The Denver Post April 06, 2003
Chechnya conflict an urban battle lesson U.S. forces likely learned a lot from Russia's mistakes
By Michael Riley
When the Russian army first tried to take the Chechen city of Grozny in 1994, they sent long columns of tanks rumbling through the city's streets in a massive show of military might.
Bands of Chechen fighters showered those tanks with gasoline and petrol bombs, cooking crew members inside. They immobilized the armored columns by hitting the first and last tank in line, trapping the others in the city's narrow streets. The guerrillas put down their grenade launchers and melted into the city's landscape before Russian troops could strike back.
'What we learned from Grozny is that there is a wrong way of doing urban warfare,' said Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Washington, D.C.
In many ways a classic urban battlefield, Grozny was also a debacle for a much larger and technologically superior Russian force. American military commanders now outside of Baghdad have carefully studied the effort to take the Chechen capital in 1994 and a more successful battle six years later, looking for ways to avoid Russia's mistakes.
'The Russians went into Grozny the first time assuming that you could do this with a show of force. If they went in with a lot of weaponry, tanks and infantry, they figured, the city would just fall,' said Olga Oliker, an analyst at Rand Corp., a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon. 'It had worked in Prague (Czechoslovakia) and elsewhere, why wouldn't it work here?' she said.
Many of the Russians' mistakes were amateurish, Oliker said, and U.S. military experts expect American and British forces to do better in their effort to take the Iraqi capital.
Russian troops got lost because they didn't have accurate city maps. Much of their night-vision equipment failed to work. And they were poorly trained in urban fighting.
'They had a couple of brochures (on urban warfare) left over from World War II that people passed around and that was pretty much it,' Oliker said.
But the Russians also learned from the experience.
Before the second battle, they ordered civilians to leave the city using special routes, then bombarded the capital for days. They developed 'storm teams,' small units of tanks and infantry that could move quickly and pursue bands of fighters. Rather than launching a massed attack, Russian commanders divided the city into a spider-web pattern, securing corridors in which their troops could move, then subduing resistance.
The Russians consider the second battle for Grozny a success. They claim to have lost only one tank in the attack. But military experts say thousands of civilians were killed as well, fueling the population's hatred of the Russian army and swelling the guerrilla ranks as they fled to nearby mountains.
'Blowing down the city in order to take it is a lousy way to do urban warfare from just about any perspective,' the Lexington Institute's Goure said.
Military experts say that Grozny and other recent urban battles have also likely been studied by Iraqi military commanders - potentially making Baghdad a much more dangerous battlefield for American forces.
Already, many tactics used by Iraqi forces in Basra and Nasiriyah mimic the methods of the Chechen fighters: Iraqi paramilitary forces are fighting in small groups, many dressed as civilians, and using their greater mobility to harass and ambush coalition forces.
Experts warn that, as the Chechens did before the Russian attack, the Iraqis may have spent the past several months fortifying basements and digging tunnels to be used against troops entering the capital.
'The Chechens did clever things like disguise themselves as Red Cross workers,' Oliker said, noting similarities with the way Iraqis fighters are driving in taxis and hiding in hospitals.
And while coalition forces have better equipment and training than their Russian counterparts, they are also much more concerned about protecting the civilian population, something that could prove a major disadvantage in the battle for Baghdad.
In what could be a signal of coming Iraqi tactics, three American soldiers were killed Friday when a woman got out of a car near a checkpoint and cried in distress. When the Americans approached, the car exploded, also killing the woman and the driver.
Iraqi television said two Iraqi women who appeared on videotape on Arab satellite television carried out the attack.
"In many ways, war is a contest of will: What is each side willing to do to achieve victory?" said Patrick Garrett, a military analyst with GlobalSecurity.org. "If Saddam Hussein and his regime (are) as evil as President Bush would have us believe, then quite frankly they are the ones who have the greater will to do whatever it takes."
GRAPHIC: The Associated Press/N. Rapp, P. Santilli Urban warfare
Copyright © 2003, The Denver Post Corporation
