![]() ![]() It required an assault team of at least two soldiers. In 1982, FM 90-10 subsequently spawned FM 90-10-1, An Infantryman’s Guide to Urban Combat, which had a section on how to conduct room clearing. Image source: FM 90-10, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) (1979) The instructions were simple: Step 1, shoot door open. In 1979, one of the Army’s first urban warfare–specific manuals- Field Manual (FM) 90-10, Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT)-described “how to attack and clear buildings” and is one of the Army’s first documented attempts to formalize tactics for room clearing using the lessons learned during and after World War II. The Army had learned valuable lessons from its experiences in major World War II battles such as Aachen and Manila and in later city fights like Seoul during the Korean War and Hue in Vietnam. Sections of doctrine on urban warfare, to include tactics for use specifically in villages and towns, pre-date World War II, but post–World War II Army manuals are the ones that first start to codify room-clearing tactics. The US Army has a long history of doctrine reflecting its experience in urban environments. What people often get wrong is that CQB is not the start of the US Army’s room-clearing tactics. As Hooker notes, the CQB tactics developed and refined by counterterrorist units such as Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta (SFOD-D) did pass into other special operations forces and eventually into conventional military units, both in the United States and around the world. Most urban warfare scholars attribute the beginnings of close-quarters battle (CQB, also sometimes called close-quarters combat) tactics to the failed raid to save Israeli Olympians in Munich in 1972. That might seem like a minor detail, but it becomes important when we examine the history and evolution of training on room clearing (using close-quarters battle tactics) done by the Army in the modern era. The video shows soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division incorrectly conducting the infantry Battle Drill 6-“Enter and Clear a Room.” Despite Hooker’s argument against conventional infantry soldiers conducting room clearing, the soldiers in the video were not actually infantry soldiers. The starting point of Hooker’s opposition is a video that went viral on social media in February 2021. The need for Army formations to close with and destroy enemy forces in buildings and rooms in support of the service’s mission statement-“defeating enemy ground forces and indefinitely seizing and controlling those things an adversary prizes most-its land, its resources and its population”-will only grow.Ī Brief History of Room-Clearing Tactics and Battle Drill 6 Both state-sponsored and nonstate actors see fighting in urban terrain and embedding within civilian populations as an effective countermeasure against Western maneuver, fires, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The era of urban warfare is already here.Ĭities are the economic and political centers of gravity for nations and historically have been the culminating sites of state-on-state, peer warfare. Rapid urbanization, globalization, the fall of super- and regional powers, and resource scarcity have all contributed to turning political violence, intrastate war, and conflict in general into an urban-dominated phenomenon. Across Western Europe, the Americas, Australia, Japan, and the Middle East today, more than 80 percent of the population lives in urban areas. The UN estimates that by 2050 two-thirds of the world will be urbanized. By 2020, over 4.3 billion (56 percent) of the global population of 7.7 billion were living in urban areas. In 1970, only 1.3 billion of the world’s 3.7 billion people were urban dwellers. The world is urbanizing at unprecedented speed and scale. The idea that infantry soldiers should stop training to clear rooms is just not informed by global trends, the Army’s history, or the character of modern warfare. Without Question, Infantry Will Have to Keep Clearing Rooms In fact, the Army should be doing more to train its conventional infantry units for urban environments-including clearing rooms-not less. This is a dangerous position, one that skips over most of the context surrounding why the US Army prepares close-combat formations for urban warfare. In the article, Hooker argues that due to a culture of specialized urban tactics, conventional infantry soldiers should completely stop training to clear rooms. Earlier this month, the Modern War Institute published an opinion piece, “ The Tyranny of Battle Drill 6,” by retired Colonel Richard Hooker.
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