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By John Barry
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The battle of Grozny was long and bloody--for Russian attackers as well as the Chechen defenders. But you won't see any condescending head-wagging in the U.S. military. As one senior Pentagon official said last week, "I'm not so sure that we'd do a whole lot better than the Russians." That's a problem; in the view of many military analysts, the killing grounds of Grozny offer a hellish view of tomorrow's warfare.
The U.S. Army used to have a simple way of dealing with cities: avoid them. The cost in street-fighting casualties was just too steep. That was one reason that, in 1945, the Army didn't try to take Berlin, a battle that Gen. Omar Bradley told Dwight Eisenhower "might cost us 100,000 men." Bradley was right. The Red Army, which did fight its way into Berlin, lost 102,000 men doing so; 125,000 German civilians died in the battle, and 150,000 to 200,000 German troops. If cities couldn't be avoided, U.S. military doctrine had a fallback plan: flatten them, which is what, in 1968, 8,000 shells from offshore warships did to the Vietnamese city of Hue.
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Neither option now exists. In a 1996 essay in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters argued, "The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world." The article hit a raw nerve. Three years earlier, in a battle in the back alleys of Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Rangers were killed and 73 wounded--a 60 percent casualty rate. All the high-tech equipment that the Rangers were meant to have at their disposal--satellite images, laser-guided munitions and the like--were largely useless in the teeming streets. After Vietnam, the military spent billions of dollars developing the kill-at-a-distance weapons that looked so good in the desert fighting of the gulf war. Trouble is, such weaponry does no good when an enemy soldier is just a few feet away. A 1994 Pentagon study after Mogadishu baldly concluded, "Our current capability was developed for a massive, rural war... Since the future looks much different, new capabilities will have to be developed."
What might those new capabilities be? In the last couple of weeks a company of U.S. Marines has been trying to find out. The Marines have been "fighting" their way through the houses and office blocks of Fort Ord, Calif., an Army base abandoned in 1994. If the results mimic those at a similar exercise last spring, they won't be encouraging. In "attacks" on a naval hospital in Oakland, Calif., the Marines took casualty rates as high as 70 percent.
For the new urban warfare, the military needs new equipment. On its long wish list: handheld sensors to detect an enemy in the next room, and the sort of trolley that mechanics use to go under cars. Why? To rescue wounded buddies. In Grozny, Chechen snipers deliberately aimed at the legs of Russian soldiers, waited patiently for a rescue squad--then shot them, too. Some gear on the wish list is high tech--like robots--but none has the big price tags that attract lobbyists and congressmen. Still, unless the money is found, the price will likely be paid in American blood.
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