The Advertiser March 26, 2003
Street warfare, the dread of every soldier
By David McLemore
NOT knowing if you're in a sniper's crosshairs, trapped by gunfire on a side street in a strange place - this is the fear of all soldiers, urban warfare.
It's a scenario confronting the thousands of Allied troops once they enter the city of Baghdad with its five million people.
Gone will be the surgical missile strikes from jets and warships.
Gone, for the most part, will be the support cover provided by helicopter gunships.
Allied troops are seemingly just hours from the hardest task so far in this conflict - brutal combat in the streets of Baghdad.
"Baghdad is the target. You have to have the city to win the war," Pat Garrett, an associate analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, said yesterday. "US forces have trained for urban warfare but the biggest difference from their training is that now there will be thousands of civilians in the fighting zone."
Mr Garrett said combat in an urban centre like Baghdad - a sprawling city with multi-storied buildings and narrow streets and alleys - could negate the Coalition's dramatic advantage in technology.
If Iraqi forces placed themselves among civilians, all the "smart" technology in the world would be of little use - unless Coalition forces wanted to kill hundreds or even thousands of civilians, along with the enemy.
Mr Garrett said this reduced the conflict to "something decidedly low-tech". "It's easy to set up tank traps. Snipers will be around every corner, and air power will have limited use," he said.
"Fighting in the city is a great equaliser."
The last major urban battle involving their troops occurred at Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993 in what was the most violent US combat since Vietnam.
A planned 90-minute operation by US Army Rangers and Delta Force troops to seize a Somali warlord collapsed into a 17-hour firefight.
A helicopter crash led to an ambush by Somali militiamen armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.
Eighteen Americans were killed and 84 were wounded. Up to 1000 Somalis died in the incident, which became the platform for the movie Black Hawk Down. In Vietnam, US Marines and Army units fought the battle of Hue over four weeks of brutal street combat in early 1968.
The 480 Marine casualties included 42 deaths; Vietnamese losses exceeded 5000.
The Vietnam experience led American military planners to create Military Operations on Urbanised Terrain training as part of the regimen for infantry units.
The Joint Readiness Training Centre at Fort Polk, in Louisiana, has a replica of a third-world village. During regular training sessions, combat units engage in realistic combat by "OPFORS" - or opposition forces.
"MOUT training involves simulated assaults and counterattacks within an abandoned urban setting," Mr Garrett said. "Nothing in their training prepares them for the scale of combat in one of the largest cities in the world.
"I have no doubt the US will win the battle for Baghdad but you have to ask at what cost?
"It depends on how far the Iraqis are willing to go. With the disregard for human life that the Republican Guard have shown, this could turn into another Grozny or Stalingrad."
Last September, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told British authorities: "People say to me, 'You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles or swamps to hide in.'
"I reply, 'Let our cities be our swamps, and our buildings our jungles'."
Copyright © 2003, Nationwide News Pty Limited
