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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 of what they may need.
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The biggest lesson may be to arm infantry platoons with as much firepower as possible.
The urban warfare in Gaza has revealed a painful truth for NATO: many of its armies are ill-prepared to fight in crowded cities.
The Israel Defense Forces has had some success in adapting new weapons and tactics, such as arming tactical units with missiles and drones rather than relying on aircraft and artillery support, 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 are equipped to die like Hamas,” warned the report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
THE British Army it is insufficient, underequipped and underfunded. But so do many European armies that dwindled after the end of the Cold War. Even some American experts worry about the U.S.’s urban combat capabilities. US Armywhich is much better equipped and supplied than its NATO counterparts. There is good reason for concern: urban warfare has become a constant element of warfare on a rapidly urbanizing planet since Fallujah in 2003 for Bakhmut in 2023.
So it’s only 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 fighting Hamas among the labyrinthine streets and skyscrapers of Gaza. Like Western militaries, the last place the IDF wants to fight is in a city, where buildings and rubble shelter defenders, impede armored vehicles, and hamper air power and artillery. Gaza poses an additional challenge: a vast network of tunnels which Hamas uses to store weapons and launch hit-and-run attacks.
In fact, Israel even coined a term for this form of combat: “War on devastated ground.” Israel’s aerial barrage reduced many neighborhoods to rubble before ground forces arrived and is the main cause of the 39,000 reported Palestinian deaths. It is a challenging environment for Israel in particular, a small nation of 10 million people that is sensitive to casualties among its soldiers, most of whom are reservists.
One tactic that proved effective was to give lower echelon units — such as platoons — small attacks. drones and anti-tank missiles. “It was discovered that units possessing these systems, as well as ATGMs [anti-tank guided missiles] could monitor more urban terrain and conduct timely precision strikes in support of tactical actions,” RUSI said. “The small size of the munitions used meant they could be used with an expectation of precision.”
With Hamas hiding and attacking around 720 kilometers of concrete tunnels, the IDF he also discovered that he could not clear the buildings first and then destroy the tunnels below. “As the operation developed, it became apparent that this allowed Hamas to persist in conducting ambushes for an extended period and then transition to a layered defense of underground facilities,” noted RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, co-authors of the report. . “Not even the underground infrastructure could be safely bypassed.” This meant that Israeli troops had to clear the surface and the tunnels simultaneously.
Surprisingly, the tall buildings of Gaza turned out to be less beneficial to Hamas than anticipated. The fighters parked on the upper floors had limited visibility and fields of fire, so the tendency was to stay on the first levels. But the tall buildings helped the defender in another way: destroying them with air strikes resulted in extensive rubble that crippled the attacker’s tanks and infantry.
The biggest lesson from Gaza is the importance of firepower in urban warfare, according to RUSI. This makes arming tactical units, such as infantry platoons, as much firepower as possible. Unlike mechanized operations, where low-level infantry and armored units can obtain air and artillery support from higher headquarters, fighting in cities tends to be fought by small units.
Firepower played a decisive role “in determining the initiative during the fighting in Gaza,” RUSI said. “Ultimately, the superior responsiveness and organic lethality of IDF units made it expensive for Hamas to mount attacks, and the greater the force it strove to exert, the greater the cost of any action. Furthermore, although Although indirect fire prevented Hamas from concentrating its forces, the limited organic lethality of its teams meant that, once IDF troops were engaged, they were quickly repressed and subsequently destroyed.”
Another lesson is the importance of air defense. “Buildings do not offer significant protection against air-dropped munitions due to the weight of ordnance that can be delivered with precision,” the report noted.
Air power also makes maneuver difficult, a major disadvantage for armies that typically do not have the strength to occupy an entire city and therefore have to redeploy troops to key sectors. “Hamas’ lack of ability to threaten Israeli aircraft and ISR [aerial reconnaissance] it meant he couldn’t concentrate and had no freedom of maneuver,” said RUSI. “Once his defensive strengths were identified, these could be reduced. The weight of munitions delivered from the air outweighs anything delivered by artillery systems, so many of the defensive advantages of urban terrain can be circumvented if it is possible to conduct precision bombing from medium altitude.”
In other words, aerial bombardment from this altitude it is accurate and has enough volume to destroy most urban fortresses or render them useless.
This phenomenon has been observed in Ukraine, said Watling and Reynolds, who have studied that conflict extensively. “Whenever the Russian Air Force established medium-altitude access near an urban settlement, it quickly destroyed it, allowing subsequent capture.”
However, lessons from Israeli operations are not always applicable to other conflicts. For example, unlike Russia, Hamas does not have artillery or electronic warfare to block Israeli drones and communications, RUSI said. Hamas also had just 40,000 fighters at the start of the war, many of whom are now victims.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine and other publications. He holds a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him Twitter and LinkedIn.
Read the original article at Business Insider
