Intelligence Support to Urban Military Operations
To the eyes of a military planner, a city presents “an elaborate combination of horizontal, vertical, interior, and exterior forms superimposed on a landscape’s natural relief, drainage, and vegetation.”
A newly reissued U.S. Army manual contemplates the difficulties facing military action in the urban environment with a focus on intelligence collection. See Intelligence Support to Urban Operations, TC 2-91.4, December 2015.
“With the continuing growth in the world’s urban areas and increasing population concentrations in urban areas, the probability that Army forces will conduct operations in urban environments is ever more likely,” the manual states.
“Providing intelligence support to operations in the complex urban environment can be quite challenging. It may at first seem overwhelming. The amount of detail required for operations in urban environments, along with the large amounts of varied information required to provide intelligence support to these operations, can be daunting.”
“In urban terrain, friendly forces will encounter a variety of potential threats, such as conventional military forces, paramilitary forces, insurgents or guerrillas, terrorists, common criminals, drug traffickers, warlords, and street gangs. These threats may operate independently or some may operate together. Individuals may be active members of one or more groups.”
“The enemy situation is often extremely fluid–locals friendly to us today may be tomorrow’s belligerents. Adversaries seek to blend in with the local population to avoid being captured or killed. Enemy forces who are familiar with the city layout have an inherently superior awareness of the current situation.”
“Finally, U.S. forces often fail to understand the motives of the urban threat due to difficulties of building cultural awareness and situational understanding for a complex environment and operation.”
While it seems that the current political climate may not incentivize the use of evidence-based data sources for decision making, those of us who are passionate about ensuring results for the American people will continue to firmly stand on the belief that learning agendas are a crucial component to successfully navigate a changing future.
In recent months, we’ve seen much of these decades’ worth of progress erased. Contracts for evaluations of government programs were canceled, FFRDCs have been forced to lay off staff, and federal advisory committees have been disbanded.
This report outlines a framework relying on “Cooperative Technical Means” for effective arms control verification based on remote sensing, avoiding on-site inspections but maintaining a level of transparency that allows for immediate detection of changes in nuclear posture or a significant build-up above agreed limits.
At a recent workshop, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions, the risk and implications of breaking trust in those systems, and how we’d known we were getting close to specific trust breaking points.