Commentary & Reply - Saving Private Ryan - Sir Halford Mackinder - Letter to the Editor

Parameters, Winter, 2000 by Reed R. Bonadonna, William J. Prior, Michael P. Noonan

The earlier doctrines were written for urban operations in support of conventional forces. Even General Krulak's "Three Block War" describes a "holding territory" type of operation. The US military seems to recognize the difficulties and has aggressively attacked the complexities of military operations in urban terrain (MOUT), including those of the resident population, refugee creation, and terrorists. However, there is little understanding about how to conduct other types of urban operations--those more closely involved with the human element: humanitarian and various forms of low-intensity conflict. The natural starting point is, of course, organizing our thinking about urban areas where US military forces may be required to conduct a large range of operations.

To accomplish this agenda, we have to (a) assess the urban areas as accurately as possible, (b) create the required doctrine and operational guidelines, and (c) make certain that these fall within the guidelines of US foreign and defense policy. Lieutenant Colonel Peters starts rather appropriately with the first task: assessment of urban areas. However, his assumption that there is a relationship between types of cities as he categorizes them and the prevalence of violence is fundamentally flawed.

First, Lieutenant Colonel Peters' categories of hierarchical, multicultural, and tribal urban areas simply don't work. Categories must be distinguishable and inclusive on the basis of criteria held in common in order to be useful and comparative. In the case of "hierarchical" the criterion for inclusion is defined as centralized administration; in the case of "multicultural" the criterion is the existence of two or more cultural groups; in the case of "tribal cities" the criterion seems to be geography. Most important, to be truly useful, categories or typologies must be "findable" in the real world. This test of verifiability simply means that one should be able to make three lists--one of hierarchical cities, one of multicultural, and one of tribal cities--and know exactly where each city fits. In the real world one would have to assign Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, Denver, Miami, Los Angeles...and Athens, Istanbul, Delhi, Damascus, London, and Tokyo to one of the categories without too much trouble. Tha t might be difficult.

Then, if the categories worked, one should be able to find a direct relationship between those lists and the level of violence. If you can't list the cities and then relate that to levels or types of violence, the categories are not very useful and maybe even misleading or dangerous when used as a basis for policy. The more critical question is: Would these categories tell us how to conduct more successful MOUT operations?

Other points:

* We do not know that historical cities were more repressive than modern cities. In some ways, the reverse may actually be true. Historical cities were certainly less intrusive--i.e., they did not have the technology of the modern state that allows control of individual citizens in a variety of ways.