Hi all; A preview on the coming MOUT in Falloujah:
Suited to Guerrillas, a Dusty Town Poses Tricky Perils
Shanker & Kifner, NY Times, April 25, 2004
If the Pentagon could build a training ground that would incorporate all the perils of urban warfare, it would look very much like the city the marines may have to invade: Falluja.
Falluja offers urban guerrillas the combat terrain they would desire. The city has nearly 300,000 residents, a complex mix of boulevards, narrow streets and many back alleys. Apartment buildings are mostly of two, three and four stories, with porches well suited to snipers. Every neighborhood has a mosque, a clinic, schools and markets, where an errant shell from the Americans could carry a high cost in civilian lives, and therefore a great risk of angering Iraqis about the occupation.
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Military officers warn that Falluja's insurgents are tunneling between buildings, linking cellars throughout the neighborhoods they control so they can pop from one building to ambush advancing American forces, then vanish underground where they cannot be tracked by helicopter or Predator surveillance drones.
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Under the military's new tactics for urban warfare, there is no boundary-to-boundary invasion of a city, but precisely focused attacks. Rather than going block by block and kicking down doors, which are often booby-trapped, troops may punch holes in the walls of buildings. A new generation of explosives is designed to open the wall, but not to blast through the building, collapse it or hit what lies beyond. Soldiers also may penetrate a building from above, deposited on roofs by ropes slung from helicopters, whose firepower would be bolstered by AC-130 gunships.
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Manuals for urban warfare have been wholly rewritten since World War II, when the military dealt with well-defended cities by using heavy artillery, intense firebombing and, twice over Japan, even atomic weapons to level cities.
Since World War II, the strategy evolved to one that called for bypassing isolating urban areas, then moving on to other targets.
In this war, similarly, the military bypassed many urban centers on its sprint to Baghdad, a drive that doubtless helped to topple Saddam Hussein in just three weeks.
But unfinished business from that phase of the war now may require marines to go into Falluja, a lingering stronghold of pro-Hussein Sunni Muslims where violence has surged.
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nytimes.com
-- Carl
P.S. Grub. |
