Fighting in - IEEE Spectrum

IE E E S P E C T R U M • Fe br u ar y 20 0 1 In March of 1999, the U.S. Marines invaded California. Descending on an old Navy hospital in Oakland, they attempted to wrest it from guerilla fighters encamped there. Despite being armed to the teeth with the latest intelligence-gathering and assault weaponry, they suffered devastating losses, some units reporting casualty rates as high as 70 percent after just a few hours of fighting. The Oakland raid was an exercise, of course, and no one actually died. But it drove home an important lesson, and one that military experts have harped on for years: despite all its advanced technology and extraordinary fire power, the U.S. military is ill-prepared to wage an urban war. Nor is it alone. Russian troops succeeded in routing Chechen fighters from the capital city of Grozny only after flattening whole neighborhoods and killing thousands of civilians. The last decade has seen similarly destructive campaigns waged in Sarajevo and Mogadishu and many other cities around the world. “Virtually every recent U.S. military operation has had an urban component,” noted Russell Glenn, a senior research analyst and urban warfare expert at Rand Corp., Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s not something that we can afford to be casual about.” Not that there’s any good place to hold a war, but, in terms of lives lost and property MILITARY