Taking it to the mean streets
FALLUJAH, IRAQ--At first glance, the desolate, rubble-strewn streets seem serene, like an abandoned movie set of an action blockbuster. American soldiers manning a tank on an empty street sit still in the afternoon sun, watching plumes of smoke vanish on a breeze as a rare moment of calm falls over a section of the city ostensibly under U.S. Army control. Suddenly, a sign of life: on a rooftop, the darkened outline of an enemy fighter, the flash of an AK-47.
The tanks respond immediately, a steady thumpy-thump of rounds echoing in the direction of the fleeting shadow, followed by the crackle of soldiers shooting from the street. Too late--the sniper is gone. "The Bradley [fighting vehicle] and tank have a great advantage if it's outside the city, but in the city, what limits you is that you can't see through a building," says Capt. Eric Krivda, the acting executive officer for the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2. "Urban battleground is the most complex thing you can ever fight in."
Faced with an ever elusive enemy who hides underground and behind walls and blends into civilian terrain, the U.S. military has refined tactics for an urban battlefield. Technology helps. From inside his Bradley, a commander tracks the locations of his soldiers on a video terminal and communicates with them over frequency-skipping, encrypted radios. Thermal imaging from pilotless drones locates the enemy at night. By daylight, the laser-sighting mechanism on an M-16 provides location coordinates to guide artillery fire coming from miles away. Still, this is tough, dangerous business. "When you're in a city, a guy is able to run and hide and change places," says Lt. Col. Peter Newell, the commander of Task Force 2-2. "The whole goal of urban warfare is to break the other guy's decision cycle, to make him react to you."
Keeping the enemy on the run is exactly what the U.S. military aimed to do in Fallujah, by ramming through quickly and powerfully, leaving behind the insurgent stragglers with sniper rifles in order to drive the organized body of resistance into a "kill zone."
In a hurry. Sweeping back through a cleared area days after the offensive began, Newell is confident that the strategy is working. Offensive positions set up by insurgent forces, fortified by explosives, land mines, and weapons caches, look as though they were abandoned in a hurry.
"You see! They left all their stuff," says Sgt. Maj. Darrin Bohn as he surveys a deserted cement factory that, after being tagged as a possible insurgent position, was hammered by heavy artillery fire. Radio communication wires stretch across the floor of the factory's parking lot, where mortar positions had been set up by insurgent fighters. Explosives are still rigged for detonation, and loaded rocket-propelled grenades lie abandoned in a nearby scrap yard. "We're finding out now in the daylight that the enemy was better prepared than we thought," Bohn says, "but they didn't stay and fight because they cannot win in a direct engagement." -Ilana Ozernoy
This story appears in the November 22, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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