I arrived home one day last week to find that this month’s issue (August 2018) of Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institutehad been slipped through my mail slot. After I spent a few moments reading the table of contents, I flipped back to Nick Nethery’s essay “
Prepare to Fight in Megacities,” which begins thus—
There are at least 35 megacities—or “dense urban areas” in doctrinal terms—in the world, most of them adjacent to littorals. Lagos, Nigeria; Mumbai, India; and Seoul, South Korea; to name just three, are among the many that also sit in active or potential conflict zones. The U.S. military will almost certainly have to fight in one of more of the these 35 in the near future.
Oh, please anything but.
Despite my revulsion at the thought, I do recommend reading the article. Nethery is a major with the explosive ordnance disposal troops of the US Army, and he is clearly concerned about a lack of preparedness in both the Army and the Marine Corps for wading into such an overwhelming urban mess. Most of his discussion centers on how the Fire Department of New York trains recruits to work in burning high-rises and subway tunnels. He cites David Kilcullen’s work Out of the Mountains, an interesting work on (and subtitled) The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (which I do recommend as well, by the way). It’s compelling stuff, and to emphasize the importance of all this, Nethery further asserts (as I have heard before) that “in the next decades, most of the world’s population will be living within artillery range of a coastline.”
So this is what strategy has come to: they live where we can get at them, so let’s prepare to shoot at them, all over the world. This is not to say that counterinsurgency is always a choice, or that armed conflict on the other side of the planet can always be ignored. Hardly. The problem is simply that in hostile megacities, the scale of the problem will exceed any reasonable American solution.
Having finished my screed, let me be a bit more polite. I am concerned that Nethery’s article may have been mis-titled. The major does cite an unnamed colonel of special forces as asserting that population density more thoroughly governs the nature of urban combat than sheer city size. And early in the recent War in Iraq, a simple “Thunder Run” secured Baghdad, a city of eight million—at least for a time. But fighting in Fallujah the next year was challenging for American ground forces—at least more than any fighting in a sprawling suburb would be. So even though American forces won an overwhelming tactical victory there, Fallujah was an instructive case. That comparatively dense city of just a quarter million people absorbed almost a division of troops.
The Marine Corps has three of those. The US Army has about ten. The National Guard can contribute at least eight more with enough notice. Taking a defended city with a semi-hostile population of ten to twenty million could require the services of an entire American corps—or more—unless local allies were actually providing the bulk of ground troops. In the past two decades, those hopes have not taken Americans far.
This is also not to suggest that the American land forces should just skip preparation for urban combat. It’s at least remotely possible that they might find themselves fighting in Seoul, though we really should imagine that South Korean troops would provide the bulk of those forces. It’s plausible that they might find themselves fighting in rather smaller Warsaw, though perhaps against a rather stretched Russian Army, which could find itself rather swallowed up by the challenge too. Vilnius? That’s another city that Americans are treaty-bound to defend, and where our common values demand solidarity. It’s a stressing case too, though more for the problems of access than the limitations of gross troop strength.
So why all the enthusiasm for alluding to battles in Mumbai and Lagos? Honestly, I suspect that this actually is about troop strength. I do not mean to make too much of a single article by a single major in a maritime journal. At the Brookings Institution earlier this summer, Commandant of the Marine Corps General Robert Neller admitted that the Pentagon has some pretty grim Plan Bs, for what happens when the next recession and higher interest rates really put the squeeze on federal spending. The Navy’s primary interest in the Army of late has been in a possibly reformed coastal artillery, this time with anti-ship missiles, to squeeze the Chinese fleet against its own shores. For the past ten years, the Air Force has shown how intervention around the world can be accomplished most with commandos and air strikes. Whether that’s a good idea is another matter. Whatever the case, though, none of this is enough to get generals of mechanized forces excited, or to offer job security to all in the ranks below.
Thus, without chatter about commitments to unsolvable problems, it’s a fair question of what the Army is supposed to do with all its troops today. Creating creative answer to that bureaucratic question may be interesting in the Pentagon, and possibly in certain offices on Capitol Hill, but it’s not the question that should directly concern Americans. Instead, they might start with why on Earth would we want to send a corps into Karachi?
