Free Republic

A Libyan colonel that defected to the rebel side last month has said that the regime has had to use soldiers from its elite special forces to command popular militias after suffering months of desertions. The officer escaped from a government town in the plains below the country's Western Mountains. Lying only 60 miles from Tripoli, the rebels have launched repeated offensives in the effort to reach the capital. Leaders of the elite fighting force belonging to Gaddafi's son Khamis had left their brigades to fight elsewhere and came to man this front line reported the Colonel. "The leaders are...

Room clearing in an urban environment is dangerous. Marines have trained extensively on this subject, applying lessons learned from tough battles in such places as Seoul during the Korean War, Hue in Vietnam, and most recently, Fallujah, Iraq. Now the Marine Corps wants to make sure its Iraqi Army brethren are skilled in close quarters battle as well. To that end, Reconnaissance Marines with 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 8, have been training Iraqi commandos with the 7th Iraqi Army Division on fundamental infantry tactics during a month-long training evolution. As part of the course,...

A Soldier with the Iraqi Special Operations Forces looks through his sight during training exercises recently in Basrah. Photo by Spc. William Hatton, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force - Arabian Peninsula. BASRAH — It requires practice and training for elite Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) to perform at the highest level.  To better their ability to protect the citizens of this second-largest Iraqi city, some ISOF Soldiers recently conducted an urban assault training exercise in southern Iraq.“If we want to be successful on missions it requires us to not only train daily, but it’s necessary for us to do...

American tank crews have now had two years of using their M-1 tanks in urban areas. They now know that tanks are very useful for streetfighting. While the M-1 has done quite well, the tankers have developed a wish list of upgrades they would like to see. First priority goes to protection. While the M-1 has generally been invulnerable to RPG rockets, there are three parts of the M-1 that were vulnerable. First, there is the rear of the tank, where the gas-turbine engine spews out hot exhaust. Put an RPG round in there and you can shut down the...

Marines prowl streets of downtown Toledo City hosts urban warfare exercise By ERICA BLAKE BLADE STAFF WRITER Mark Lehmann was absent-mindedly walking down Jefferson Avenue yesterday when he found himself in the middle of a gunfight involving men dressed in camouflage crouched behind mounds of snow. Stunned, the 41-year-old Toledoan stopped in the intersection of Jefferson and Ontario Street for a moment. His presence, however, seemed to go unnoticed by the 20 or so Marines who quickly jumped up and ran past him.

Israel Defense Forces have been working to perfect their urban warfare tactics, in an effort to eliminate militant cells in the disputed zones of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The goal is to gradually shift from a defensive to an offensive posture, said Col. Boaz Cohen, a military envoy to the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C. On the offensive, the Isreali military hunts down potential suicide bombers and their handlers before they launch their operations, said Cohen. “We realized that we cannot deal with the reality of suicide bombers,” he said. “Through the years, we realized that there...

"The worst policy is to attack cities. Attack cities only when there is no alternative." --Sun Tzu, The Art of War It is time for a revolution in our thinking about urban warfare. For too long the American military establishment has been reading the wrong history, preparing for the wrong fight and reclining in the wisdom of the wrong philosophers. Urban warfare is the fight of the future--the very near future--and we are not ready. Our thinking about this subject has been derailed by anachronistic principles that no longer apply. We do not live in Sun Tzu’s world, nor even...

New Training Site Brings Afghan Reality to Troops By Spc. Kelly Hunt, USASpecial to American Forces Press Service BAGRAM, Afghanistan, Oct. 14, 2003 – In the hidden back trails of Bagram Air Base stands an Afghan compound, made by hand out of mud by local citizens -- a training site used by Bagram troops to prepare for urban combat. Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division's 87th Infantry Regiment put their training to the test at the new MOUT training facility at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. MOUT stands for Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain. Army photo by Spc. Kelly Hunt(Click...

Tasked with urban operations, soldiers think of buildings. The initial mental image is of physical forms--skyscrapers or huts, airports and harbors, size, construction density, streets, sewers, and so on. Planners certainly are interested in the population's attitudes and allegiances, but cities are more likely to be classified by their differences in construction than by the variety of their populations. This focus on "terrain" leads to the assumption that military operations would be more challenging in a Munich than in a Mogadishu. But the latter "primitive" city brutally foiled an international intervention launched with humanitarian intent, while "complex" Munich whimpered into...

Yellow Smoke: The Future Of Land Warfare For America's Military. By Robert H. Scales Jr. Rowan and Littlefield, $24.95, 179 pages During a Rand conference on urban warfare in 1999, Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales derided the emphasis on urban warfare that was then becoming trendy by reiterating the Army's traditional concept of bypassing cities or laying siege to them. Gen. Scales' schedule did not allow him to stay for questions and answers, but he left behind a firestorm of controversy among officers with recent urban combat experience, including several Russians in the audience. Say what you like about Bob...

Ground Forces TrainingThe director gave his staff a sequence of commands: "Console one: We have tanks coming down the road. Record with camera nine. Console two: Swing the camera all the way to the left and cover the town's main entrance. Pick up the tank on the right with camera three. Console one: Pan camera 10 to the left toward the soccer field and capture the dismounted squad. That's good. Now pan down." What appears to be a movie director filming a rapidly evolving battle for a soon-to-be-released combat action movie is actually the control station editor at a US...

New York Times August 26, 2002 Pg. 1 Iraq Said To Plan Tangling The U.S. In Street Fighting By Michael R. Gordon WASHINGTON, Aug. 25 — President Saddam Hussein of Iraq will try to compensate for his armed forces' glaring weaknesses by raising the specter of urban warfare if the Bush administration moves to attack the Iraqi government, according to Pentagon officials and former United States government experts. In anticipation of an eventual American attack, Iraq has already started military preparations, they say. Iraqi forces have been digging defensive positions for military equipment around Baghdad. The Iraqi military has also...