As an analyst and teacher on conflicts around the globe…I have seen our army fight the good fight….massive amounts of men and equipment racing across a desert on the way to victory.
Makes for impressive History Channel shows but in these days of terrorism and fighting for every inch of territory the military needs to be well trained in urban combat. Look at Mosul the fight is from street to street and house to house……the tactics of an conventional war are useless in the urban setting.
I recently read a good report on what is needed by our military to deal with the battlefront of today’s wars……….
Train as you fight. It’s the first of the Army’s ten principles of training, meant to ensure that the Army will develop and execute tough, realistic training. As long as we train as we fight, no soldier should confront a situation or an environment for the first time in combat. Unfortunately, the Army occasionally ignores this principle. Case in point: despite history and global urbanization trends, the Army doesn’t adequately train for operations in urban environments. It is time that changed. The Army needs to establish an urban warfare school to prepare soldiers to fight and survive in dense urban terrain.
The chief of staff of Army, Gen. Mark Milley, recent detailed his thoughts on urban warfare at the annual AUSA conference, stating that the future battlefield “will almost certainly be in dense urban terrain” and that in the future the Army will have to “optimize for urban combat.” He described the urban environment’s “huge implications” on intelligence collection, vehicles and weapons, target discrimination, and maneuver, and concluded ominously: “Army forces operating in complex, densely populated urban terrain in dense urban areas is the toughest and bloodiest form of combat and it will become the norm, not the exception in the future.”
Source: The Army Needs an Urban Warfare School and It Needs It Soon | RealClearDefense
Our military needs to adapt…the fields of combat are changing and we need to be the best we can be in all of them. Learning as they go is not the best way to fight these types of conflict.