Thomas Crosbie & Holger Lindhardtsen
The global security environment is undergoing rapid change. For many countries, including the United States and its NATO allies, there has been both a push and a pull effect indicating the need for a new security posture. The push is a movement away from the sorts of conflicts that marked the first two decades of the twenty-first century. With the fall of Kabul in 2021, the era of countering insurgencies, building and stabilizing states, and countering terror organizations was thought to draw to an ambivalent, unsatisfying end. At the same time as militaries seem to be pushed out of low-intensity conflicts, there has been an alarming pull in the opposite direction, back to preparing for major combat operations.
With the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European countries in particular have raced to enact a wide range of reforms that support a radical change in posture toward territorial defense. Given that much of the early fighting in Ukraine took place in urban environments, it also served as an indicator that urban warfighting and the lessons learned from two decades of COIN remain still relevant. This belief was reinforced in October 2023, when Hamas launched an attack into Israel, leading to a large-scale urban warfighting operation in the Gaza Strip, while also reminding the world that the era of counter-insurgency might not be coming to an end.
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