Andrea Lopreiato: War in the cities

Andrea Lopreiato
Mursia Editore, Milan, 2016
pp. 269, euro 15,00

Since ancient times, urban combat has been an event to be avoided if not forced by the progress of the war. More than 2500 years ago, Sun Tzu, in his treatise on theArt of War, the commanders warned about the dangers and pitfalls of war in the city: "The most risky tactic is to besiege cities. Assign it only if you have no other alternative ".

But although strategists over the centuries have advised them to stay away from cities, generals and armies throughout history have continued to attack and defend cities, which have always been considered a tactical and strategic goal. And the growing urbanization of the world's population - it is estimated that by the 2050 three-quarters of humanity will live in an urban environment - it makes it very likely that cities, especially the large coastal metropolises, will be the theaters of war of the coming armed conflicts.

"The cities will be the battlefields of the 21 century", says Louis Di Marco, former lieutenant colonel in the US army, lecturer in military history and urban war theory at theUS Command and General Staff College of Fort Leavenworth, as well as the author of some specialized manuals, including the FM 3-06 Urban Operations of 2002.

The volume is dedicated to military operations in urban areas after World War II War in the Cities by Andrea Lopreiato, in which the author reconstructs seventy years of conflict, from the Arab-Israeli war in the 1948, to the bloody battles of Saigon and Hué in the 1968, to the battles of Vukovar in the 1991 and Sarajevo in the 1992-95, to the intervention in Somalia in the 1993, via the interventions in Chechnya, the first battle of Grozny in the 1994-95 and the second battle of Grozny in the 1999-2000, at the two battles of Fallujah in the 2004, up to the recent clashes in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip .

The author was very selective in the choice of case studies, leaving aside for example some important battles, such as Budapest (1956), Algiers (1956-57) or Panama City (1989). But this is a choice that can be shared, since the cases dealt with are largely representative of the major military interventions conducted within the inhabited centers from 1945 to today.

To cope with this form of combat, the armies, over the years, have developed different tactics and innovative techniques, which are regularly described and analyzed in the volume. Among the most effective, in particular, those developed by the Israelis since the first conflict against the Arab-Palestinians, and, precisely, the technique of mouse-holing, or the advancement through the breaches practiced in the walls of buildings to move from house to house, avoiding the streets, potential places of ambush. Implemented at the time by the terrorist organization Irgun Zwei Levi, the technique was refined and widely tested by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) during the operation Defensive Shield (March-April 2002) coupled with the technique of swarming, of the "swarm". Borrowed from the behavior of some insects, such as ants, grasshoppers and wasps, it swarming consists in advancing and attacking the goal moving in mass like a swarm then disappearing quickly before the enemy can react. The technique of mouse-holing it was later used also by the US army during the operation Phantom Fury (Fallujah 2004).

In the final chapter of the volume, Lopreiato makes stimulating considerations on the wars that the Armed Forces of Western countries will have to face and on the gaps that should be filled in terms of training, human resources, means, materials and intelligence. And there is a series of interesting proposals: urban war, the urban warfare should correspond a new type of soldier, in possession of new specializations. Forcing, but not too much the author's hand, it could be said that the constitution within the regular armies of a new military body, which we could define as urban warfighters. Furthermore, for Lopreiato new means and weapon systems should be employed in this particular kind of combat, for example mechanical arms and elevators, capable of carrying heavy weapons and operators up to 40 meters high, which would allow to break into the upper floors of buildings to be reclaimed or portable thermobaric weapons, very effective against structures and artifacts, as seen during the war in Chechnya.

The volume closes with a sufficiently large and up-to-date bibliography, even if, in some cases, some of the quoted texts are not reported in Italian. But this is nothing but a minor detail, which does not detract from the value and quality of the work. A Lopreiato deserves credit for having treated, in an agile and documented way, a topic on which there is a vast bibliography in foreign language, but still little frequented by Italian scholars of military affairs.

War in the Cities, remains one of the very few works on the subject, if not perhaps the only one, so far written by an Italian author and published in Italy.

Nicola Festa