Street War

Now that it looks like regular troops are in Baghdad proper, here’s the way urban war works, more or less.

This is the imaginary construct.  I want you to go around the whole house tonight, open all the blinds and curtain, turn on all the lights, then strip buck naked in the bathroom. 

Your mission, without putting any clothes on, or just saying ˜so what if they can see Mr. Johnson” is to close all the curtains and drapes and turn off all the lights.  Accomplish this without your neighbours getting a peek at the goodies.  Assume that all your neighbours are perverts and are actively looking in all the windows of your house.  For some of us, this is not much of a leap of faith.

So, how to you do it?  Slowly for one.  You think before you turn a corner in the hallway.  Can they see me from the windows over there, or over there behind me.  Do I turn off the lights first, or am I being lit from behind in that other room where I still haven’t turned off the lights.  Could it take a couple of hours of crawling on your belly and sneaking about the house to finally get things buttoned back up?  Easily.

That is the essential of street fighting war.  Enemy snipers are waiting for anything to pop up in a window a half a kilometer away that they can shoot.  Rocket Propelled Grenades, known as the Beirut Knock-Knock, at close range, can rip the tread off a tank or disable a Bradley.  You are now left with soldiers on foot, dismounted, going room to room, house to house. 

Tanks, like the M1A2 Abrams, are too damn big for the back streets and alleys.  The Abrams has a couple of useful features in street fighting, like machine guns, mortars and the sheer mass of 70 or so tons.  Don’t worry about firing the Big Fun Gun, just drive the whole tank over a house.  That tends to deny the enemy the position.

The only way you can call in air support is to find out where they’re shooting at you from.  Which house or apartment?  You do this by being bait and drawing fire.

A skilled enemy, only fires from highly concealed positions and does not fire until they are certain they can kill someone.  After firing, they get out of where they are.  This is Shoot and Scoot fighting, so by the time the helicopter gunships are targeted at your last position, you are somewhere else.  They blow up where you were, not where you are.  Then you sit quietly and wait for the next target to roll in, ride in, or walk in.

The big advantage is you know every street, alley, basement, sewer pipe, rooftop and hidey hole.  Your enemy, the US, does not, so you can dress up like an Iraqi woman and just walk from place to place, with your gun under your robes.

This gives the US some options, however.  As was done in WWII and Viet Nam, assume that all structures hold bad guys.  Churches in WWII were common places for snipers and artillery observers, as they had height as an advantage and could see more ground.  Allies at or near the downtown crosswalk?  Here’s the map reference, drop a half-dozen mortar rounds or artillery shells on that map reference and we’ll slow them down some more. 

This is why so many churches in Europe had their steeples blown off: German observers were probably there, so the Allies denied them the high observation point, by shooting the tops off churches or any other tall structures with their Sherman tanks’ 75 mm Fun Gun.

Urban War is the slowest, most precise and dangerous type of fighting.  Everything in front of you must be assumed to be dangerous.  In the Viet Nam era, the street fighting in Hue taught the US some very bloody lessons.  Even if a building was totally on fire, there was often a crazed opponent, in the basement, blazing away with a machine gun until the upper floors collapsed in on them.  Bullets fired by the crazy still kill, just as effectively as bullets fired by the perfectly sane.

In Somalia, specifically Mogadishu, people with weapons (I will not call them soldiers, as they do not deserve the title) would come running from everywhere, surrounded by family members and civilians, to get in the fight.  The civilians had come to “witness” the battle and the weapons folks had come to use the civilians as cover.  The US took another bloody nose there, as the natural reaction of controlled, trained soldiers is to not fire on women and children.  Of course, this is where the weapon-toting folks hid, right in the crowds.

Can an urban war be won in Baghdad?  Yes, but it takes a very strong willed, disciplined force.  It also takes some very serious decisions to be made higher up.  Namely the use of very intense fire from tanks and conventional artillery.  This will cause the death and injury of hundreds, if not thousands of civilians. 

This will cause extensive devastation of areas of town.  Not just blown out windows and some dust, but whole blocks of apartments, offices, stores, homes, markets, yards and businesses turned into piles of broken bricks.  Think of the photos of Berlin at the end of WWII.  Nothing left intact.

Can the US take that decision?  They should, but will they?  I think they won’t and the price will be paid in lives.  It is always thus.