Economist Article on Urban Warfare

The Economist published an in-depth article this week on urban warfare. It is here: Armies are re-learning how to fight in cities | The Economist

You will not be able to read the entire article without a subscription, but I think I can quote the two most important paragraphs as fair use:

The biggest question is whether a lack of familiarity with city fighting has over-amplified its grim reputation. A study by Christopher Lawrence of the Dupuy Institute, which collects historical data on warfare, analysed urban operations towards the end of the second world war, including three battles over Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city which has been battered in the current conflict. It found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that cities slowed down armies: rates of advance were one-third to one-half what they were in non-urban combat.

But cities were not necessarily deadlier than other battlefields. The attacker’s casualties were no higher in urban operations than non-urban ones, and losses of vehicles were the same or lower. In more recent urban battles—those for Fallujah in Iraq in 2004 or Marawi in the Philippines in 2017—the attackers’ casualties were low, just over one death a day, and far lower than those of defenders. In fact the highest casualties in urban offensives have been borne by Soviet or Russian armies—a fact which says as much about Russian tactical prowess as it does about urban warfare.

Anyhow, thanks to the Economist for the shout-out. The three urban warfare studies that we did were done by both Richard C. Anderson and I. The first study (see: Microsoft Word – Urban Warfare Phase I _W2K_.doc (dupuyinstitute.org)) was a joint effort by the two of us. The sections on combat stress and logistical expenditures from pages 58 to 75 was Richard Anderson’s work based upon Richard Anderson’s idea.

The second study on the three battles of Kharkov was primarily my work. The third study, which covered Manila and Hue was mostly Richard Anderson’s study. The fourth study was cancelled by Hurricane Katrina: Urban Phase IV – Stalingrad | Mystics & Statistics (dupuyinstitute.org).

and then there is this following paragraph:

Nor does this sort of fighting seem to be uniquely traumatic (at least for those carrying guns). A report by the Rand Corporation, an American think-tank, concludes that rates of combat stress—what was once called shell shock—were no higher than usual in the battles for Brest in Brittany in 1944, Manila in the Philippines in 1945 or Hue in Vietnam in 1968 (though most civilians had, wisely, left before the fighting started). The report suggests that the intensity of urban combat paradoxically gave soldiers a greater sense of initiative, control and purpose than those fighting in open terrain. Anecdotally, Ukrainian forces facing distant and relentless shellfire in Donbas say that the inability to see the enemy is as demoralising and disempowering as anything else.

Now, this was really Richard Anderson’s work redone as a RAND study. In our first report, I put in a section called “Appendix VII: Recent MOUT Literature” (page 112-121). This was because I was appalled at what other people were claiming about urban warfare and their methodology for how they developed these ideas. While I usually try to refrain from addressing other people’s work, sometimes I can’t help myself. Anyhow, this resulted in RAND doing another study on urban warfare in 2005 called Steeling the Mind: Combat Stress Reactions and Their Implications for Urban Warfare (see: Steeling the Mind: Combat Stress Reactions and Their Implications for Urban Warfare | RAND) This effort included a section done by Dr. Todd C. Helmus (Chapter 4, pages 39-67) that was really the core of the RAND report. This effort repeated the research done by Richard Anderson. In fact, Dr. Helmus called us, and Richard ended up giving him a list of the exact NARA files we looked at. Our work is footnoted in Chapter Four the RAND study on pages 46 (along with the comment: “We would like to thank the authors of this report for their helpful comments”) and is listed in the bibliography on page 145. Otherwise, we are not mentioned, even though clearly the entire reason for their revised study was because of our study. 

Now, overall this is a good thing. We produced a report that contradicted previous RAND studies, they then conducted an independent effort to replicate our research and double-check our results. The end result is that they found our research was good and our finding were correct. This is kind of how part of the scientific process should work. 

Now, perhaps I am overly sensitive about this, but the RAND report that was published never stated up front that it was a revision of their previous work. In fact, it directly contradicted some of their previous work. Furthermore, they never stated that the basic idea for the research and the conclusions were The Dupuy Institute‘s or Richard Anderson’s. They kind of carefully avoided mentioning us other than one footnote in Chapter Four of the report. In my view, this kind of looks like they stole our ideas, claimed them as their own, and did not give us proper credit. Maybe I am truly overly sensitive about this, but this is not the first time that people at RAND have done that and this was not the last time it happened. So yea, still carrying a little bit of a grudge. Especially as before the end of 2005 I had to lay Richard Anderson off because of a lack of budget. In the end, it was our ideas, research and work, not RAND’s.