad to Iraq
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The Good Friday Agreement effectively ended the conflict in Northern Ireland, though much political negotiation, and police and military operations, remained. Republican opposition to the agreement continued to manifest itself through violence carried out by a splinter group of the PIRA – the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA). They made their opposition known most violently in the Omagh car bombing in August 1998 which killed 21 people of all affiliations and wounded over 100. However, groups like the RIRA and their loyalist equivalents did not have large followings and had decreasing political effects after 1998. Managing the efforts of such groups was well within the capabilities of the RUC (renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland [PSNI] in 2001) without army support. After 1998, violence like the Omagh bombing and smaller-scale events tended to reinforce public support for the power-sharing formula that the Good Friday agreement put in place. The last British soldier killed in the Troubles died in Northern Ireland in 1997. The last member of the RUC killed as part of the Troubles died in 1998. In July 2007 the British Army formally ended Operation Banner, the British military operation in Northern Ireland, after 38 years.
Urban Counterinsurgency Tactics
Over the course of the 38-year war with the Irish paramilitaries in Northern Ireland the role of British conventional forces was substantial and important. The bulk of the army forces deployed to Northern Ireland were required to perform two different but related missions depending on the circumstances during their deployment. One mission was population control during marches and riots. The other was what came to be called framework operations. Framework operations were routine operations conducted regularly to keep continuous pressure on the paramilitaries and ensure that the security forces retained the tactical and operational initiative. There were three main types of tactical framework operations: patrolling, vehicle checkpoints, and observation posts.
Patrols were used to show the presence of the security forces, add protection to RUC patrols, discourage the movement of paramilitaries, and obtain both knowledge of local conditions at the tactical level, and intelligence. In the early years patrols routinely detained individuals for formal questioning but this was eventually found to alienate the civilian community and was replaced by patrol members – not necessarily the patrol leader – “chatting up” people encountered during the patrol. Patrols were vulnerable to both explosives and gun attacks. The key to the protection of the patrols was keeping the timing, area, and routes random and unpredictable. Also important was mutual protection. The typical attack occurred by a gunman who ambushed a patrol at short range and then made a quick escape. Single patrols were very vulnerable to this type of attack. Gun attacks were most easily discouraged by threatening the escape of the gunman. To do this the British Army first developed the technique of mutually supporting parallel patrols. An attack on one patrol quickly brought the other patrol in support. This idea was enhanced by eventually developing the multiple-patrol technique in which several small teams, typically three or four consisting of four men each, patrolled in a seemingly random pattern, frequently crossing tracks, but always within supporting distance. Explosives could not predict where or when the patrol would be and gunmen could not predict where the supporting patrols were located and thus could not be assured of an open escape route. The key to the success of patrolling was carefully planning the patrol routes. The paramilitaries were very careful to study patrol routes and if they discovered patterns in the activity they planned operations accordingly.
Vehicle checkpoints were another way to reassure the public and to limit the mobility of the paramilitaries. Checkpoints fell into two types: permanent, and unannounced temporary checkpoints, called “snap” checkpoints. The permanent checkpoints were necessary to ensure security-force control of major roadways, however they were vulnerable targets themselves and rarely disrupted paramilitary operations because of their overt nature. However, their role was denial of access to the major routes and forcing paramilitary movement onto the smaller and slower secondary road network. The army established snap checkpoints to ensure that the paramilitaries understood there were no safe movement routes and they occasionally did result in the identification and arrest of known paramilitaries.
Observation posts fell into two broad categories: covert and overt. Overt observation posts served the same purpose as permanent vehicle checkpoints: they denied freedom of movement to the paramilitaries in particularly important areas. Covert observation was much more difficult. Throughout the campaign, regular army units employed close observation platoons that operated covertly to observe and gather intelligence. They received specialized training and would typically occupy derelict buildings at night and remain hidden in position for days. Overt observation posts were heavily protected positions in important, heavily trafficked parts of cities or in neighborhoods known to be sympathetic to paramilitaries. They used a wide range of sophisticated listening and observation devices and again, the expectation was that these known positions would deny the use of the area to the paramilitaries.
Intelligence analysis and acquisition was probably the most important element in the success of the security forces at all levels of operations. By the end of the campaign one in eight British troops in Northern Ireland was directly involved in the intelligence process in some manner. In addition to the techniques contributed by the regular army infantry units and the special operations units mentioned above, as time went on the army developed a significant electronics intelligence capability which included cameras, signals intelligence, and airborne intelligence – both manned and unmanned. In addition the army intelligence capability was integrated into the local intelligence network run by the RUC Special Branch. This capability was relatively ineffective in the early years of the war, but by the 1980s it was a very sophisticated and effective operation. Also MI5, a British national intelligence agency, had a strong presence in Northern Ireland. However there were problems throughout the history of the conflict, with the various intelligence agencies not effectively sharing information. Still, in the last decade of the campaign the combined intelligence capability of the security forces severely constrained the paramilitaries and disrupted literally hundreds of operations before they could be executed.
The Military Role in Urban Insurgency
There are many strategic lessons that can be taken from the British experience fighting a determined and skilled insurgent in the urban areas of Northern Ireland. One of the most important, learned only over time by the British forces, was that the key to success was the allegiance of the civil population. In the case of Northern Ireland, the key factor was the attitudes of the Catholic and Protestant communities. The various paramilitaries were in a similar situation – needing to be perceived as legitimate by the civilian population. The strength of the PIRA came from its support in the Catholic community. That support was generated by the aggressive actions of the RUC and the sectarian policies of the Stormont government in the early years. That support hardened in the face of the relatively clumsy and unfocused army counterinsurgency efforts through the 1970s. Arguably, it took the entire decade of the 1980s and the first years of the 1990s for the British security forces to learn to apply more sophisticated tactics, tied into an integrated political and military strategy, and wean the Catholic community from its steadfast support of the PIRA.
One of the keys to the ultimate success of the British strategy in Northern Ireland was the army learning the counterintuitive effects of military actions. What the British security forces learned, over many years, was that when the PIRA indiscriminately attacked civilian targets, support for it among the general Catholic population decreased. However, as the security forces responded to the PIRA attack with searches, arrests, and raids, often poorly targeted and involving collateral damage to innocent civilians and their property, support for the PIRA increased. These phenomena perpetuated the cycle of violence in the war and in fact became part of the PIRA’s long-war strategy. However, in the mid-198
0s, the security forces began to discern that if the security forces responded to PIRA violence covertly, or with precisely targeted arrests, there was a net decrease in popular support for the PIRA. Thus, as the security forces took a lower profile in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the popular support for the PIRA slowly and steadily decreased. The PIRA’s response to decreasing support was to lash out with even less discriminating attacks and thereby further delegitimize itself in the eyes of the Catholic population. Losing the confidence and support of the general Catholic population was not the only reason that the PIRA was at increasing variance with Sinn Fein’s political strategy, but it was an important aspect in why the PIRA ultimately conceded to a political solution to the war.
The British Army’s experience in Northern Ireland is an important demonstration of the increasingly sophisticated nature of urban warfare in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Importantly, the British Army’s operations in the Northern Ireland conflict required a much more complex understanding of the role of military forces and the definition of success and winning in war than was required to understand most previous conflicts. Northern Ireland demonstrated that winning an urban insurgency was as much about an integrated national counterinsurgency strategy as it was about military effectiveness. The British military was never seriously challenged directly by the military capabilities of the paramilitaries. However, effective paramilitary politics, information operations, combined with ineffectual British government political reforms and an abysmal economic environment, allowed the PIRA and other paramilitaries to be effective out of all proportion to their actual military capabilities. The British Army won its war with the paramilitaries in the urban environment of Northern Ireland not because it destroyed the paramilitaries, but rather because it created a secure enough environment such that political reform and compromise, and economic development could advance to the point that the information operations of the paramilitaries were ineffective. Thus, urban warfare had evolved to the point that it was not about destroying the enemy, instead military operations were about creating secure enough conditions that political success was possible.
CHAPTER 8
URBAN DEATH TRAP
The Russian Army in Grozny, 1995
After many years absent from major urban combat, the Russian army, the victors at Stalingrad and the largest, most lethal urban battlefields of World War II, found itself once again confronting urban combat, this time in the Russian province of Chechnya. In the early 1990s, separatist movements sprang up all over the former Soviet empire as people, long subjugated by Moscow, sought to take advantage of the end of the Cold War and win sovereignty for themselves. The traditional inhabitants of Russia’s Chechen province were one of the ethnic groups who wanted self-determination, and in 1991 they declared their intent to become independent and took control of the province, and its capital city Grozny. It wasn’t until 1994 that Russia tried to reassert its claim to dominion over Chechnya, and the Russian army invaded.
In the early 1990s Chechnya had a total population of about 1.2 million. The province is located in the north Caucus Mountains region of southern Russia. It is bordered on the west, north and east by the Russian Republic. In the south it shares a border with the country of Georgia. The terrain of the province is generally mountainous and covered with dense forests. The city of Grozny, in the center of the country, was the focus of most military operations during two separate wars between Chechen independence forces and the Russian army, in 1994 and 1999.
Grozny was a city that traced its roots to the early 19th century when Russia, at war with the Ottoman Turks, formally claimed the area. Terek Cossacks of the Russian army established a fort called Fortress Groznaya (which means “Terrible” Fortress). Grozny was an important outpost from which Czarist Russia, through its Cossacks, controlled the Muslim mountain people indigenous to the northern Caucasus. Before World War I, oil was discovered in Grozny and the surrounding area and economic development transformed the military base into a city. During the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed, the Cossacks, then the basis of the Russian ethnic population in Grozny, sided with the pro-Czarist White forces and lost control of Grozny to the Bolsheviks who were aided by the indigenous Muslim tribes. Over the next 70 years Grozny was the center of much anticommunist sentiment – stemming from both the anticommunist Cossacks and the Muslim mountain people. Both the Cossacks and the Muslims were subjected to forced migration by the Communists. Their places in Grozny were taken by non-Cossack Russians. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, most of the Muslim population had returned and they made up about two-thirds of the population of the province, but only a small percentage of the urban population of Grozny, which remained largely ethnic Russian. Russians claim that prior to the first Chechnya war in 1994, most ethnic Russians were forced by the Chechen majority to flee Chechnya, thus in the first battle of Grozny most of the city’s residents were Muslim. However, some international observers and the advocates of an independent Chechnya claim that the Russian population was never forced to leave by the Chechen government, and remained until forced to depart by the war conditions, when Russian bombing caused between 200,000 and 300,000 ethnic Russians to flee the province. In 1994, in the months before the first battle for Grozny, the city had a mixed Chechen-Russian population of approximately 490,000 – almost a third of the province’s population. The city and its suburbs covered approximately 90 square miles. The city was a mixture of buildings ranging from one-story residences to massive 15-story housing structures. Almost all of the structures in the city were made of reinforced concrete. The Sunzha River was a major terrain feature within the city and flowed northeast to southwest dividing the city into a northern and southern sector.
The Road to Grozny
On December 11, 1994, the Russian Republic, under President Boris Yeltsin, launched its military into Chechnya to restore that province to the control of the Republic. The Russians were motivated by a number of factors, the two most important being access to, and control of oil; and ensuring that they stopped the dissolution of the former Soviet Union while the Russian Republic still had sufficient land and resources to be regarded as an international power. Chechnya had significant indigenous oil stocks, and its location, and particularly the location of the city of Grozny, made it a key distribution point for oil and oil products coming from neighboring provinces. By 1994 Chechnya had effectively been independent for almost three years – though its status was not legal according to the Russian constitution, and it was not recognized by the Russian government in Moscow. Other peripheral provinces were in danger of following the Chechen example. Thus the government in Moscow determined to demonstrate that it had the will and capability to preserve the integrity of what remained of the former Soviet Union, lest further disintegration occur. By December 21, Russian forces had advanced through Chechnya and closed in on Grozny from the north, southwest, and east. On December 26, the Russian government authorized the Russian army to advance into Grozny itself.
The Russian army that served the Russian Republic in 1994 appeared to be virtually identical to the formidable Soviet Red Army which had intimidated Europe for half a century and which had destroyed the vaunted German war machine in World War II. However, less than five short years after the end of the Cold War, the army was neither the mighty machine that fought on the Eastern Front in World War II, nor the menace that had threatened NATO since the 1950s.
The battle for Stalingrad during World War II had honed the Soviet army into an expert urban warfare force. Subsequent campaigns in World War II built on that expertise, which reached its peak in the battle for Berlin in 1945. However, after World War II, Soviet forces gradually lost that expertise. The Soviet army was not committed to any significant large-scale combat for almost 50 years – the one exception being Afghanistan where no major urban combat occurred. More importantly, Soviet doctrinal thinkers focused on operational maneuver warfare. The Soviet army believed
that the major lesson learned in World War II was that victory was the result of flexible and rapid maneuver by massed mobile armies built around large armor and mechanized infantry formations. The prospect of lengthy and resource-consuming urban combat was anathema to the maneuver focus of the Red Army. Soviet army leaders believed that in a confrontation with NATO, western armies would abandon western European cities rather than see them and their populations destroyed in street-by-street battles. They also believed that any city that might be decisively defended could be bypassed by mechanized spearheads, and then carefully reduced or induced to surrender once surrounded. Urban warfare, once a key competency of the Red Army, was absent from both Soviet doctrine and practice by the end of the Cold War.