A series of live war games and training drills in simulated urban centers is playing a critical role in the Marine Corps' preparation for conflicts in non-traditional battle zones.

The Corps is so committed to preparing for urban warfare that it staged elaborate experiments in mock cities in order to get a real-world feel for the type of military contingency that, planners believe, will become the norm rather than the exception.

The experiments aimed to push the technology envelope even though they did not rely on high-tech virtual reality digital environments. And they defied many of the established rules of war-gaming.

There are several reasons why the Corps is focusing on urban war. Officials cited studies indicating that by the year 2025, roughly 85 percent of the world's population will live within urban areas.

Further, urban warfare is deadly and costly. In 1950, the Marines lost more than 2,000 troops recapturing the city of Seoul, South Korea. In 1968 in the battle for the city of Hue, Vietnam, the Marines experienced more casualties than they did during the bloody fighting on Okinawa in World War II. And with adversarial use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the urban environment looming large in the 21st century, the potential for both combatant and non-combatant casualties has increased enormously, complicating an already difficult warfighting problem.

According to Russell Glenn, senior defense analyst at Rand, a public policy research firm in Washington, D.C., it wasn't until 1998 that the Marine Corps revised Cold War era urban warfighting doctrines to reflect the lessons from history, worldwide demographic changes and trends which point to the urban center as the likely terrain-of-choice for adversary forces or rebels.

The Marines have moved swiftly to redress the lack of procedure and practice in urban warfare by taking cues from civilian firefighters, altering practice and procedure, and staging broad-ranging, and sometimes controversial, urban warfare exercises in the United States. The results are promising, said Glenn. Urban areas are tinderboxes. A well-trained and motivated urban guerrilla force can offset U.S. military mobility and firepower by choosing an urban setting to wage war or make a violent statement of protest. And non-combatants often find themselves in the line of fire between the warring parties.

That exact scenario was played out in the city of Grozny, Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, during which the Russian Army was pitted against a comparatively small Chechen rebel force. Even though the Russians held a 5:1 manpower advantage and technical superiority, they suffered tremendous losses because of, among other reasons, lack of sufficient training.

Those events and the lessons they offer have not been lost on the Marines. "The Russians made a conscious decision not to do room-to-room combat" said Colonel Gary Anderson, USMC, chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) in Quantico, Virginia. "Despite all the hype about how good the Russians were in urban combat, they would blow a building down before they'd fight room-to-room and that, of course, resulted in a lot of civilian casualties.

"We have to figure the room-to-room and house-to-house situation out. The use of incapacitating non-lethal weaponry is of great interest to us, and we're looking into some very interesting classified technology ... We don't necessarily mean to be non-lethal but if we can avoid warfighter casualties and friendly casualties, that's the way we want to do it," Anderson said in an interview.

The Three Block War

The MCWL was established in 1995 by then-Commandant Gen. Charles Krulak, to explore innovative methods and combat technologies. Concepts are developed then tested in the field through a series of experiments and subsequently assessed by the MCWL.

But the lab is not a gigantic virtual reality and video operation linked to supercomputers, as some believe. "The lab is a bunch of desks and cubicles and people thinking, not simulators and computers as many believe, " said Tim Jones, MCWL spokesman.

The lab was designed to help Marines prepare for what Gen. Krulak called the "three-block war." That means that, in the same urban area, "our Marines are feeding and clothing displaced refugees--providing humanitarian assistance. In the next moment, they are holding two warring tribes apart--conducting peacekeeping operations. In yet another part of the city they are fighting a highly lethal battle against a determined foe. All on the same day, all within three city blocks."

Under a five-year plan, the Corps scheduled three "warrior" experiments: Hunter Warrior, Urban Warrior and Capable Warrior. These will be completed by the end of 1999. They will be followed, sometime in the next decade, by another trio of experiments called Information Warrior, Coalition Warrior, and Future Warrior. Hunter Warrior, completed in 1997, focused on targeting, communications and maneuverability. Earlier this year, Capable Warrior examined air-to-ground support methodologies, such as dynamic targeting which is intended to empower air and sea units to acquire targets, on sight rather than waiting on commanders in the rear to give the order to engage those targets. These concepts have raised eyebrows among traditionalists who see empowerment of lower-level squad leaders and decentralization of battlefield decision making as a threat to the chain of command.

Glenn believes this is a non-issue in urban combat because it is a decentralized fight. "A commander who runs that type of operation in a centralized manner has no business being a commander. The commander should not make himself indispensable to his men. The job is to make your people the best they can be. You need a culture that supports that, not a centralized structure." Anderson, from the Marine lab, believes the urban battlefield demands this think-on-your-feet structure. "We have a lot of eyes out on the battlefield, both in the urban and littoral battlefields, and we are letting the reconnaissance units talk directly with the maneuver elements to tell them where the enemy is and isn't. And [we are] then letting them make a quick decision as to exploiting surfaces and gaps rather than doing a 'Mother May I' to higher headquarters. We think that may change the psychology of the battlefield, and that is something we are looking hard at ... We think that, by doing it this way, we can make decisions faster than the enemy can react."

Communications Is Key

The Urban Warrior experiment, capped off by a live operation in the San Francisco Bay area, put into practice MCWL tactics, techniques and procedures, and tested the ability of the Marines to operate in a densely populated urban environment. Results of that effort are still being assessed. Anderson praised the technology for squad-level communications but is holding out hope that industry will provide a "eureka solution" to a persistent "navigation problem." One of the debilitating aspects of urban warfare is communicating between buildings. Radio signals tend to degrade and the subsequent inability of support units to communicate with one another can lead to disaster. Hence, one of Urban Warrior's objectives was to test a squad-level handheld radio. "We were happy enough with the results of that performance that we've already given sets to some of our units, and we are going to try for a rapid acquisition by the end of the year to get sets out to all battalions in the Marine Corps." According to Anderson, "the Marines are ready to procure Kenwood FreeTalk radios readily available at any local Radio Shack for about 80 bucks.

"The navigation [global positioning system--GPS] piece is still hard to do in the urban canyon," he said. "It's hard to get a read, but we still want to give each squad leader a GPS. If worse comes to worse, we can always climb to the top of the building and find out where he is and maybe even use a tourist road map or something like that once he has gotten his initial position plotted. We think the hand-held radio and the GPS together are a 60 percent solution." Anderson believes that commercial technology is vital to the Marine mission in an urban environment and is aggressively pushing industry to provide the necessary equipment. "The vast majority of research is being done by businesses. We are trying to learn how to get better tapped into what is going and we are going to spend some money next year on an organized search of what's out there to help us."

Anderson cited various items the Marine Corps wants to buy:

- A hand-held laser designator--not a range finder--that weighs less than 45 pounds to bring in Hellfire-like weapons. - A black box that can digitally send back target data to the fighter so that he can locate the most suitable shooter and give him fire support as soon as possible.

"We see all the pieces out there but we haven't seen a system that puts it all together the way we want it to work. We think the technology is out there, but it's a question of putting it together the right way."

X-Files

The X-Files ('x' for experimental) are a series of tactic, technique and procedures pocketsize booklets authored by MCWL and based on "warrior" field experimentation.

If validated through experimentation and practice, the X-Files will become Marine Corps warfighting doctrine. These how-to-booklets range in subject matter from combat squad leader decision making to combined arms directed energy weapons.

Meanwhile, NATO's bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has brought to light the difficulty of precision air operations in the urban environment. Anderson thinks in the future technology can help minimize errors in targeting but that there is no substitute for good intelligence and ensuring that maps are updated. "What if I could have flown a micro-robot or dropped a bunch of my little robots on a potential target to verify what it is? We are working a lot with reachback, and we have been looking at cheaper, better ways of getting updated maps."

MCWL helped fund the development of an aviation urban warfare training center for named Yodaville, located in Yuma, Arizona. "Yoda" has 167 urban structures that are integrated into a computer system that provides bomb and missile damage assessments to training participants. Anderson explained the Marines are "pushing" the development of technologies such as bug-like machines to undertake reconnaissance and intelligence missions and unmanned drones to hover in and around high-rise buildings. "We are really interested in micro-robots that allow our human handlers to sit off at a safe distance, while they do all the things that a human 'recon' team can do, such as call in fire and report what they have seen. This is not the stuff of science fiction. What we ultimately want is a little scurrying robot and one that hops up stairs ... The prototypes for those exist and we have even looked at one that flies like an insect."

"We have got our surrogate robot called SARGE [surveillance and reconnaissance ground equipment], which is a teleoperated unmanned ground vehicle. It's a little dune buggy that has wrist-to-cloud capability and knows where he is, and he has a GPS chip that can designate targets. But he's too big. We want something we can disguise as a brick or that is small enough not to be very noticeable," Anderson said.

John J. Stanton is a member of the professional staff of the National Defense Industrial Association. His Internet address is John Stanton

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