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Many NATO armies may not be prepared for large-scale urban warfare.
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Israel’s operation in Gaza is a test-case for what they may need.
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The biggest lesson may be arming infantry platoons with as much firepower as possible.
Urban warfare in Gaza has revealed a painful truth for NATO: Many of its armies are ill-prepared for fighting in crowded cities.
The Israel Defense Forces has achieved some success in adapting new weapons and tactics, such as arming tactical units with missiles and drones rather than relying support from aircraft and artillery, according to a new British study. The problem is that the British Army lacks the equipment to replicate Israeli tactics.
“While British troops may be trained to fight like the IDF, they find themselves equipped to die like Hamas,” warned the report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
The British Army is understrength, underequipped and underfunded. But so are many European armies that dwindled after the end of the Cold War. Even some American experts worry about the city-fighting capabilities of the US Army, which is far more lavishly equipped and supplied than its NATO counterparts. There is good reason for concern: urban warfare has become a fixture of warfare on a rapidly urbanizing planet, from Fallujah in 2003 to Bakhmut in 2023.
So it’s natural for NATO armies to study how the IDF — a NATO-style mechanized force with a reputation for innovative tactics and high-tech equipment — is battling Hamas among the labyrinthine streets and high-rises of Gaza. Like Western militaries, the last place the IDF wants to fight is in a city, where buildings and rubble shelter the defender, impede armored vehicles and hamper airpower and artillery. Gaza poses an added challenge: a vast tunnel network that Hamas uses for storing weapons and springing hit-and-run attacks.
Indeed, Israel even coined a term for this form of combat: “Devastated terrain warfare.” Israel’s aerial barrage reduced many neighborhoods to rubble before ground forces moved in and is the leading cause of the 39,000 reported Palestinian fatalities. It is a challenging environment for Israel in particular, a small nation of 10 million people that is sensitive to casualties among its soldiers, the majority of whom are reservists.
One tactic that proved effective was to give the lower echelon units — such as platoons — small attack drones and anti-tank missiles. “It was discovered that units that had these systems as well as ATGMs [anti-tank guided missiles] could monitor more urban terrain and conduct precision strikes at tempo in support of tactical actions,” RUSI said. “The small size of the munitions used meant that they could be used with an expectation of precision.”
With Hamas hiding in and raiding from an estimated 450 miles of concrete tunnels, the IDF also found that it couldn’t clear buildings first and then destroy the tunnels underneath. “As the operation developed, it became evident that this allowed Hamas to persist in conducting ambushes for a protracted period and to then transition to a layered defense of underground facilities,” noted RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, who co-authored the report. “Nor could underground infrastructure be safely bypassed.” This meant that Israeli troops had to clear the surface and tunnels simultaneously.
Surprisingly, the high-rise buildings of Gaza proved less beneficial to Hamas than anticipated. Fighters stationed in the upper stories had limited visibility and fields of fire, so the tendency was to stick to the first few levels. But tall buildings did help the defender in another way: destroying them with air strikes led to extensive rubble that hampered the attacker’s tanks and infantry.
The biggest lesson of Gaza is the importance of firepower in urban warfare, according to RUSI. This makes arming tactical units, such as infantry platoons, with as much firepower as possible. Unlike mechanized operations, where low-level infantry and armored units might get air and artillery support from higher headquarters, city fighting tends to be waged by small units.
Firepower played a decisive role “in determining initiative during the fighting in Gaza,” RUSI said. “Ultimately, the superiority in responsiveness and organic lethality of IDF units made it costly for Hamas to mount attacks, and the larger the force it endeavored to bring to bear, the higher the cost of any given action. Furthermore, while indirect fire prevented Hamas from concentrating its forces, the limited organic lethality of its teams meant that once they engaged IDF troops, they were quickly suppressed and thereafter destroyed.”
Another lesson is the importance of air defense. “Buildings do not offer significant protection against air-delivered munitions because of the weight of ordnance that can be dropped with precision,” the report pointed out.
Airpower also hampers maneuver, a major handicap for armies that usually lack the strength to occupy an entire city, and thus have to redeploy troops to key sectors. “Hamas’s lack of ability to threaten Israeli aircraft and ISR [aerial reconnaissance] meant that it was unable to concentrate and lacked freedom of maneuver,” said RUSI. “Once its defensive strong points were identified, they could be reduced. The weight of munitions deliverable from the air outweighs anything deliverable from artillery systems, such that many of the defensive advantages of urban terrain can be bypassed if it is possible to conduct precision bombing from medium altitude.”
In other words, aerial bombing from this altitude is accurate and high volume enough to destroy most urban strongholds or render them useless.
This phenomenon has been seen in Ukraine, said Watling and Reynolds, who have extensively studied that conflict. “Whenever the Russian air force has established access at medium altitude near an urban settlement, it has rapidly destroyed it, enabling subsequent capture.”
However, the lessons of Israeli operations are not always applicable to other conflicts. For example, unlike Russia, Hamas has no artillery, nor electronic warfare to jam Israeli drones and communications, RUSI said. Hamas also only had 40,000 fighters at the war’s start, many of whom are now casualties.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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