Abstract
Anthony King is Professor of War Studies at the University of Warwick and a noted and astute commentator on warfare and the armed forces in the twenty-first century. In books such as The Combat Soldier, Frontline and Command: the Twenty-First Century General, King, a former adviser to General Sir Nick Carter (the UK’s current Chief of the Defence Staff), has combined the sociologist’s sharp eye for structures and relationships with the sensibility of the historian to pick apart what it means to be a warrior today. Now, he has turned his attention to urban warfare: a phenomenon as old as Jericho, of course, but one which is assuming increasing importance.
Analysts such as David Kilcullen have tended to argue that demography and asymmetry have been the main forces driving the increased incidence of urban warfare. Since 1960, the world’s population has doubled, but the number of people living in towns and cities has gone up more than six times, to 3.3 billion. As cities occupy ever more of the planet, they not only prove harder for armies to bypass and avoid, but offer complex defensive positions where hi-tech western militaries find their sophisticated weapons harder to deploy. Insurgents who used to hole up in forests and mountains now find their chances are better on the mean streets of Mosul or Marawi.
King’s first objective is to challenge this narrative. He demonstrates that not all of this shift is new: Palestine, Aden and Algeria are just three examples where urban combat was widespread and important. Second, he inverts Kilcullen’s logic, arguing that it is smaller armies and more precise weaponry that have driven the growth of street fighting. Armies no longer command the manpower to flow around cities, as they did during the Second World War, so they must go in; but, rather than flatten everything and everyone in their path, they now have the ability to limit the destruction and fight only for the decisive locations inside. Third, he offers an up-to-date anatomy of how urban warfare is conducted, displaying how the built environment, airpower, firepower, tactics, allies and information warfare all interact on the modern urban battlefield. Fourth, he supports all this with a wide range of detailed historical case studies from Stalingrad to Fallujah and the Donbas. And, lastly, King scatters insights throughout the book which make the reader think of things in an invigorating fresh light. Some of these are controversial: not everyone would agree that Operation Motorman in Belfast (1972) was ‘war’, for instance. Others offer original ways of thinking about old tropes. So, for example, King points out that while we tend to think of the major urban battles of the Second World War as land battles (Stalingrad, Manila and Berlin), in fact ‘urban air battles were far more common and, overall, far more destructive’ (p. 111). He uses Hamburg to illustrate this.
This is an excellent book. It is easy to read and the argument is neatly laid out and straightforward to follow. It offers a handbook which practitioners will find extremely useful, but it also has resonance outside the profession of arms. Historians will find it a valuable source for detail on a number of important recent campaigns. What makes it a very important book, however, is the way it sheds light on one of the central questions of the study of war in history: how and why the character of war evolves. The answers to such questions are all too often abstract or half-lost, far in the past. With Urban Warfare, however, Professor King has served up a very concrete example of how this extremely complex process operates, supported by evidence gathered almost in real time. Anyone who wants to understand warfare in any of its guises, no matter when or where it is fought, should read this book.