The U.S. Owns the Night in Fallouja

Urban warfare can be highly unpredictable. There is a tendency to assume that just because some of the bloodiest battles in history have occurred in cities, all such battles are bloody.

In practice, however, many urban defenses collapse almost immediately, partly through inexperience but more often because the defender is not committed to an almost suicidal form of last-ditch combat. The rapid fall of Baghdad in 2003 is a good example of a rapid collapse caused by both military incompetence on the part of defender (and high confidence on the part of the attacker) and a lack of commitment to final combat.

Fallouja seems more likely to have a determined set of defenders than Baghdad did, although this is not certain. It certainly has enough armed Islamists and potential die-hards -- and Abu Musab Zarqawi and others have already promised a bitter battle.

At the same time, several issues that could work to the advantage of the United States must be considered.

For one thing, the U.S. has prepared the battlefield. It has had months to create a mosaic of the insurgents’ strong points and the lines of advance in the city, and to use unmanned aerial vehicles, radar, night vision devices and mapping systems to learn the lay of the land. It has had time to train its forces, and they have encircled the city and taken the bridges to the west. Airstrikes have been underway for weeks and have sharply intensified over the last few days.

Because Fallouja is a medium-sized city with a core population of around 150,000 and a greater urban population of up to 300,000, the “density” of insurgents may be low relative to the size of the city. Reports indicate that 50% to 80% of the population has left, and that the core insurgent strength is from 2,000 to 6,000 -- more probably in the 2,000-3,000 range. The number of insurgents appears large enough to cause a high number of clashes, but not large enough to defend a broad urban area.

With luck, the insurgents will be quickly driven out of the more open areas in the modern city and forced to defend part of the more crowded old city. If this happens, ambushes and booby traps will delay U.S. forces but not defeat them. To succeed, the insurgents will have to be able to create “fortresses” within the city, but the U.S. has already made it clear that it will attack such strongholds from the air with precision-guided weapons. Armor and infantry could then penetrate into the area. The result would be considerable physical destruction in a limited area, but a deathtrap for the insurgents.

It is true that the insurgents know the ground, almost to the building. But U.S. forces have compensating advantages. It is doubtful, for instance, that the insurgents will have more than a few night vision devices, or any counter to sophisticated sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles, or anything approaching effective communications. Many will have little or no realistic combat training and be very poor weapons operators and marksmen. They will have to use mortars and rocket and relatively low-grade anti-armor weapons like rocket-propelled grenades. This can make them lethal, but the U.S. has air supremacy, owns the night in terms of technology, has a monopoly of armor, has precision artillery and advanced ground sensors and fire control and has vastly superior tactical experience and training.

It is also possible that the insurgents may be divided and have objectives other than a last stand. Martyrdom is easy to call for, but better to inflict than suffer. Some 35 Sunni groups have claimed to exist during the fighting, but many are shell groups. The core elements in Fallouja seem to be native Sunni Islamists, Saddam Hussein regime loyalists, Sunni nationalists, foreign volunteers and some outside-led Islamists under Zarqawi. It is not clear how well these groups will unite, particularly as they come under pressure.

Concerns about collateral damage, civilian casualties and the sanctity of religious buildings will be a constraint on coalition forces, but the effect may be limited. Insurgents are already using civilian casualties as weapons -- claiming the U.S. attacked the main hospital to deny insurgents medical care and showing the bodies of dead children on TV. The fact remains, however, that U.S. commanders have to know that slow, methodical advances may reduce civilian casualties in a given clash or day, but cumulatively produce far higher and more lasting damage and images of damage over time. The U.S. will need to show it is exercising the maximum possible restraint in achieving decisive results; it will have to ask Iraqi troops to take over some attacks on sensitive targets. Restraint, however, in no ways needs to mean paralysis or ineffectiveness.

From the point of view of the insurgents, the most sensible strategy would be to put up an initial battle, leave low-level cadres to martyrdom -- and then disperse to fight another day. Whether they will be able to do that or not depends entirely on the effectiveness of the U.S. strategy.