Book Review - Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century - Anthony King

Reviewed by Amos C. Fox, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Reading

Introduction

Following in the footsteps of other British war studies luminaries, such as J. F. C. Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart, and Michael Howard, Professor Anthony King delivers a modern classic in Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. King’s treatise, published in 2021, adroitly cuts through the chafe found in much of the contemporary writing on urban warfare. Professor King eloquently delivers a penetrating account of how modern war is waged, why urban environments are so prevalent in today’s conflicts, and how the character of urban battle can be defined. King’s work relies on useful examples to illustrate the history of urban warfare and how changes in military force structures have been one of the largest drivers for urban battle in the post-Cold War era.   

King’s balance of qualitative narrative and quantitative data creates a rich empirical study of urban warfare, yet does not oversaturate the reader with laborious amounts of statistics. Beyond that, King’s arrayal of information, lively writing style, and excellent selection of case studies keeps the reader’s attention, making the book challenging to put down.    

Summary

Professor King provides an empirical look at the rise of urban battles in the context of armed conflict. King’s research finds that, since the end of the Cold War, urban warfare is disproportionately represented in armed conflict when analyzed with respect to other eras of war. In short, King rightly asserts that urban battles and urban warfare—near constants in war since 2000—are both dominant and defining features of modern armed conflict. 

King contends that the interplay of weaponry, cities, and forces is the key to understanding urban warfare. Moreover, King asserts that appreciating the urban warfare phenomenon requires operating beyond the bounds of disciplinary thought, and clearly understanding urban warfare requires an interdisciplinary mindset.  

Warfare

King provides a set of changes in modern warfare that help explain why urban warfare has become much more prevalent in the post-Cold War period, but the three most useful are increased range and lethality at lower echelons of organization, swarming, and sieges. King argues that increased lethality and precision fire weapons at lower levels of organization, that is, the platoon, section, and squad level, has caused combatants to seek parity, not in comparable arms, but in offsetting those advantages. The city—a great neutralizer of weapon system asymmetry—is thus one of the leading features that combatants use to give themselves a chance against a numerically and technologically superior opponent.

Swarming is another adaptation in warfare that is seeing a resurgence. Swarming, in the context of urban battle, is the result of weaker actors relying on urban areas to help offset the strength of more powerful adversaries. King notes that in Grozny in 1994, for example, small swarms of Chechen fighters routed superior Russian forces. The Chechens, far more familiar with the three-dimensional urban geography of Grozny than the average Russian soldier, deftly moved from one location to the next, eliminating Russian tanks and mechanized infantry vehicles, before disappearing like ghosts and coalescing at another pivotal place of battle. 

Sieges and micro-sieges are the final adaptation in warfare that King explores. King rightly notes that sieges are back in fashion because of the parity that urban battlefields deliver. As a result, actors not looking to engage in street fighting tend to conduct sieges. However, given the diminishing size of modern forces, coupled with the increased size of cities, fully encircling a city is often out of the question. Resultantly, micro-sieges take the place of full-scale sieges. Micro-sieges, like the US Army’s encirclement of Baghdad’s Sadr City during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, become common place. King states that as cities continue to grow and land forces continue to constrict, micro-sieges will increasingly become a feature of urban warfare.      

Cities

Professor King states that one of the leading reasons for the increasing frequency of urban warfare is that the world’s cities are growing at an incredible rate. This growth makes cities that were already large even bigger. Further, modern urban growth has caused small towns and villages to gradually morph into bigger cities. Therefore, where in the past it was possible to move through much more passive open terrain, today’s physical space is less restrictive because cities are much larger than they were in the recent past. Urban growth, therefore, has a relatively deterministic effect on today’s combatants, luring them into the urban areas based on geography and the need to survive.

Forces

Professor King persuasively argues that the pervasiveness of urban battles is the result of land forces that are significantly smaller than those of previous generations. In the past, notably in World War I (WWI), World War II (WWII), and the Korean War, armies were extremely large and operated along fronts, or on a massive swath of land that was heavily populated with soldiers and formations both laterally and in great depth. Army fronts consumed everything within their boundaries. The army front’s size made urban combat less pronounced and less noticeable because of the scale of the fronts, the size of the forces at play, and the smaller size of urban areas in relation to today. However, King asserts that as troop numbers in armies decrease and cities grow, it is all but impossible for armies to overwhelm urban areas and their neighborhoods, and therefore weaker combatants use urban warfare to offset adversary strength. 

Recommendation

King’s Urban Warfare is the pinnacle of urban warfare studies. The book’s versatility is perhaps its most respectable quality. Many books on armed conflict tend to focus either entirely on policy implications, or on tangible insights for the practitioner. Urban Warfare, however, is a rarity in that it adroitly combines useful implications for both policymakers and practitioners. For the policymaker who might be considering armed conflict as a solution to a political problem, the book recasts glowing predictions of lightning war into the praxis of reality: wars are won through hard attritional slogs, which today cannot be separated from the urban battlefield. Further, Urban Warfare serves as a cautionary tale for policymakers, pointing to a future of lengthy wars of attrition based on the decreasing size of modern armies, and the parity urban areas provide to partisans and hostile non-state actors. 

Likewise, Urban Warfare provides practitioners with realistic considerations that must be accounted for when contemplating the reality of urban warfare. For the practitioner, at all levels of war, King provides tangible considerations for force employment, force development, and concept and doctrine development based on the realities of the urban battlefield. For instance, practitioners will likely face sieges and micro-sieges on future urban battlefields. Moreover, urban environments suboptimize airpower and other precision-based capabilities, thereby thwarting short-war dreams. Perhaps most apropos, King asserts that urban warfare rapidly nullifies the prospect of sanitary battles, but instead sharply increases the likelihood of stalemate, civilian casualties, collateral damage, and turning armed conflict into grinding wars of attrition.

Professor Anthony King’s Urban Warfare is a fantastic contribution to the study of war and warfare. Urban Warfare should be atop the reading list for anyone studying modern armed conflict because it is an excellent primer on the character of modern war and because it provides a traceable line to the future of warfare. As King argues, urban warfare is not a fad or the result of bad tactics; instead, urban warfare is a permanent condition within modern and future armed conflict. Anyone with a passing interest in understanding modern armed conflict, advocates for international humanitarian law in war, or defence experts looking to glean the most relevant insights into post-Cold War conflict must start their examination with Anthony King’s Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century; it is, hands down, a classic in the study of modern warfare. 

This article first appeared in the October, 2024 edition of Canadian Army Journal (21-1).