Armies are re-learning how to fight in cities

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“The city doesn’t exist any more,” said Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, in April. By then Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, had been under Russian siege for seven weeks—bombed, shelled and struck by rockets. The city fell the next month. Its mayor said that 1,300 high-rise buildings had been destroyed. Satellite images suggested almost half its built-up areas were badly damaged (see map). A pre-war population of over 400,000 had shrunk by more than 75%.

Mariupol’s grim experience holds useful lessons for armies around the world. “For practically all of history, generals have loathed the prospect of fighting in cities and have sought to avoid it,” write David Betz of King’s College London and Lieutenant-Colonel Hugo Stanford-Tuck, a British officer, in the Texas National Security Review, a military and security journal. But whether they like it or not, modern armies are increasingly forced to do so. They are looking to the past for guidance, and pondering how urban battles might best be fought with modern weapons.