Operations in Built-Up Areas (OBUA)

[rw4th]

Nobody's mentioned it, but multiple points of entry is also very problematic for structures where the layout is not know (again the battles in Falluja are an example). The tactics used for precision DA attacks do not all port to extended urban battles. I think you can separate the tactics and training for urban operations into 3 different categories:

- FIBUA/CQB: the tactics used by the â Å“big armyâ ? for urban combat
- Advanced FIBUA/CQB: the tactics used by SOF type units for DA missions
- The stuff specialist units do: the tactics hostage rescue and other specialist units use

While the 3 levels have commonalities, some tactics do not port well across all 3 categories; e.g. using multiple entry points is good for a well-trained unit doing a precision DA raid with good intel on the target building, but can prove fatal for an infantry company fighting building to building in a foreign city.

 

[jmackenzie_15]

So far, what Ghostwalk said IMO sounds alot better than what we're doing.Assaulting a building from the roof or top level - down is harder to defend against, and the less educated/trained enemy would usually opt to just run out the seemingly safe front door only to be cut down by a c6.That idea right there cuts down on a few enemy troops that otherwise would have been firing at you from the top of a stairwell.

I also agree that it is far easier to fight downhill than up.The training i was talking about that our unit did, many of our casualties came from being hit from above, be it a stairwell, a mousehole in the floor or something similar.The enemy also cannot use grenades as effectively having to throw them upstairs when they might just roll back down on top of them, and likewise, we could use grenades more effectively (if we were permitted to use them at all.)

Also, it seems safer to attack from the roof, as you dont have to worry /so much/ about the guy down the street with an RPG or whomever.You would also have a vantage point on any forces attacking you from outside the building.

That mouseholing idea sounds like it would also work alot better too..... I can see the official doctrine on OBUA being changed many many times in the future

 

[Michael Dorosh]

I'm all in favour of masking cities and leaving them to wither on the vine, myself...

Silly REMF.

Check out Dunkirk and many of the major French channel ports in WW II; they didn't surrender until May 1945...

I know, I know, how incredibly unhelpful of me...

 

[a_majoor]

Some observations:

Attacking from the top down is ideal in theory, but very hard in practice. Large helicopters will have difficulty landing on a roof, while small helicopters might only be able to deliver a single "brick" of four soldiers. Driving up in an AFV puts the vehicle in a bad spot, ladders expose the troops for a long time, even going from roof to roof might be problematic if the buildings are too far apart. This looks like a job for spider man!

AFVs are best used as "cut offs", since they are able to use their weapons and optics to cover down the length of a street. Using an AFV to breach a wall in "Stalingrad" fashion has the same limitations as using the AFV as a ladder. Use AFVs to divide the area into bite sized pieces. Anyone trying to cross the streets to escape or reinforce the position "gets it".

Multiple entry points are often discounted in training for the simple reason that control is lost right away. This is a risk assessment the local commander has to make.

High Explosive Dual Purpose (HEDP) 84mm is great for making a hole in a wall. Normal 84 or M-72 rounds will penetrate the wall and probably kill everyone inside with blast and overpressure, but there won't be a usable hole for you to go through.

Doors and windows can be booby trapped and covered, but this could be to your advantage: blast out the offending door or window with a large calibre round or charge. This will detonate the booby traps and possibly kill the defenders waiting for your arrival. Mouseholing is always better, though.

Combat inside buildings should be in "pulses" for lack of a better term. Hit a room, clear a room, secure a room, pause and pass on the situation to the next fire team or section, then they go into the next room.

 

[TangoTwoBravo]

Looking at AFVs in urban operations I think that we need to overcome our fear of deploying vehicles into these situations.  A built-up area does present many constraints but having AFVs available can make a big difference (in my opinion).  If tanks and APCs just motor into a city at full speed they will eventually get wiped out (Warsaw, Grozny), but if they are part of an infantry heavy combined arms force they can make a great contribution.

Tanks need protection in an urban environment but they certainly have a place.  The 105mm HESH round can make an excellent entry-point into a building (I've seen the results) and can give precise and timely fire support.  The problem, of course, is that you eventually end up wrecking the city this way...The MGS might be able to fill this role although I worry even more about RPGs.

I'm all for bypassing cities in a WW III scenario but in our current operations we may find ourselves having to fight for a particular part of a city even though we'd rather not.  

Cheers,

2B

 

[Britney Spears]

Ghostwalk:

I'm not discounting entirely the idea of stacking, it has its place just like anything else in an urban enviroment. Rather I was uing it to illustrate how over reliance on police tactics has caused us to forget some fundamentals of infantry combat which stay true regardless of the enviroment. i.e. Don't bunch up. You wouldn't want to bunch up in a section attack, nor on a fighting patrol, why would you do it while clearing a building? The Russians at Stalingrad never operated in groups of more than 2-4 men, blowing holes and fragging each room before entering it.  More were brought up as needed but the idea of gathering up a whole section outside each room to clear it is ludicrous, especially if the enemy has tanks. This was actually one of the weakneses of German tactics, whose troops were much better trained in operating as a section, but not in fireteams.

Just like a section attack, there isn't a perfect solution, but the Israeli idea of staying out of streets, doorways, and obvious routes of movement entirely as a doctrine does work. Piling 7 or 8 men through a narrow doorway, especially if its in a position exposed to fire from elsewhere, is stupid and dangerous.     

 

[westie47]

We are in the midst of training for Urban Ops. There seems to have been a shift from all-out (high-intensity) fighting to this 3 block war concept. The question is: how do we train for all three blocks???? It's more common nowadays to enter a building and find everything from a family eating dinner in one room, to a guy with a rifle, making a bomb in the next.  Now you can't very well use frags in every room and go in spraying as per our old doctrine. Now it's more of a SWAT style entry, then determine the threat. We changed our drills from the old ones to new hostage rescue type of drills that a couple of us use in our normal jobs. We aslo finally got some MLP's from the recent Urban Ops Course, which were very similiar to our hostage-rescue drills.

The biggest problem I see with CQB-type of operations, is the IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) ability of our troops. We have all read/seen about the many American soldiers being charged for murder in Iraq!!!! Nobody wants to be that guy.

Thankfully the army is now, from what I understand, introducing DD-25's. We use them all of the time at work and they work awesome. The crap part is, they are in the system but we don't get them for training. It seems they are under the 'when you really need them you will get them' file!!!

I think the SWAT-style clearing techniques are the best.  If need be you can always escalate to frags. Using these techniques forces the troops to think and make snap decisions more so than if they just threw a frag in and went in firing.

Does anyone agree?

 

[a_majoor]

Sorry, I'm with Britney on this one.

 

[Michael Dorosh]

The question is: how do we train for all three blocks????

The answer is: One block at a time.

 

[Britney Spears]

Westie47:

Noone's disagreeing with you, I was merely pointing out that police tactics are for police situations, and we often do face them. When buddy on the second floor decides to roll a grenade into your stack, you should probably stop stacking and bring out the RPOs.

I've been on too many FISHing trips where the plan was something like "Okay, C6 overwatch will riddle all the windows and shoot anything that moves, and then 1 section will stack up on this door here....."  :

Anyone catch a glimpse of the American "storming" of the hideout of Uday and Qusay?  They brought in all their Delta, Seals, and the whole skateboard crew, tried to go in, took fire, pulled back, and then "cleared" each room with a TOW missile followed by a few bursts from the .50.

It would be great if we could train for every kind of situation, but in the mean time we have to make a choice.

Actual footage of the operation. Note the fancy helmets and webbing some of the characters in the front are sporting.
<img src=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/Allen710/UdayQusaykilled_sizedown.jpg>
"Room clear.... no wait, I think there's still some movement..... fire another one in there......"

 

[bossi]

... As per the mention about the Israeli's tactics, those are nothing new, One needs only to remember Ortona in the Italian campaign back in 1943 ...

Thanks for mentioning that (i.e. the Israelis may have practised it, but they certainly didn't invent it ...)

Trivia:  The Canadian Army Review thing-a-ma-bob (or whatever it's called) had an amusing anecdote - Cdn troops in the Netherlands were more successful when they simply knocked on doors and asked if there were any Germans there ... (chuckle) ... ah, for the simpler days of yore ...

 

[a_majoor]

Three block fighting needs to be very deliberate:

Combat inside buildings should be in "pulses" for lack of a better term. Hit a room, clear a room, secure a room, pause and pass on the situation to the next fire team or section, then they go into the next room.

This certainly allows the situation to be developed, without having too many people in one place should something go wrong (Family eating dinner turns out to be terrorist cell). The primary mistake is bunching up either in doors, or clustering behind AFVs expecting them to be mobile ballistic shields. This sort of thing attracts the wrong sort of attention; either a machinegun burst or an RPG (or maybe a remote IED).

The real issue is higher level tactics, or even the operational art. Stalingrad or Ortona style battles consume men and resources on huge scales, and give the initiative to the defender, since the attacker is basicly stuck in the city until it is cleared. Various methods of manoeuvrist fighting can be tried in Urban Ops, with screening the city being one extreme case. More sensible ideas would include "thunder runs" to rapidly insert forces, dominate areas and cut the city into bite sized pieces, very high levels of surveillance with Coyotes, UAVs, recce patrols, sniper dets etc. to pinpoint the enemy as best as you can, and agressive use of PSYWAR, CIMIC and HUMINT to separate the locals from the enemy, or better still, turn them against the enemy. Once the enemy is located, going in and getting them is fairly straightforward....

 

[KevinB]

I am with Westie on this.

Obviosuly we need both training - but just cause soemone in the house is hostile does not give us the right to level it.  Multiple Entry points keep the En off balance and allow you to enter and clear the straucture in a quicker manner of time.

Unknown Layout -- Well unless your clearing a CF FIBUA house you lilkely dont have a good grip of the layout - that is why DD;s are good - you can "eat" one an dlive to joke about it - as out our drills and comms.

Even in Iraq not ever house is "burned to the ground"  We practice precision house clearing.  SFOD and JTF do SURGICAL missions.  


Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

- In Door turn right!  

Seriosuly any of the areas where we have conducted recent ops - back as far as Somalia the typical threat area was limited personnel inside a house with non combatants.
 Now I must have missed it in my ROE's where I can cook down a family simply cause some asshoe took over their home to use as an ambush site?

Will their we some times when settign fire to the structure is viabke - you bet - but train for the most demanding eventds - then you can dumb it down.

 

[westie47]

The point I was trying to make was it's hard to train for every scenario.  Personally, I would rather move from the top down, mouseholing all the way. It causes a lot of damage but more of your guys are going home.  If you train for high-intensity, it will be easier to transition down than it would be to transition up.  Just like peacekeeping.  However, when you have to search buildings rapidly as in cordon and search ops, there has to be a different approach.  So I guess the question is: What do we train for?

Michael said, "one block at a time.." So in our case, we got around 4 days to give our troops 8 weeks worth of CQB training. We went with the low-medium intensity approach.

Maybe the way to do it is to have specially trained troops to do rapid room clearing (JTF), or one platoon out of a rifle company that focuses on CQB while the other two platoons focus on high-intensity operations.

I fear this will be a topic that will garner much debate.....some "experts" say we will never fight another Stalingrad, Ortona, Caen, etc so why train for it.  Then Fallujah happened. That being said, the Marines didn't flatten every house either!So where does that leave us? I guess that will leave us debating further!!!!

 

[Michael Dorosh]

The point I was trying to make was it's hard to train for every scenario.  Personally, I would rather move from the top down, mouseholing all the way. It causes a lot of damage but more of your guys are going home.  If you train for high-intensity, it will be easier to transition down than it would be to transition up.  Just like peacekeeping.  However, when you have to search buildings rapidly as in cordon and search ops, there has to be a different approach.  So I guess the question is: What do we train for?

Michael said, "one block at a time.." So in our case, we got around 4 days to give our troops 8 weeks worth of CQB training. We went with the low-medium intensity approach.

Maybe the way to do it is to have specially trained troops to do rapid room clearing (JTF), or one platoon out of a rifle company that focuses on CQB while the other two platoons focus on high-intensity operations.

I fear this will be a topic that will garner much debate.....some "experts" say we will never fight another Stalingrad, Ortona, Caen, etc so why train for it.  Then Fallujah happened. That being said, the Marines didn't flatten every house either!So where does that leave us? I guess that will leave us debating further!!!!

Oh, we always train for one or two wars past, though, don't we?  Training to fight Falujah again will only guarantee that you will never actually use that training.  Isn't that one of Murphy's laws or somefink?

 

[Fusaki]

IMO, precision house clearing is the toughest form of OBUA that a regular infantry unit can be expected to undertake. I also believe that given our current political atmosphere, its the most likely situation we'd find ourselves in.

But if we're going to adopt a "Precision Oriented" attitude for the better part of our OBUA training, we'd better go all out or none at all. If you want to move past Ortona and embrace the more delicate nature of a Peace Support Operation, there needs to be a major shift in training policy. The troops need to spend at least as much time at the FIBUA site as we do in regular field training. We need tables, chairs, smashed cars, and all sorts of other junk in the buildings themselves. We need an enemy force that acts less like Herman the German and more like the bomb maker with his wife and kids in the next room. A half assed attempt at playing JTF will just get Canadians killed overseas.

What we need is a clear standard for the kinds of ops infanteers should be capable of, and if it is decided that we should be capable of precision strikes, it should be understood that the more complicated nature of it will require much more training. Trying to use multiple entry points and limiting the use of mouseholes is not something that you can pick up in a few days. It will require time, money, and a consistant and focused effort.

 

[Eric]

Saw something interesting about IDF MOUT/FIBUA tactics.  Anybody know of a reference online? 
Appreciate the help.

 

[Spr.Earl]

As to FIBUA training,we are taught to fight against a formally trained Army in the defence.
But as of late our training due too the present enemy negates our present training and doctrine.

So what does the poor old infantry man have to deal with now?
Adapt and over come?
Yes that is what we have done for years with no money or the high tech goochie stuff the Yanks have.

It's a tuff call.

 

[Eric]

Appreciate the reply.  I saw a mention in one of the above posts about Israeli MOUT/FIBUA tactics; if anyone happens to know an onliine reference, I'd love to see it.  We tried a variation of the Brit's N. Ireland 4-man "bricks" in the desert while in urban areas and it worked nicely in certain situations. 

If anyone has any ideas, tactics or references to operations in "permissive" (not actively shooting at you) and "non-permissive" (shooting at you with COB's present, or confirmed HVT) SASO urban environments...Canadian or otherwise...it would be a big help.

BTW, the "gucci" equipment is nice...some of it real nice...but more important in my mind is the ability of that 19-year old rifleman to ID and decide to shoot/no-shoot in a split second...

 

[thimot]

there is a fibua/obua site in gagetown called the --->ostere<---- "not idea how to spell it" village, and it has nothing on the american mout sites i've been too