Back in 2001 we did our first report on urban warfare. It was followed by three two others. It was the report that forced RAND to completely reverse revise their position on urban war. Report is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/pdf/urbanwar.pdf
Our three urban warfare reports are the basis for two chapters in my book War by Numbers. They are Chapter 16: Urban Legends and Chapter 17: The Use of Case Studies. I did brief it in several forums inside of DOD back in the early 2000s. I did consider at one point doing a separate book on urban warfare, but the interest in the subject appeared to be waning and we switched our work to examining insurgencies. I did brief part of Chapter 16 in my presentation at NYMAS (but the podcast has not been posted yet).
Urban warfare now seems to be a major topic once again. There are a number of sites and links that reference many reports, articles and studies on the subject. What is curious is that our original reports nor is my book listed on most of these sites. Our original urban warfare report was significant enough to help answer the Center for Army Analysis (CAA) questions about modeling urban fighting in their simulations and to cause RAND to issue out a revised urban warfare report based upon our report. Yet, it is not significant enough to be listed on these various reference sites. Is it because it does not provide the answer that some people want to see?
We did put the data we used for this analysis in our appendices to these reports. This resulted in one student at the Naval Postgraduate School putting out a report called “Analyzing the Effects of Urban Combat on Daily Casualty Rates.” Basically, he reworked our analysis using the data in the appendices. So he looked at 253 battles, of which 96 occurred in urban areas. The link to that report is here: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a424898.pdf
It was work done by a graduate student named Hakan Yazilitas (First Lieutenant, Turkish Army). It was for his master of science in operations research. According to his abstract:
Hypothesis tests are used to find if the DCR [Daily Casualty Rate] is different in urban operations. A linear regression model is constructed to predict outcomes of similar engagements and to see the effect of each variable. It is conluded that the attacker’s daily casualty rate is, on average, lower in urban operations. Terrain and force ratio are the most effective drivers of the daily casualty rate.
I am thanked in the acknowledgments, although I don’t recall what I did to help.
A few things of note:
- The chart on page xvii is cool (track urban vs non-urban losses).
- The graph on page 7 is cool (shows daily casualty rates from attacking and defenders from 1600 to present).
Lt. Yazilitas seems to have produced a very rigorous thesis or dissertation. I only briefly scanned his report, but he seems to have taken care of any potential problem of force nationality being correlated with that force’s terrain decisions, attacker-to-defender ratio decisions, etc. by using interaction terms. Did anyone notice whether he wrote about any doctrine differences between the nations concerning the kind of terrain through which a nation was willing to attack (or in which a nation was willing to defend)? Same question goes for attacker-to-defender ratio, etc. Those questions are important for making sure that nationality variables don’t muddy the estimated effects of the other variables when nationality variables are included with the other variables in the regression.
Just scrolled through the text:
a) Sun Tzu was not an individual but rather a compilation of various philosophies (and they can hardly answer all problems encountered in the 21st century) .
b) His comparisons can be meaningless, if he ignores the different nature of operations/conflicts and not listing which operations he specifically selected. They can also be distorted by not distinguishing between combat/bloody and CIA rates.
“One notable issue is the absence of data for Germans attacking Allied forces in urban areas.” Doctrinal differences aside, that is exactly the issue. When the defensive layers were broken and collapse was imminent, German forces were much more eager to surrender and fall into US/UK captivity, than e.g. to end in a Soviet camp. I do not know if this would apply to Arnhem, Best, Uden, Son, Nijmegen or Eindhoven. I have not seen any thorough study on those engagements, or if they were featured in Yazilitas study. During the battle of Aachen, the German war machine was already in disarray and collapsing, when the Germans fought the Soviets, it was not.
c) The usual 3 to 1 nonsense.
d) The findings on the evolution of dispersion have been formulated by many scholars and researchers of military affairs. I think Dupuy predates most of the quoted names. Never heard of any Yigit, so I apologize for my ignorance.
e) “Battle outcomes are more probabilistic than deterministic.” Dupuy disagreed.
f) Initially, the Germans never really considered Stalingrad that important. That was bloated up by Soviet post war propaganda (and various Generals memoirs). The focus of two belligerents can be determined by the decision making based on the operational circumstances or at least develop through the interaction of those forces. Reaching the city was more costly than actually holding it, at least until the envelopment occured. The Germans were overextended, in Cherbourg, Caen and Brest, the Allies were not.
The Soviets launched massive, simultanous offensives and failed on all other sectors, while succeeding in the South, which threatened AGC. Their main focus was to destroy AGC which pointed towards Moscow, they did not manage to do that before mid 44, so that historiography focused on Stalingrad and declared it the main effort.
g) TDI did not establish that US and Ger effectiveness was equal. At least that is not what Dupuy’s original figures showed.
e) “Due to the small number of cases where U.K. and Canadians fought against the Germans, the Germans advantage in combat effectiveness can be ignored.” The constants for both world wars are almost identical. There are enough operations to measure combat effectiveness. However, my theory is that the difference in performance between British and US troops can be explained by the fact that the study was conducted by Americans.
f) “Aerial bombardment against cities contributed to higher destruction and casualties as depicted in Figure 16. Bombers turned the cities into rubble, killing many civilians in addtion to military personnel [Ref. 13]. Thus, it is possible that a high daily defender casualty rate and low attacker casualty rate could be a result of the use of indirect fire platforms. ” Yes, in Grozny, the Russians left no stone unturned and raized the city to the ground before commencing.
h) “Thus, the Allied forces differ from the Germans and Soviets in their understanding of the urban operations.” Yes, the Nazis and Soviets showed little to no mercy for the local populations and utilized the cities as hotels.
Sorry, screwed up the enumeration. I wrote some passages before others and forgot to sort them 😉
Well, it is still nice to see someone re-shoot our analysis using our data.
… and nice to see someone addressing econometric issues that could affect the analysis (though I still haven’t taken the time to evaluate how well the issues were addressed).