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The City Is Not Neutral: Why Urban Warfare Is So Hard
John Spencer | 03.04.20
"Contrary to what is often supposed, urban warfare is not more difficult than other types of warfare." That's what a recent article published in the Texas National Security Review argues. The authors believe, in fact, that urban environments are "neutral," not to be feared—that, as in almost every other environment, the better-trained and more-professional force should have an advantage.
Unfortunately, history does not support this notion of urban terrain's neutrality, nor do the realities of modern warfare. The article presents solutions to urban challenges, but is mistaken in its characterization of these challenges as simple dilemmas.
British soldier F. Spencer Chapman once wrote of a very different type of terrain,
The truth is that the jungle is neutral. It provides any amount of fresh water, and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe—an armed neutrality, if you like, but neutrality nevertheless. It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive. 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' The jungle itself is neutral.
Chapman wrote this in his book The Jungle is Neutral, which details his story of survival, resistance, and insurgency behind enemy lines in Malaya during World War II. Chapman's words should not be taken out of context and applied to other forms of warfare or environments. More broadly, they are also wrong. Neutrality in an environment would mean it does not assist either side. That is not true in warfare, not true in jungles, and definitely not true in urban combat.
The authors of the Texas National Security Review article—Dr. David Betz, a professor in the War Studies Department at King's College London, and Lt. Col. Hugo Stanford-Tuck, an infantry officer with the British Army's Royal Gurkha Rifles—should be commended for contributing to a very important debate that does desperately need different paradigms and deeper thought. But this specific article included important contextual gaps, inaccurate claims, and as a result, dangerous recommendations.
Types of Warfare—and Why They Matter
As Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote, "The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."
Discussions of war should, of course, never be separated from the political objectives in pursuit of which wars are fought. But warfare is specifically characterized by the method of fighting and the tactics, techniques, and technology used. So when seeking to determine which environments are especially difficult to fight in, it is important to specify the type of fighting—the type of warfare—in question. This is an important conceptual gap in Betz and Stanford-Tuck's article.
The changing character of warfare does matter. There are few parallels between ancient historical accounts about fighting in cities and the character of urban combat today. Not accounting for the social or technological changes in which a war is fought is an abuse of military history and as dangerous as not recognizing history at all. Assessments about the difficulty of urban warfare today in comparison to other environments or with reference to past conflicts need to be fully contextualized to have contemporary value. War and warfare must be understood in the context of their social, cultural, economic, human, moral, political, and psychological dimensions.
The political consequences of civilian casualties in warfare, for example, have dramatically increased. If one is to compare the urban warfare of antiquity to that of today, analysts should ensure their readers know that the killing of men with little regard to their combatant status and the enslavement of women and children was the norm for centuries. They should know that warfare fought by soldiers armed with swords, spears, arrows, and horses is vastly different—on many levels, including tactics and effects on soldiers and societies—than battles fought with gunpowder, tanks, armor-piercing explosive devices, and bombs that can turn city blocks into piles of smoking dust.
Urban warfare can take many forms, depending on variables, including the nature of the enemy, the political and strategic context, as well as the tactical situation. Is the urban area a permissive environment where a military force can move for the most part unobstructed but there is a small enemy element that must be found and destroyed? Or is the area completely nonpermissive and the military must fight just to get into the environment to begin searching for the enemy force? Even this one single characteristic matters—and it's one among many that need to be considered to assess whether an environment is difficult to fight in.
Not only do few modern militaries have experience fighting in cities, urban fighting is not part of their corporate memories. Militaries have a long history of fighting for cities, but not in them. The earliest forms of urban warfare primarily involved sieges, which can be traced back to antiquity. We have detailed accounts of their conduct by the Romans and Greeks—including Alexander the Great. They remained a dominant and decisive military option through the Middle Ages. During siege warfare, fighting mainly occurred at the fortifications surrounding cities. Once the fortifications of a city were breached by the attackers, the city either capitulated or was brutally sacked. The invention of gunpowder-based weapons and advancements in artillery eventually brought an end to the era of siege warfare.
Even after the era in which sieges dominated, from the latter part seventeenth century, the professional armies of European kings ascribed to norms of decisive battle in the open. Similarly, with the rise of the levée en masse that followed, armies did not fight in urban areas—even when capturing a city was a primary operational objective—except when they were repressing domestic uprisings. With surprisingly few exceptions, urban warfare is a modern phenomenon.
It was not until World War II that Western military formations experienced heavy and frequent fighting in cities. Even then, a majority of the urban fighting was a part of much wider campaigns fought in rural areas. Even the often-referenced Battle of Stalingrad saw most of the Wehrmacht's Army Group South (B) and major proportions of Gen. Friedrich Paulus's 6th Army fighting in the countryside around the city where they were later surrounded by the numerically superior Soviet armies.
The two main types of operations that Betz and Stanford-Tuck continually refer to in their article in support of their argument about cities being neutral are counterinsurgencies and attacks against an enemy defending from within a city. These two missions are very different and require different military capabilities, tactics, and considerations. At times the article discusses assaulting a besieged city but recommends tactics that are more appropriate to a counterinsurgency or urban-policing mission—such as becoming the "strongest gang" in the area.
During an urban counterinsurgency operation, military forces are deployed by a government to defeat an insurgency. Military forces conducting counterinsurgencies will frequently be tasked to defeat armed resistance, reduce passive opposition, establish or reestablish host-nation legitimacy, restore civil order, and assist with other stability operations. Counterinsurgencies are a complex subset of warfare. The insurgents can use a range of guerrilla, terrorist, and paramilitary tactics in pursuit of their political objectives. While urban insurgency campaigns can involve pitched battles against massed insurgent forces, more frequently insurgents attempt to blend in with local populations to conduct hit-and-run strikes as well as operations aimed at swaying public sentiment in their favor. This ability to hide among the people is one of the insurgent's strengths and increases in highly populated areas. Dense urban areas also provide insurgents with high concentrations of targets and resources that other environments do not. They offer concentrations of large populations to blend in with, government forces and establishments to strike, dense physical terrain that is ideal for ambush sites, sniper perches, and escape routes, and easy access to food, water, and money. That's why urban guerrilla advocate Carlos Marighella believed cities to have ideal conditions for insurgents.
Military forces fighting an urban counterinsurgency are usually conducting operations in a permissive environment. Everyday life of the city continues while the military looks to use a range of intelligence capabilities and search operations to both find insurgents and separate them physically and ideologically from the rest of the population. Once found, the military conducts intelligence-driven raids to kill or capture insurgents. Counterinsurgency operations also often involve stability operations meant to address the underlying social, political, and economic conditions allowing insurgencies to persist.
Thus, to argue that conducting a counterinsurgency in a jungle, mountain, desert, or any other environment is more difficult than an urban is not logical. Trying to find, separate, capture, or kill a small group of individuals without drastically changing the environment is orders of magnitude harder where there are tens of thousands or millions of people compared to all other environments that do not contain this density of populations.
The other military operation the "neutral cities" article references—and one that is often the topic of discussion pertaining to urban combat—is conducting a deliberate assault against an enemy force defending within an urban area with the purpose of clearing, seizing, or securing that area. This operation involves fighting in a nonpermissive environment in which the area most be penetrated to even gain access to the urban battlespace. Every part of the operating environment could contain an armed combatant force. That was the situation for most urban battles of World War II, including Stalingrad, Aachen, Manila, and Berlin, and also in the battles of Seoul, Hue, and Fallujah.. Each of these involved clearing defending enemy out of dense urban areas.
The Overarching Challenges in Urban Warfare
There are two overarching challenges when conducting a military operation in an urban area. One is simply being able to understand the environment. The other is being able to understand how to operate in the environment. Both these challenges are harder to do in an urban environment than any other. Claims of cities' neutrality as operating environments only stand if these challenges are downplayed or ignored.
Understanding urban areas is complicated. Cities are complex adaptive systems—or more accurately, many systems of systems that allow the unique civil, social, and economic conditions that originally drove cities' development and continue to allow the city to survive as an optimized hub of a large civilization. Like other complex systems, when it is touched, it changes, and the system's complexity makes it nearly impossible to truly know the second- or third-order effects of those changes. Moreover, the increased connections of urban people and places means changes in one city can impact many other urban areas. No matter the metric, when a military interacts with the systems of an urban area, the effects (to residents, to local and global economies, and to the natural stasis of the system) are far higher than the costs in any other environment.
The very introduction of military forces into a city changes it. Combat operations can disrupt and destroy many parts of a city. There is physical destruction, clearly, of buildings, homes, and infrastructure, but combat can also destroy political power systems, social processes, and the natural flows of a city. These changes can negatively impact millions of people and result in billions of dollars in costs. This effect of warfare on the urban environment—its people, terrain, infrastructure—also has no parallel, in scope or magnitude, in any other environment.
Understanding how to operate in a city depends on the mission given to the military. In an urban counterinsurgency, military forces must understand the human geography in order to achieve their mission of finding, separating, fixing, and finishing the enemy. They must understand the city as a system to identify the requirements of the people they wish to safeguard from the enemy and those on whom they are dependent for intelligence. The people and their support systems are the terrain and understanding how to conduct an urban counterinsurgency is much harder than in any other environment. Conducting a city assault—the other mission Betz and Stanford-Tuck highlighted in their article—requires understanding how to use military force to achieve the mission of either destroying the enemy in its entirety or seizing the physical terrain with the lowest possible risk to the attacker, residents, and built environment. Regardless of mission, cities require militaries to conceptualize ways to operate that are unique to the environment.
The City is Neutral?
Contrary to the Betz and Stanford-Tuck's thesis, an urban environment will never be neutral while civilians are present. Certain terms, like "urban environment" and even "city," have their own complicated and often controversial definitions. The article in question is right to highlight that most militaries recognize that urban environments are defined by the presence of three components: a complex, man-made, physical terrain; a population of significant size and density; and a supporting infrastructure. Most dictionaries define cities in relation to smaller population centers—of "greater size, population, or importance," for example, "than a town or village." Doctrinal definitions often classify environments based on population size. Other classifications add to population size factors like governance and administrative borders, functional areas and roles, or even royal decree. Although the article does not further define the urban environment Betz and Stanford-Tuck describe as neutral, we can assume they mean large and densely populated areas.
People are partisan. They can and will act to constrain, support, reject, limit, block, or displace military operations. The fact that people might be found in other environments, although definitionally not in such high density, is irrelevant. Urban means high concentrations of people and people in the middle of warfare do not influence both sides equally—thus they are not "neutral."
The article's claim that civilian populations "may be evacuated, limiting their exposure to harm," thereby making military operations less difficult, is at odds with experience and consequently not a prudent planning assumption. Historical case studies of urban combat show that no matter the scale of militaries' efforts to evacuate cities before major assaults, some civilians always remain. This has been the case in almost every single major urban battle in the modern age. For example, in the 1944 Battle of Aachen, even after two mandatory evacuations (one by the Germans and one by the Americans) there were still an estimated seven thousand civilians in the city at the beginning of the battle and one thousand remained by the time it ended. In 2004, there were six months between the first and second Battles of Fallujah, Iraq, during which time civilians were notified of impending operations and encouraged to leave. Somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the estimated three hundred thousand residents vacated the city—but that still left thirty to ninety thousand civilians present during the fighting.
Even if the civilians within urban areas could be evacuated, the urban physical terrain that remains is not neutral. There is an assumption that the terrain can be manipulated to the advantage of whichever side has better tactics or is better trained. That is simply not accurate. The large advantage that urban terrain provides to a defending force—even a weaker one—gives the occupier of the terrain a significant advantage. In warfare, it is neither wise to hope for an empty battlefield or a sound planning assumption that one can reach the terrain first. Militaries have historically been presented with no option other than to attack weaker enemies in dense urban terrain—and confront the important advantages that terrain gives to the defender.
Urban Warfare is Not More Difficult than Other Types of Warfare?
In the context of both a counterinsurgency and deliberate assault, urban combat is the most difficult form of warfare because the environment is both the most physically constraining and also involves the most constraints from a policy perspective.
Evaluating the difficulty of warfare in a specific environment requires considering both the environment itself and the military capabilities available to achieve the task in that environment. Betz and Stanford-Tuck's arguments focus mainly on military methods but pay less attention to how the environment itself constrains modern military capabilities.
It is partially right to argue, as their article does, that many of the tactical challenges of the physical terrain of dense urban areas—how it constrains military units from conducting maneuver warfare by breaking them up into disconnected small fighting elements; how it offers a defender thousands of hidden and protected ambush sites; how it helps prevent a defender from being surprised; how it limits the ability to see and strike an enemy with military ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and aerial weapon capabilities; and how it interferes with global positioning systems and radio transmissions—are all equally true, if not more so, in thick jungle environments. But one of the many differences between the jungle and dense urban terrain is how the physical terrain limits the effects of the weapons of an attacking military force. The ferns, vines, and bush of jungles or thick trees of wooded areas are an obstacle and may provide a defender great concealment from observation, but provide little covering protection from bullets and bombs; indeed, trees can enhance the effects of artillery rounds. Concrete, on the other hand, limits (and in many cases, stops) the effects of an attacker's weapons (as well as their navigation and radio signals) and provides a defending force ready-made bunkers throughout the environment.
The physical terrain of cities has changed across time. In the past, the fortifications that protected cities were robust, but interior home and building construction was not. Advancements in building materials have changed and now the city walls are gone, but many structures within the city are made of steel rebar–reinforced concrete that serve as instant fortifications. This makes many urban sites superior defensive locations with little to no investment of time or resources.
Also, unlike other environments, military force applied to urban terrain historically increases the difficulty of conducting operations in it. The preparatory and assaulting fires from airstrikes, artillery, and mortars creates rubble that in turn makes the terrain easier to defend and harder to attack. The rubble blocks vehicle movements and, in many cases, creates even stronger fortifications than the buildings provided while standing. The commanding officer of the US mission in support of the Iraqi Army during the final battle to liberate Mosul in 2017, Gen. Stephen Townsend, described it by saying, "The buildings had been turned into bunkers. Imagine a five-story building and the top four floors are gone. They're rubble now and that rubble is twenty and thirty feet deep on top of the first floor and the basement floor. . . . You couldn't build a better bomb-proof shelter than that. If you tried to erect it, it would be easier to penetrate that with our munitions than the accidental bunkers created by rubble."
The ready-made defensive qualities of urban terrain cannot be overlooked. While defensive sites can be prepared in other environments such as mountains and jungles, it takes large investments in time and resources to do so. Fortified concrete bunkers, pillboxes, towers, and gun positions must be constructed. Tunnels and underground military complexes must be dug. This constructed defensive infrastructure can take months if not years to make other environments defensible. The Japanese invested over a year to supplement the existing natural defensive qualities of the island of Iwo Jima for the eventual United States attack and communist forces spent years digging networks of tunnels under the jungle terrain of South Vietnam. In urban areas, it is already there.
Urban Warfare Doesn't Favor the Defense over the Offense?
Clausewitz was right in his conclusions about the defense. "It is easier to hold ground than to take it. It follows that defense is easier than attack," he wrote. "If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, if follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object." In short, not only is defense the "stronger form of war," it is the tactic of the weaker force.
In their article, Betz and Stanford-Tuck emphasize not allowing the enemy time to establish a defense. They also suggest the best advice military officers can give to political leaders is that they should think twice before ordering the military to assault a city. Both of these points are irrelevant to an assessment of whether conducting a deliberate assault against an urban defense is more difficult than doing so in other types of terrain.
History is full of examples of enemy forces quickly occupying dense urban areas and using the existing physical terrain to create fortified positions that would take years to build in other environments. Single buildings can and have been turned into battlefields. Despite Betz and Stnford-Tuck's recommendation to forget the 1942–43 Battle of Stalingrad—they believe no similar battle for a city will ever be fought with such vigor and commitment of resources—that battle included a long list of single structures being turned into fortresses with little time and resources. In the summer of 1942, Sgt. Yakov Pavlov and roughly twenty other Soviet soldiers occupied a small apartment building. The soldiers put machine guns at windows to cover all approaches to the building and emplaced wire and antipersonnel and antitank mines around the exterior. When the building was bombed, the men moved into the basement. When German tanks attacked, the small band of Red Army defenders shot antitank rifle fire down from floors above the point where the attacking tanks could elevate their guns. Pavlov's men are credited with destroying over a dozen German tanks. Despite German attacks with up to a division of tanks and infantry, Pavlov's small group held the house for two months. The Germans lost more men attacking the house than they did during their entire push to Paris in 1940.
This rapid and easy use of the urban physical terrain for military purposes has also been seen in many other battles and theaters of war. In the Battle of Manila in 1945, Japanese forces, mostly poorly trained sailors, turned the steel-reinforced concrete buildings of the city into a series of fortified strongholds. They made barricades out of cars, laid mines along roads, filled windows with concrete, made gun slits in walls, and dug tunnels connecting select buildings. The attacking US forces of the 1st Cavalry Division quickly learned that reducing the Japanese strongpoints required deliberate and overwhelming force. They developed a tactic that required a full battalion to attack a single multi-story building. For example, on February 20, 1945, the Americans used a battalion to clear a large building, Rizal Hall, within the University of the Philippines complex. They fired two hours of preparatory fire before breaching the exterior walls, although that fire did not flatten the building. Inside, the Americans found that the Japanese had created bunkers throughout the building, which was itself a bunker. For two days the opposing forces literally fought an indoor battle, hurling grenades at each other from room to room. Rizal Hall is also an example of how dense urban terrain can contain numerous micro-environments. Urban battles have even seen opposing forces controlling different floors of the same structure at the same time.
The Challenges of Urban Warfare aren't New?
Urban warfare means fighting among a population and is therefore the most constraining on the use of force. That makes it alarming that Betz and Stanford-Tuck's study of whether urban warfare is especially difficult did not once mention international humanitarian law. Even if one makes an argument that the challenges presented by the complex physical terrain and the presence of noncombatants have remained the same across time, the same cannot be said with respect to the constraints on military force. Modern militaries are expected by their governments and populations to execute warfare within the bounds of recognized laws, treaties, customs, norms, and moral standards. Since World War II, there have been numerous additions to the laws of war that guide the actions of participants in armed conflict These laws dictate how military combat will be carried out and what the military can and cannot attack, with a special emphasis on protection of civilians and civilian objects in warfare.
The four basic principles of the law of armed conflict, otherwise called international humanitarian law—distinction, proportionality, military necessity, and avoidance of unnecessary suffering—are most relevant in urban combat. Urban areas require military commanders to consider the use of force in greater detail and apply more constraints on the use of force than any other environment. Unlike all the other environments where military forces might fight, urban areas contain a density of protected population and objects that limit the methods of warfare that can be applied. This, again, makes urban warfare uniquely difficult because military commanders must consider more variables on how they will accomplish their mission than in, say, a jungle or a desert.
In one of the boldest claims Betz and Stanford-Tuck make in their article is that the primacy of politics, political interconnectedness, media influence, and tactical complexity—hallmarks of contemporary urban operational environments—have not changed in two thousand years. They cite the example of Roman troops attacking Jerusalem in 70 AD to show the tactical complexity of fighting among a hostile population, arguing "that this battle involved swords and clubs rather than M-4s and AK-47s matters little—just replace 'archers' and 'arrows' [in Flavius Josephus's account of the battle] with 'close combat attack' and 'armed aviation' and the scene has an obvious contemporary resonance." This is a gross oversimplification of the tactical challenges of close combat, the capabilities and lethality of modern military methods, psychological and physiological impact of explosive weapons, and risk to soldiers and civilians in warfare.
Furthermore, the Roman legions were repeatedly repulsed on the narrow streets of Jerusalem by untrained rebels throwing rocks from the roofs above. Yet the Roman tactic of forming protective formations using their heavy shields was pretty much invincible in open terrain. Thus, the Battle of Jerusalem actually supports the argument that the city is not neutral—the constraining terrain allowed for a weaker defending force to gain tremendous advantage over the attacking Romans.
Betz and Stanford-Tuck also use the ancient Roman battle as an example of the impacts of tactical actions on strategic political issues and political interconnectedness in warfare. The military commander of the Roman force was the son of the newly elected emperor and the results of the battle supposedly could have undermined the emperor's political power. This example has little resemblance the complexity of political control and societal influences on modern military forces during urban warfare today. The information from the Roman army's battle might have reached the Senate weeks later; in urban combat today societies and the governments can watch their militaries fight in real time. Information from battles no longer require messengers running from Marathon to Athens to announce victories, or even popular and credible media personalities like Walter Cronkite flying back to the United States after visiting Vietnam to report that the war was mired in stalemate.
Any urban environment today will have thousands of instant messengers. There are few barriers to getting information from a combat zone today, and information is most readily available and waiting to be transmitted in urban environments. Not only can the plentiful media that is found on a modern battlefield broadcast live and unfiltered images, but every photo or video captured by a cell phone can be uploaded on the internet and instantly shape the narrative of the battle.
Simply put, in order to assess the difficulty of urban warfare today, any effort to do so must take place in the full context of the constraints on military forces. That is why the best use of the 70 AD siege of Jerusalem is to show the difference in expectations surrounding the use of military force between then and now. Once the Roman legions breached Jerusalem's walls they proceeded to punish the resisters in a systematic sack of the city. Thousands of noncombatants were executed, enslaved, or sent for slaughter. The temple that served as the center of Judaism was destroyed. Today, the same urban mission—capture a city—would have to be accomplished while minimizing harm to protected populations and sites. The armies of Western democracies and their allies that wish to maintain their legitimacy and political support must today execute their tasks, no different than those of their ancient Roman counterparts, in compliance with the law of armed conflict and the expectations of their societies, in many cases in the real-time view of their governments, their populations, and the world—clearly not only very different but much, much harder. Consider, as an example, the First Battle of Fallujah in 2004, when American forces were completely halted—in the middle of the operation—under pressure from Iraqi authorities after images of civilian casualties were broadcast around the world.
The difficulty of conducting urban warfare within the legal, moral, and ethical constraints of one's society and international norms is only increasing as, more and more, warfare moves into dense urban terrain and is increasingly conducted under the watchful eye of a connected world. As an example of these changes, in response to an explosion of urban combat in the last five to ten years, many groups and key leaders—from the International Committee of the Red Cross to the United Nations Secretary-General—are advocating for a political declaration to avoid the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area in populated urban areas. Over 130 countries recently met under the United Nations banner to discuss such a declaration. The effort is similar to the 2015 Safe Schools Declaration, endorsed by ninety-nine countries, whereby governments have committed to restrict their use of schools—as military headquarters, for example—during combat. These actions implement policy commitments for countries and their militaries to constrain their methods of warfare, which contributes to making urban warfare the most difficult type of fighting for military forces.*
Dangerous Recommendations
With better articulation of the context of urban warfare—including specifics about the mission, enemy, constraints on military force, terrain construction, and other environmental conditions—dedicated researchers can not only see why urban warfare is the hardest, but also better understand the formation of tactics and approaches that have been learned and developed over time. These include the number and composition of troops required to accomplish tasks like assaults on a fortified urban structure or to conduct an urban counterinsurgency, the use of firepower to allow attackers to get closer to defended positions, and the organization of attacking forces.
Despite citing little of either quantitative or qualitive research, wargaming, or experimentation, Betz and Stanford-Tuck make several recommendations that they argue would make urban warfare even easier than they assert it already is. Specifically, they recommend that militaries give up approaches that are "reliant upon massive firepower and overwhelming manpower," become more imaginative, be less risk-averse and rule-bound, and become the "strongest gang" in urban combat.
Their article's argument has fallen victim to a particular fallacy, the mistaken belief that precision-guided munitions necessarily make urban combat easier for an attacking military and less destructive to the urban environment. They write that "technological advances in the form of precision-fire weapons supported by unmanned aerial vehicles reduce the requirement for conventional artillery, even if they do not replace them altogether." Recent operations in Iraq and Syria strongly call this assertion into question. US Army scholar Amos Fox has written widely on the fallacy, describing it as the precision paradox, wherein the practice of targeting enemy forces in dense, concrete urban terrain has actually resulted in systematic destruction of cities because of the large number of strikes required to engage targets in such hardened structures. In the 2017 Battle of Mosul, the US military forces supporting Iraqi ground forces nearly depleted their entire precision-guided munitions stockpile attempting to precisely strike enemy positions. The enemy within the buildings often were in fact not destroyed because of the protection of the structure, or simply moved by underground tunnels to an adjacent building which became the next structure to be targeted for destruction. Furthermore, the promise of precision-guided munitions has yet to reduce the need for conventional artillery in city assaults. In the recent five-month Battle of Raqqa, Syria, US Marines fired thirty-five thousand artillery rounds against Islamic State terrorists. That is more rounds than any Marine artillery battalion has fired since the Vietnam War. The threat of vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 was so high that the American military decided to strike every visible vehicle on the streets of the city with an artillery round to eliminate the potential threats to the attacking troops.
The amount of forces needed to accomplish a military task is a decision for military commanders and planners that takes into consideration range of variables—the assigned mission; enemy composition, disposition, and strength; troops, time, and capabilities available; terrain; tactical risks; and the history of successful operations with a similar task and in similar situations. For urban operations, current US Army doctrine states, "Major urban operations, particularly those that are opposed, require a significant number of forces of which infantry will be the largest portion. History suggests urban offensive missions require three to five times greater troop density than for similar missions in open terrain." The article is not specific, but it does imply that militaries could accomplish everything from reducing individual fortified positions to full city assaults with much less forces than current military planners allocate. They do this despite historical case studies from almost every major urban battle in modern history—Stalingrad, Manila, Berlin, Seoul, Panama, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, and many others.
In one of the few pieces of evidence supporting a claim that fewer forces are needed to attack a city than conventional military wisdom tends to believe, the article cites the 1944 Battle of Aachen. This seems to contradict Betz and Stanford-Tuck's other assertion that militaries should not be reliant on firepower. The American unit that executed the Aachen operation did it with massive amounts of artillery and mortars. The attacking unit adopted a catchphrase—"Knock 'em all down"—that reflected both its systematic approach to destroying buildings and a complete lack of concern for collateral damage. In fact, researchers have shown that the soldiers displayed a degree of enthusiasm for destroying the German city.
The Battle of Aachen is also not an example of a smaller attacking force defeating a larger defending enemy. To say that "two battalions of the American 26th Infantry Division (with armor and engineering attachments) soundly defeated a much larger entrenched German force of 5,000 troops," as the authors do, is simply not accurate. The fact is that the German defenders under Col. Gerhard Wilck were outnumbered by the Americans by a ratio of three or four to one. The American force was composed of over a division of armor, infantry, engineers, and artillery, not just two battalions of the infantry. Betz and Stanford-Tuck's description ignores the division used to encircle the city, the engineer unit functioning in an infantry role fighting on the flanks of the two clearing battalions, units used to secure key hilltops around the city, artillery forces, and others.
Another major recommendation from the article is for regular military forces to simply become the "strongest gang in a given area." Putting aside the legal, moral, and ethical reasons as to why one should not refer to military forces as gangs, the concept might work, but only under limited circumstances; the methods of implementation could easily evolve into unethical, unjust, and immoral practices. According to Betz and Stanford-Tuck, urban wars can be won by "not necessarily using divisional-level maneuvering to shatter an enemy general's plan, but successfully overwhelming the adversary's cognitive abilities at the team and individual level." The article recommends attacking a city with a large swarm of dismounted soldiers that can "create a thousand small outflanking maneuvers together to generate the conditions to destroy their enemy's ability to put together a response." This too might work, but thousands of small maneuvering and flanking forces requires thousands of soldiers and defeats the proposition of a smaller force. The article also fails to convincingly show that the problem with past major urban operations—even recent ones—was overly controlled maneuver forces or the speed of operations, especially since most urban fighting evolves into thousands of small-unit engagements, all the way down to the squad level.
It is dangerous to tell military formations to simply go faster, act with fewer rules, plan less, use less combined-arms maneuver, and fight with smaller formations. The danger of rushing into dense urban terrain without fully understanding the enemy defenses or plans to reinforce gains made by maneuvering forces is a recipe for complete failure. Modern history abounds with examples of the consequences of militaries' overemphasis on speed, lack of planning, lack of appropriate resources, and general unpreparedness, including the Russian defeat in the first battle of Grozny in 1994 and the American defeat in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 and again in Sadr City, Iraq in 2004. The Russians lost more tanks, proportionally, in Grozny in 1994 than they did in the battle for Berlin in 1945.
Training is Only Part of the Solution
The challenges of urban warfare do make it the hardest of all environments to conduct multiple different types of operations, but the challenges posed by cities should never be looked as insurmountable. Military forces must be prepared to fight and win in any environment. New approaches, doctrine, training, and investments are needed to increase military effectiveness when they are asked to accomplish complex missions in dense urban environments.
Training is critical to building the necessary skills and confidence for urban combat. But unlike the recommendation Betz and Stanford-Tuck make in their article, militaries of the world should not forget the Battle of Stalingrad. The authors claim that no government will expend so much over a city. They forget that in 2004 two Marine battalions were ordered to immediately retaliate against the perpetrators of an attack that killed four American civilians in Fallujah—a city with an estimated population of 280,000 at the time. Because of the worldwide media attention to the Americans' burning corpses hanging from a bridge, the American people and government demanded the military immediately respond, despite senior military commanders' recommendations not to enter the city.
Instead of thinking less about Stalingrad, militaries should think less about using techniques typically unique to special operations forces, which is generally a legacy from the failed 1972 operation to save members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, Germany. In his book, The Combat Soldier: Infantry Tactics and Cohesion in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, Dr. Anthony King details how the failed operation led to the creation of elite counterterrorism forces around the world and the development of specialized close-quarter battle tactics and techniques. These tactics center on high-risk, intelligence-driven raids and the capability to enter and clear a building and room to kill a surprised enemy while sustaining few casualties to both the soldiers and any civilians intermixed with the enemy. The context for training this mission usually involves a semi-permissive environment where military forces can get to the objective and assumes knowledge of where the enemy is, that the enemy can be surprised, and that the enter-and-clear tactic will be successful.
Training for intelligence-driven, high-tempo raids using the enter-and-clear tactic has attracted a growing share of current military training resources and represents the majority of training for urban areas that is conducted by most forces. This is despite evidence from major urban battles—historical and modern—like Aachen, Seoul, Hue City, Fallujah, Sadr City, Mosul, and Marawi, which show that entering and clearing a room is not the tactic that leads to success. Rather, what is required is the integration of combined arms, specific urban tactics to kill enemy forces in fortified structures, urban-specific tools, and innovation of small units.
Very few militaries have training sites that allow them to train city assaults or urban counterinsurgencies with large combined-arms formations. The US military only has one training site that can train more than a battalion of soldiers. Even that site, at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, lacks density or realism. A brigade in the US Army will use the site for a simulated battle for only one day during its biannual training rotation to the training center. The site also lacks any ability to simulate the effects of combat inside or on the physical terrain itself. An enemy soldier can hide behind a plywood door and not be affected by the rounds of attacking soldiers or their fire support.
Training is important, but if military forces do not have the right capabilities to accomplish the tasks or challenges of urban operations such as city assaults or counterinsurgencies, training will still leave them unprepared. Because of military wargaming of the most likely enemy and locations of future war, most military forces do not have the urban-specific tools. Combat units in World War II had more capabilities to penetrate concrete fortifications and clear buildings than soldiers have today. Without combined-arms formations, mobile-protected firepower, and concrete-penetrating munitions, swarms of assaulting infantrymen can quickly flow through walls and jump rooftops all they want—as Betz and Stanford-Tuck suggest they should. But eventually they will reach an enemy fortified in a structure like Pavlov's House in Stalingrad or the "house of hell" that Medal of Honor recipient Staff. Sgt. David Bellavia described from the Second Battle of Fallujah, and they will need the right capabilities to defeat the entrenched defenders.
Militaries must be able to train for both city assaults and urban counterinsurgencies, not just intelligence-driven raids in permissible or semi-permissible environments. They need urban-optimized capabilities for the most difficult challenges they will face. Not having the best tools for urban operations and the right training opportunities only contributes to the difficulty posed by cities.
The primary mission of the US Army is to "organize, train, and equip its forces to conduct prompt and sustained land combat to defeat enemy ground forces and seize, occupy, and defend land areas." The hardest environment on the planet for a military that abides by the law of armed conflict to accomplish this mission is densely populated, large urban areas.
To be sure, in some ways the challenges of urban warfare are not new. One could argue that almost every challenge that arises from the nature of war, irrespective of environments, has remained the same. War remains a human endeavor to impose one's will on an enemy in the pursuit of political objectives where tactical actions can have strategic implications, including with respect to one's population and government. But when considering the changing character of warfare, military operations in urban environments have changed drastically. Urban environments are physically bigger, with larger populations and increasingly complex systems—trends surely set to continue. Yet, the application of military force in urban terrain is more constrained than ever before.
While it is vital that we should robustly debate how to conduct urban operations in the future, it is alarming when an article like Betz and Stanford-Tuck's so readily dismisses leading current thinking about urban warfare. The unavoidable facts are sobering. Global urban areas have become bigger and more unstable, complex, and connected. Cities have become attractive territory for weaker nonstate actors and home to an increasing share of the world's political violence. The costs of conducting military operations in dense urban areas has increased with time. The levels of war have condensed because of globalization and worldwide connectivity. Defending from urban terrain does negate the advantages of a technologically and militarily superior attacker. And urban attacks do require more troops than attacks in all other terrain.
Urban warfare is not the mythical monster Betz and Stanford-Tuck describe it as. It is a very real monster that military forces must be prepared to slay. Warfare in densely populated urban areas is the hardest type of warfare for many reasons, it is not something that can be wished away or avoided, and the city is most definitely not neutral.
John W. Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies with the Modern War Institute at West Point and co-director of its Urban Warfare Project. He previously served as a fellow with the chief of staff of the Army's Strategic Studies Group. He served twenty-four years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
*Editor's note: This article was updated to reflect the fact that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is not a human rights organization, but a neutral organization ensuring humanitarian protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence. The ICRC President and United Nations Secretary-General's joint appeal calling on countries and warring parties to avoid the use of explosive weapons with wide impact area in populated areas can be found at this link. The article previously included this link to a Human Rights Watch article discussing the effort.
Image credit: Capt. Gregory Walsh, US Army
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COL (R) Michael Spears on 03.04.20 at 8:29 am
I wrote this at the request of the Army G2 in 2005. https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A2f785afb-e1f2-401d-9669-bdd7a27c6f14
John Archille Cote on 03.04.20 at 4:51 pm
Excellent Work Michael! I agree with your conclusions 100 percent. Urban warfare is one of the trickiest operations a military unit can embark on. Even with the high tempo of urban operations in the past 20 years we still have not cracked the code to fighting smart in Cities. We have exhausted our Tier one units in the past years fighting back to back engagements in both Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously. There is also the psychological stress of not knowing who or what is on the other side of the door you are about to kick in. Insurgents, family, local gang members, Day in Day out these types of operations wear down a soldier's sole.
Bob on 03.06.20 at 11:38 am
Add spider holes, various snakes, insects, leeches, and punji sticks and other booby-traps in and around villages (etc) and you have Vietnam.
Hassan uba on 03.05.20 at 1:52 am
This is article really shows up the future of modern warfare. War one day would be fought in cities, thanks for this master piece contribution.
Rick Sinnreich on 03.05.20 at 4:44 pm
Cogent and convincing. Well done.
Nishad Padman on 03.06.20 at 1:15 pm
I am only an civilian enthusiast of military affairs and by no means any kind of expert but this has got be one of the best article that I have read – The analysis is extremely in-depth , precise and gives a clear eyed view of how urban combat works – It's hard , ugly and infinitely dangerous for everyone participating in it – So the lessons from history are really a good pointer to what to expect and then improve rather than to be summarily dismissed – Bravo and kudos on such a beautifully written piece
B.C. on 03.06.20 at 1:44 pm
Should we consider that, although the city indeed may not be neutral, the question of whether this should be seen as a good thing or bad, this will depend on one's political objective, for example, to:
a. Move one's country forward and, thus, to (a) achieve necessary political, economic, social and value change/reform; this, so as to (b) better provide for one's national security today and going forward. Or to:
b. Stop progress and even move backward; this, so as to (a) prevent further unwanted political, economic, social and value change and to (b) return to status quo ante — when more-traditional values, attitudes and beliefs ruled.
From these such perspectives, I suggest, one can now determine whether the city might be seen as "friend" or "foe". In this regard, consider the following three examples:
First, as relates to Afghanistan, from Matthew Hoh's resignation letter:
"If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least King Zahir Shah's reign (Afghanistan's first "modernizer?"), has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional."
(Item in parenthesis above is mine. See Matthew Hoh's resignation letter as provided by the Washington Post.)
Next, and re: U.S./the West in this case, what might be seen as a similar observation:
"The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920. Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country's direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and educational divides that explained Trump's stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week, none proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats' continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else."
(See the "Atlantic" article entitled: "How the Election Revealed the Divide Between City and Country, by Ronald Brownstein.)
Finally, and in this case re: Afghanistan again, consider this observation:
"Having spoken with members of rural communities and the weary survivors of Afghanistan's numerous conflicts, I sought the opinion of a different demographic: young city-dwellers that have a different perspective from their forebears. In the opinion of one young Uzbek I spoke to in Kabul, it is the duty of all Afghans to be united under a single country and state. For a Hazara in her mid-20s, the goal was to get a college degree and eventually run her own business. Such a dream could only become a reality under the current government in Kabul. And for a young male Pashtun who ran a local enterprise in the city, the Pashtunwali and the strict interpretation of Islam belonged to the countryside, not in places like Kabul."
(From the STRATFOR article: "Deciphering the Taliban," by Diego Solis)
Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:
Thus, from the perspective I have offered above, one might suggest that:
a. While the "city" indeed would not seem to be "neutral" (all three examples above seem to confirm this fact?),
b. Whether this should be considered a "good thing" (and thus should be exploited) — or a "bad thing" (and thus would tend to stand in one's way) — this must be determined with regard to one's political objective, for example:
1. To more forward and, thus, to bring about necessary progress, modernization, etc. Or:
2. To cause stagnation — and/or to even move backward — this, so as to reinstate more-traditional (i.e., more-"rural?") ways of life, ways of governance, values, etc.
Kurt Bergstrom on 03.06.20 at 11:54 pm
Urban combat is inherently more complex than any other environment. It's truly 3 dimensional in ways that are beyond even mountaineering. You've got sewers & multi-story buildings, the ability to interlock fires is exponentially larger than any other environment. We've got to learn the lessons of Fallujah. Infantry is the Queen of battle, but in the cities, the Prime Minister is the Combat Engineer, impeding enemy movement, enhancing friendly movement, hardening or reducing strong points as appropriate, not to mention boobytrapping and neutralization. Mortars will need to come back to the rifle companies. Learning how to unmask/mask mortars from several streets over and apply devastating high angle fire within seconds of needing it, must become a priority.
Lily hidalgo on 03.08.20 at 12:14 am
Cities/urban areas are densely populated human settlements, with its systems, dimensions, host to 55% of world population & generate 3/4 of global eco output. People are political not apolitical, therefore cities cannot be neutral. They thrive, grow & prosper in peace, security & stability. Conflicts & violence are anathema to their predictable daily lives. The study that posited urban warfare as neutral has at its core, the argument to be the strongest gang, disregard for intl humanitarian law & protection of civilians & non- combatants etc. To validate the recommendations of the study, apply in simulation all the measures identified in the study to fallujah, mogadishu & marawi at the same time compliant with intl humanitarian law. Urban counterinsurgencies & urban policing should mitigate escalation to urban warfare anywhere. Urban warfare cannot be less hard nor neutral under any circumstance.
Hans Lundberg on 03.09.20 at 11:16 am
Just now reading "Into Oblivion Kharkov To Stalingrad: The Story Of Pionier-Bataillon 305", by Jason D. Mark, where it is stated that the germans had a specific written instruction for fighting in towns that all officers needed to learn by heart. This was before the unit was deployed to Stalingrad in October.
Locam on 03.10.20 at 10:49 pm
Urban Warfare shows that the need for a tank is not dead.
The use of high explosives, rockets, artillery, and grenades will not go away. Few battles in cities are won with bullets alone, and it seems that the trend is the side that brings the largest gun or explosive will win.
The need to preserve infrastructure seems a distant factor despite the laws and limits to curtail human suffering. In WW2, entire cities were carpet or firebombed into submission, forcing many to flee into the countryside. With Urban Sprawl, that may no longer be an option.
Does that mean cities of the future will require bunkers, SAMs, laser defenses, radars, and CIWS? Would such a future like that become a reality? No Urban Planner has ever imagined integrating such hidden weapons in a city and yet national capitals do have some form of hidden SAMs, radar, and perhaps other weapons or EW/ECM.
Recent battles highlight Urban Warfare, but surprisingly, the civilians have not resisted to the effect of WW2 with Molotov cocktails or mass supplies of arms. Bear in mind that Urban Warfare varies in many areas of the world. Some places have few arms compared to say the USA where many civilians possess guns. Would Urban Warfare prepare the military for civilian Resistance Forces armed with about the same weapons as the military playing the Gray Side? Has that ever been a factor in training such as Mad Max or Zombie Human Survivors against the government?
And how about the use of flame? Flamethrowers have fallen out of favor as being too dangerous to the user, but they're mighty effective in Urban Warfare. Non-Lethals are also another option.
Usually one sniper or rocket gunner could hole up an entire attack. With the advent of drones, UAVs, and mini-robots, perhaps such situations would be remedied.
R. M. on 03.17.20 at 5:34 pm
With respect, I think your analysis again, just like the study being rebutted, is ignoring the international and humanitarian law component. You say, "The need to preserve infrastructure seems a distant factor despite the laws and limits to curtail human suffering." So military necessity has made the laws of war a total nullity? We are not living in WWII, and a great many actions taken then such as the destruction of Dresden and the atomic bombings would be seen by the world today as war crimes. Some even insist they were back then.
My analysis is that unless international law comes to recognize, as I think it should, that taking up defensive positions in a populated city is itself a war crime against civilian populations, which the attacker may remedy in a retaliatory manner, then cities are inherently the domain of the defender and the insurgent, not mechanically, but politically and morally.
Ken on 03.24.20 at 7:49 pm
R.M: With respect, I think you place far too much esteem in the idea of law. Laws (particularly international ones) exist on an inverse sliding scale with necessity of outcome. By which I mean that the more important winning a conflict is to a county, the more willing it will be to just ignore those laws when they become inconvenient.
I'll give examples from the US context. WW2 is a great example of a war where the US felt they had to win. So there was no real hesitation in firebombing cities, unrestricted attacks on merchant shipping etc. Do what you have to do to win, with high tolerance for civilian casualties. Conversely, the US did not have the same desire to win the war in Vietnam. This is evident by the restrictions placed on the military, and the whole "bomb them back to the negotiating table" approach. Had the US approached defeating North Vietnam with the same seriousness they applied to defeating Japan they would have mounted a direct invasion and physical occupation. They didn't. It's in this type of lower order conflict where operating within international law is more important.
That the US in their most recent wars are more likely to recognise law is not a function of law becoming more important, it's a function of the US fighting wars that are not critical for national survival. It does not follow that all future wars will follow this model, and that is particularly true of comparatively weaker countries.
The major flaw with your stated analysis is the reality that international law is utterly irrelevant except when two conditions are met. 1) the subject country is able to be heavily influenced by the US, and 2) the US decides that it will enforce those laws. The US underwrites international law – if the US doesn't choose to enforce those laws, those laws are nothing more than quaint bits of paper on a desk somewhere. We've certainly already seen that with Russia in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and in the tactics employed by anti-US insurgencies (who are quite happy to use children and ambulances as IED carriers). In the event that China mounts an invasion of Taiwan, would you really expect the Taiwanese not to dig in and defend Taipei because they fear a nasty letter from the Hague? Would you expect the Chinese army to stop their advance at the city outskirts for fear of breaching international law. Of course not.
As for morality. It's worth remembering that the generation often called the "Greatest Generation" is the exact same generation that was routinely razing cities full of civilians. When the chips are down, winning matters more.
Michael Datsenko USUBC on 03.26.22 at 6:32 am
I wholeheartedly agree – as this is written, Russian invaders are committing all sorts of war crimes against civilians in Ukraine, either with the hope to reduce morale of the population and the Armed Forces, or for personal gain (monetary or sexual).


text:
Q: Scraping a table with no id with python/beautifulsoup, how can I use the literal html string? There is no specific table id for the table I want to scrape, and the height/width levels of the table match other tables on the same page, but the literal html string is unique:

So what is the formatting within "soup.find()" to find this literal string.

A: You can find all the tables in the page using the findAll('table') method, then put the table objects in a string constructor to get their literal html code.
(The string constructor basically calls __str__() on the table object)
Example:
import bs4

page = """

            Firstname
            Lastname
            Age

            Altair
            Ibn La Ahad
            939

            Ezio
            Auditore
            604

"""

bs= bs4.BeautifulSoup(page, 'lxml')

tables = bs.findAll('table') # Find all tables

# for each table
for table in tables:
    table_html_code= str(table)          #get html code of this table

    first_line = table_html_code.split('\n')[0] # get first line of the table's html code
    print(first_line)

Another thing you can try is to use the order of tables. If you want to access the fourth table in the page you can access the table like this:
beautifulsoup_obj.findAll('table')[3]

A: From looking at the documentation it looks like you can do the following with the find() method.  You can pass in a dictionary of html attributes.  It looks like this link has a similar question/solution.
BeautilSoup.find(self, name=None, attrs={}, recursive=True, text=None, **kwargs)
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = """

</table

"""

soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

results = soup.find("table", {"border": "10%", "cellpadding": "10%", "cellspacing": "10%", "width": "100%"})

print(results)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
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text:
Crom Carmichael on How Operation Warp Speed is President Donald Trump's Accomplishment Avoiding Glacial Speed Bureaucracy
December 24, 2020 December 23, 2020 Julie Carr
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville's Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss President Trump's success with Operation Warp Speed acknowledging how the president was able to find a way around all the bureaucracy that is normally a part of the FDA process.
Leahy: We are joined in the studio now by the original all-star panelist and our very good friend for 30 years Crom Carmichael. Good morning Crom.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning sir.
Leahy: It is the last show for The Tennessee Star Report in 2020 today.
Carmichael: Well, we'll try to make it very good.
Leahy: We'll make it great.
Carmichael: It's a very very exciting thing.
Leahy: So we're off and we get to sleep in.
Carmichael: You get to sleep in. I get up early for the radio show. But not like you. Nothing like you.
Leahy: No 3:30 a.m. for Crom. (Chuckles) I don't blame you. We'll be back here on Monday, January 4, 2021 and we'll see how that all plays out Crom.
Carmichael: I have a prediction by the way for the Georgia Senate races on Monday the fourth because we're going to be running prediction markets with a company called consensus point.
Leahy: We will wait. I'll be very interested in your prediction.
Carmichael: We will be running essentially two panels. One is a national panel and then within the national panel, we'll have a Georgia panel. So we'll know what the national panel says and we'll know what the Georgia panel says within that national panel and we'll see if there is a meaningful difference.
Leahy: That's going to be very interesting and I look forward to hearing what the prediction panel says on it. Well, you know when Donald Trump announced in March that he was going to establish Operation Warp Speed…
Carmichael: No. That's not accurate. I want to be clear. Based on Joe Biden's history he says he coined the term Operation Warp Speed.
Leahy: Oh really?
Carmichael: He says he's going to put it in place. In fact, he already has. Biden already has.
Leahy: A revisionist history. Anyway, when Donald Trump began the process of getting a vaccine ready in less than a year the left-wing critics said, oh, he's just blowing smoke. It'll never happen. It's happened.
Carmichael: Now, here's what's interesting about that. One is they said it would never happen because they assumed that the FDA would continue to operate the way it has historically. And that is things moving at a glacial pace. And I think I've talked about this before Michael that the reason the FDA is slow in approving drugs is that Big Pharma likes it that way.
Big Pharma likes it to be expensive so that little companies that might be creating drugs before they get to the phase three trials are forced to sell out to Big Pharma. So Big Pharma lets little companies go through phase one and go through phase two. Now, in this case, the reason that Big Pharma jumped in the first of all, they put a person in charge of Operation Warp Speed who was not part of the FDA.
And so he was able to circumvent completely. He had the authority to circumvent all the bureaucrats at the FDA. And he did. But the other thing is that the federal government funded Operation Warp Speed and took the risk out of it. So it shows you how quickly a drug can be created if the bureaucrats get out of the way. Now the FDA still exists. All this did was show what is possible. But now that it is done, we now have Joe Biden taking his vaccine. Now, this is a person who six weeks ago said he wouldn't take it because he didn't trust Trump.
Leahy: That's right. He did say that.
Carmichael: Yes, he did and so did Kamala Harris. By the way, nothing has changed in that six weeks period in terms of Trump being president of the United States. He is still president. Operation Warp Speed, contrary to what Joe Biden might say is something Trump did not Biden. But what's interesting is that he took it and then an hour after that candidate Biden claimed that the president had no plan for addressing the virus.
And warned that Americans, this is from The Wall Street Journal, and warned that Americans couldn't trust Mr. Trump to oversee a quick and safe vaccine. With today's vaccination Biden essentially is admitting that he didn't have a clue what he was saying or didn't believe it. But what's interesting is that Biden now says that there's still much work to be done.
And here's the greatest concern now. And that is if Biden will actually stop Operation Warp Speed before it's finished and then claim that something else has to be done, I think that's entirely possible. All Biden has to do is do nothing. Just do nothing and Operation Warp Speed will be completed and the population will be vaccinated by sometime in the spring. But it'll be interesting to see if he will do that. Then you have this relief bill of 5,593 pages, which is a lot like the Obamacare bill.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carmichael: Because a lot of congressmen and women voted against it simply because they didn't know what was in it.
Leahy: They had at least six hours to read over 5,593 pages.
Carmichael: This is no way to pass a $2 trillion bill. It was over two trillion by the time you added it all up. But here's what's really interesting about that. For those people who do know the big chunks of it, it really reveals what is important to the Democrat Party. One is a lot of funding for state and local government. A lot of funding for government-run schools
Leahy: They've claimed not. They claimed that not to be the case. I heard a report that said no money for state and local schools. And I thought that can't be true.
Carmichael: That's false.
Leahy: Thank you.
Carmichael: That's false. What we should be doing Michael we should be holding journalist full-time journalists to account in the same way the police are held to account. Police have a job to do and when they break the law of their job, then they should be held accountable. And journalists have a job to do. It's not like a law that's written, it's a law of their industry, and that is, to tell the truth.
To seek the truth and then to tell the truth. And so the the the equivalent of somebody who is too lazy to seek the truth, but just repeats what they've heard from somebody else who then turns out to have not told the truth that is to me similar to a policeman who is engaged in some kind of abusive behavior.
Leahy: Well, you're just describing The New York Times's false attack on the 10th on The Georgia Star News yesterday.
Carmichael: Tell us a bit about that. What we're some of the things that they said in their article that were just flat out wrong. Give us a few examples.
Leahy: Well they mischaracterized one of our stories. They said that we claimed that an audit showed that there was a changing of the votes. We didn't claim that in the article at all. We simply said that a Trump supporter alleged that. They got that totally wrong. They dedicated four paragraphs of their article to us. Every one of those four paragraphs had false statements in it. We sent them a correction.
They saw it and they corrected half of them. They haven't corrected the other half. They also claimed that we were a misinformation super spreader. And they conflated our verifiable, accurate, and fact-based news stories with something like Diamond and Silk did. Totally different. Totally different. But what's interesting about this Crom is you look at the interplay of The New York Times false reporting with a couple of other things.
There was a report done by a group I'd never heard of before. It's a progressive nongovernmental organization. It's a 501-c4 that was founded by the Moveon.org and SEIU employee union guys. They get 25 million bucks a year. We don't know exactly where it comes from. Supposedly it comes from donations around the world under a hundred bucks.
I'm not quite buying it. They do things like, you know, save the rainforest etc. They've decided now the disinformation in Georgia is the number one priority and they released a study that said that there are 20 "super spreaders" out there that have an outsized impact on the Georgia election. The George Star News according to them is one of those 20.
Carmichael: Well congratulations. You could be added to the list of influential publications.
Leahy: I know. I know. I know. The New York Times had so many errors in their four paragraphs. But they have corrected half of them but they haven't corrected all of them. But they're lumping us in with "false and misinformation." They didn't lay a glove on us and we're punching back.
Carmichael: Well Lin Wood I know has filed a lawsuit claiming that the ballots for the Senate race and must follow the laws passed by the legislature and not the consent decree.
Leahy: They should! He's right.
Carmichael: So what he's done is he has now filed a suit before the election so he can file a suit after the election and they can't claim he should have filed it before the election.
Leahy: Which is what they've done in many other cases.
Carmichael: Which they've done in other cases. So he's done the wise thing from a legal standpoint. It's a little bit like what Jim Roberts is doing by having to kind of make sure that he now comports with a ruling so that the next time he has his referendum he passes scrutiny.
Listen to the full second hour here:
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
News, Tennessee Star Report, The Tennessee StarCOVID vaccine, Crom Carmichael, FDA, Joe Biden, Media Misinformation, Michael Patrick Leahy, Operation Warp Speed, radio, The New York Times
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Cowds are returning to Athens as arts and culture drives the fiscal recovery. Photos: Fotis Kapetopoulos.
Arts producers: check your passports, make sure they're valid. You're invited to participate in a major tour of the cultural industry of Athens, Greece during February of 2019, as the economic recovery in that nation picks up steam.
It wasn't long ago that the beautiful nation on the Mediterranean dominated international headlines, all brought about by a catastrophic fiscal collapse that started in 2007. Beset by public debt totaling more than 100% of GDP, Greece's economic woes were exacerbated by punishing reforms imposed by the European Union that sent unemployment skyrocketing, citizens protesting in the streets, and tourists fleeing. The situation seemed intractable until the economy finally stabilized in 2014. By the end of 2017, some 30 million tourists visited Greece, including five million tourists to Athens alone — and the numbers are pointing to a repeat performance in 2018. What's driving the resurgence? Arts and culture.
Kapetopoulos told the CFR that Athens is "hip" right now not because of gentrification but because of what he calls "regeneration" — followed by sustainability for artists, especially at a time when real estate is unusually affordable, especially as compared to the rest of the EU. This is why artists "are streaming out of places like Brussels and France, and finding new opportunities in Athens to do their work." Post-crisis Athens, he added, can be put into five words: "creative, exhilarating, intense, political and hedonistic." And that is why now is the right time for American arts producers to rediscover Athens and to investigate cultural exchanges with their stateside institutions.
Athens Burns Bright is the name of the tour. It will take place Feb. 10-14, 2019, and will be open to a dozen creative producers, artists, thinkers, writers and cultural innovators from the US. The group will learn about events like the Mind the Fact Festival; revel in music venues like Cantina Social; explore Psyri, formerly a downtrodden inner-city neighborhood that is now a hipster hub; and enjoy Embros, an abandoned warehouse now filled with theater and art, music and dance.
Fotis Kapetopoulos and Vallejo Gantner with Kit, the car from the 1980s TV show Night Rider, at the launch of a science fiction exhibition at the Onassis Center in Athens.
And that's just for starters. The group will make curated, behind-the-scenes visits to the remarkable new Acropolis Museum and to the ancient but active Odeon of Herodes Atticus, one of the finest open-air theaters in the world. There will also be meetings with important officials from the National Theatre of Greece and the Benaki Museum. A pair of influential cultural organizations — the Onassis Cultural Centre and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre — are among the major change-makers right now in Athens, and the group will meet key leaders from bot. There will be some of the city's remarkable and increasingly renowned street art, guided tours of the city's Ancient and Byzantine sections, and enough food, bars and music to show you just how brightly Athens burns.
This post is sponsored by Kape Communications Pty Ltd. For more information on Athens Burns Bright and for details on cost (approximately US $1,270), contact Kape Communications Pty Ltd, email mail@kape.com.au or call +61 3 9486 2770.
How to Decorate a Fabulous Wall? Ask Wallpics.com!


The team traveled to Colorado to face the other undefeated team in USA rugby Division 4 men rugby, Littleton Eagles. The Lumberjacks had to play without previous starters Levi Donaldson, Royce Fertig, Sam Joseph, Zach Watson, Justin Schaeffer, and Derek Eggerman. These players didn't play because an injury, relocation for jobs, and a work scheduling conflict.
The match took place at Shea Stadium on a bright 80 degree day. The Eagles jumped out to a 7-0 lead to start the match. Littleton's fast recycling of the ball kept the Lumberjacks on their heels. After some good defense Laramie gained possession of the ball, Lumberjacks inside center (12)- Isaiah Smith was able to break the gain line and send the ball wide left to Wing (11) – Bobby Watkins for the breakaway try. Conversion by Fly Half (10) – Derek Ogren. Evening the score to 7-7.
The Eagles were able to bounce back from the Lumberjacks score and moved the ball down the pitch. Where Eagles Fly Half (10) – Nick Prudhomme capitalized on a Lumberjacks penalty and choose to kick for points. Eagles 10 – 7 Lumberjacks. A missed tackle let the Eagles outside center break the gain line for the go ahead try, 17-7. The Lumberjacks weren't splintered by the Eagles quick score. Scrumhalf (9)- Alex Knowles kicked short of touch and wing (14) – Cody Jerabek came blazing down the pitch to catch the ball. Jerabek was tackled and the Lumberjacks quickly moved the ball to the left and Smith (12) was high tackled by an Eagles player.
Referee Brendon Kozman assessed the high tackle and issued a warning and penalty kick. The lumberjacks won their line-out and the ball was passed to Ogren (10) where he was tackled, but not released by an Eagles player. The referee issued a penalty and Prop (3) – Evan Cox five meters out from the try line. Took the quick tap with the ball and barreled into the try zone to end the half. Lumberjacks 14 – 17 Eagles.
The lumberjacks didn't fair to well in the second half. Their defense fell apart, they weren't spreading the field, and their fitness wasn't the best to start their first match of USA rugby D4 Men rugby spring season. The Laramie Lumberjacks would only put two more tries across the try-line by Watkins (11) and outside center (13) – Stephan Roaque. Conversion by Knowles (9). Final score Eagles 66 – 26 Lumberjacks.
The Laramie Lumberjacks next match is vs. the Denver Harlequins D4. Saturday, March 25th in Denver at Jacobs Park (7200 E Mississippi Ave Denver, CO 80224 USA) Kick-off at 1:30pm.
Follow us on Facebook for match updates!


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Мерси-Аржанто (de Mercy-Argenteau) — австро-бельгийский графский род, ветвь рода Мерси.

Его представители:
 Мерси-Аржанто, Луиза де (1837—1890) — бельгийская графиня, пианистка и музыкальный публицист, первой открывшая европейской публике музыку русской школы.
 Мерси-Аржанто, Флоримон де (1727—1794) — граф из Лотарингии, австрийский посол во Франции (1780—1790).
 Мерси-Аржанто, Эжен фон (1743—1819) — австро-венгерский фельдцейхмейстер (генерал артиллерии); участник кампаний в Италии (1795—1796).

Прочее
 Отель Мерси-Аржанто (Hôtel de Mercy-Argenteau) — парижский особняк, принадлежавший графам Мерси-Аржанто.

См. также
 Мерси

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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16 anti-camping sites | Do you know your watering days? | Daily Digest morning edition
Welcome to the Daily Digest, which features the latest content from TheEastsiderLA.com.
It's Veterans Day. To honor those who served in the military, a Veterans Day Resource Fair will be held at Obregon Park in East LA and a ceremony will take place at Cinco Puntos in Boyle Heights.
And, since it's a statutory holiday, you can expect most government offices to be closed for the day.
Now read on for the last one.
Jesús Sanchez, editor
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EAST STAGE
Photo by Jesus Sanchez
The Rio De Los Angeles State Park Veterans Memorial Project features three flag poles that rise above a rock encrusted with symbols of the armed forces.
Go here to share your neighborhood photos or send them to hello@theeastsiderla.com. You can also tag your Instagram photos on #theeastsiderla.
Crash east of LA
LA County Sheriff's SUV crashed into a traffic light pole at Third Street and Mednik Avenue, seriously damaging the vehicle and injuring two deputies. The Eastside
A SuperLotto Plus ticket with five numbers, but the missing Mega number, was sold to 7-11 store on Franklin and Vermont avenues in Los Feliz. Better to find this ticket: it's worth $ 37,351.
Go here for an interactive version of the map.
The orange pins are sites that have been approved by the city council for the application. Blue pins denote locations that are still subject to review and approval.
Where will camping be prohibited in the Eastside?
Freeway underpasses at Glassell Park and Silver Lake. Schools in Echo Park and historic Filipinotown. Parks in Boyle Heights and East Hollywood.
These are just a few of the 16 sites in the Eastside where city council members want to enforce recently updated anti-camping ordinance which prohibits encampments as well as sleeping and obstructing sidewalks and other public places. Go here for an interactive map of the sites.
Dozens of anti-camping sites have been designated so far across the city.
On the east side, some of the sites have already been approved while others are still pending. And there could be more in the months to come.
Until there, City Council Members Kevin De Leon from District 14 and Mitch O'Farrell from District 13 took the initiative to identify Eastside sites, which must be within 500 feet of schools, parks and other sensitive locations or 1,000 feet in certain shelters.
During this time, Gil Cedillo of District 1 Council did not submit any sites for consideration and approval by city council. Neither has Board Member Nithya Raman, a vocal critic of the law, in Municipal District 4.
"The council member has not filed and has no plans to drop any banned sites at this time," a Raman spokesperson said.
The order consists of several stages, including:
• Residents not staying at the sites should be offered shelter, accommodation and other services
• Signage must be posted and notice given when the ordinance is enforced for the region
• Personal belongings will be removed and the site cleaned up once the homeless have left; they would be forbidden to come back
• Those who break the law are subject to sanctions
Critics of the anti-camping law say it is inhumane and makes roaming a crime. But supporters argue it offers a compassionate and safe alternative to life on the streets.
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IMMOVABLE
Houses for $ 800,000
If a $ 800,000 home is within your budget, we've found three properties in Eagle Rock, Elysian Valley and Highland Park that are currently on the market.
Sponsored by the L34 group
Mid-Century Jewel in Adams Hill
Nestled atop Glassell Park on the edge of Adams Hill is this beautiful mid-century hillside hideaway.
Privacy, tranquility and panoramic mountain views create the ambiance of this 1961 gem. Snuggle up in front of the flagstone fireplace, the heart of the living room, on cold winter nights. Open plan kitchen, full dining room and office area with built-in floor-to-ceiling shelving.
Sliding glass doors leading to the balcony with large windows overlooking the Verdugo mountains allow you to glimpse the majestic view wherever you are!
Taking a break from the kitchen for Thanksgiving?
Let us know if you can recommend a East Coast restaurant, bakery or market you rely on to prepare your holiday party – take home or eat out on Thanksgiving Day. We'll be releasing a Daily Digest exclusive list at the end of next week. Simply respond to this newsletter with your recommendations.
You have art
ArtUnite is an online and in-person art auction that will benefit Central City Action Committee, an Angelino Heights non-profit that works with at-risk youth. Organizers ask local artists and collectors to submit a work for auction. The deadline is November 12 (The Eastsider is a sponsor of ArtUnite).
Sponsored by LACFEPS
Local public schools provide enriched education for student success
Public schools like Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, Ednovate, Green Dot Public Schools-CA, and KIPP SoCal Public Schools quickly learned that, even during a global pandemic, in today's competitive university environment, schools must provide students and their families with a rewarding public education experience requiring additional resources, services and supports so that they can be successful in college, in their careers and beyond.
Source: LADWP
Do you know your watering days?
You've probably heard that we've been asked to conserve water after a drought emergency was declared this week. What you may not know (or have chosen to ignore) is that residents and businesses in the city of LA have been subject to mandatory water conservation restrictions since 2009.
Now, in the wake of the drought emergency, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Electricity has said it will start enforcing those restrictions more aggressively and increasing patrols in search of water wasters.
What are these mandatory restrictions? Here is:
• Outdoor watering by sprinkling is limited to three days per week. People with odd addresses can water on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; even addresses can water on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.
• No sprinkler watering between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. regardless of the watering day.
• Sprinklers with non-conservative nozzles can only run for up to 8 minutes per station; conservation nozzles can run for 15 minutes per station.
• No watering in case of rain or within 48 hours of rain.
• Hand watering with a self-closing nozzle on the hose is allowed any day of the week before 9:00 a.m. or after 4:00 p.m.
• No water runoff in streets, alleys and gutters.
• No washing of hard surfaces such as sidewalks, driveways, driveways or parking areas using water, except for health and safety purposes.
• All leaks should be repaired in a timely manner.
• Washing of vehicles is allowed using a hose with a self-closing water stop nozzle.
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November 11th : Veterans Day Ceremony and Resource Fair in East LA
November 11th : Peacock: A Comedy Show at Club Tee Gee
November 13: Los Feliz fleas
• Click here for event details
The Eastsider offers free access to its latest news and neighborhood features, including extensive COVID-19 coverage, as a community service. To keep our stories accessible to all during these difficult times, we need your support.
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The Eastsider is committed to providing free news and information to everyone as a community service. But reporting and writing neighborhood news takes time and money. Join fellow Eastsider readers whose one-off contributions and monthly referrals help pay our bills and allow us to provide you with the news and information that keeps you connected to your community. – Jesus Sanchez, editor
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Campsites scattered throughout Minnesota's national forests will reopen on May 18
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Randolph County Campgrounds and Trails, National Camp Day 2021
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Here you can find videos on the Oral Health Assessment Tool (OHAT). The first link (full video) is a compilation of the subsequent videos. Click on any of the titles below to expand the corresponding video.
Note: Daily Assessments - OHAT (11 min) is not included in the Oral Health Assessment - Full Video (32 min).


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Palace & Grounds
Weddings and Hospitality
The Wider Estate
Scone Palace painting mystery resolved as Dido portrait attributed to Scots artist David Martin
The long-running mystery surrounding the famous portrait of Dido Belle has been resolved after a BBC investigation attributed the Scone Palace painting to Scots artist David Martin.
In a compelling episode of the popular TV series Fake or Fortune?, aired on BBC One on Sunday September 2nd, art expert Philip Mould looked into the history of a painting which had long been attributed to German artist Johann Zoffany.
Piecing together evidence from paint samples, x-ray imagery and his own studies of other paintings at Scone Palace, Philip revealed that Anstruther- born David Martin was the artist behind the commission.
Martin painted hundreds of portraits in his lifetime, among them Benjamin Franklin (an image which hangs in the White House), David Hume and William Murray, the 1st Earl of Mansfield. It was the Earl of Mansfield who brought up Dido Belle, the mixed-race daughter of an African slave, after her British naval captain father, Sir John Lindsay, brought her to the UK. The Murrays were already guardians to their niece, Lady Elizabeth Murray and brought up Dido as a free, educated girl at their home at Kenwood House, Hampstead.
The portrait was painted at Kenwood in about 1779 and sees St Paul's Cathedral in the background. It features Lady Elizabeth and Dido Belle sitting on a bench, Dido seeming to coyly point to her face and holding a bowl of fruit.
Philip Mould drew similarities between the Dido painting and one hanging in the private drawing room of Lord and Lady Mansfield at Scone Palace. The portrait of Lady Marjory Murray is strikingly similar, with the same attention to the fabric, flowers in her hair, the colour of her lips and, tellingly, a finger resting on her face – much as Dido is portrayed.
The Palace, which now has 10 paintings by David Martin, today formally attributed the painting to Martin by attaching a new plaque on the portrait.
Scone Palace has now formally attributed the painting to David Martin by attaching a new plaque on the portrait.
Lady Mansfield said:
"This was an extraordinary journey and I'm so grateful to the team at Fake or Fortune for taking the time to look into this. The painting is very precious to us as a family and admired by the many visitors to Scone Palace. I can't believe the clue to the mystery painter – the portrait of the Lady Marjory Murray - has hung in our drawing room for years, quite literally staring us in the face!"
Scone Palace will hold a special evening with Lady Mansfield on November 1 in which she will talk about the painting and give a tour of previously unseen areas of the Palace, including other David Martin portraits.


Nobody had been able to stop the Saints offense all season leading up to Thursday when the Cowboys were going to get their shot at trying to slow down the unit that's been a complete juggernaut all season and the Cowboys defense came through and proved itself as one of the top units in football. The Saints came in on pace to be the most efficient offense in NFL history, but the Cowboys held them to just 10 points and 176 yards. A big reason for their success against this great offense was them making Drew Brees uncomfortable by being able to get pressure right up the middle.
It become possible last week if the Seahawks would've lost to the Panthers, which didn't happen, so this week the Rams went into Detroit and took care of business themselves, winning 30-16, to clinch the NFC West for the second straight season.
The early slate of games this week looked like it was going to produce some fairly predictable results, which of course in the NFL means that the teams that weren't supposed to win were going to win. This included the Giants beating the Bears, Jaguars beating the Colts, Buccaneers beating the Panthers and most notably, the Cardinals beating the Packers. This threw a wrench in the playoff standings compared to what we thought they might look like at weeks end.
The most shocking result of the early slate of games Sunday in my opinion was the Cardinals going into Lambeau Field and beating the Packers and what that did do besides pretty much put a nail in the Packers season, was put a nail in the Packers coaching career of Mike McCarthy. There was a good chance that things in Green Bay were going to come to an end for him at the end of the season anyways, but this is a loss that couldn't happen so when news broke of his firing later on Sunday, it wasn't too surprising. McCarthy finishes his tenure in Green Bay with a record of 125-77-2 and one Super Bowl title. Just looking at the record and the Super Bowl title it looks like a successful tenure, which it was for the most part, but with a guy like Aaron Rodgers, only getting one title seems like not enough and people will debate if that's more on McCarthy or if Rodgers should take a lot of blame for it, but regardless of which side you're on on that debate, they should have more than one title. This job will probably be the most interesting to watch this offseason unless someone unexpected leaves their current team or is fired.
The Chargers were needing to go into Pittsburgh and make a statement that they're a legit team come playoff time and they did that by pulling out a 33-30 win on a Michael Badgley field goal as time expired. Things looked bleak for Los Angeles when the Steelers jumped out to an early 13-0 lead, but the Chargers were able to overcome that early storm and find a way to win. There were certainly some questionable calls in the game, but ultimately it'll go down as a win for the Chargers in the standings.


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Q: Old Java Application -> setLookAndFeel(swing.WindowsClassic), is there a java.awt variant I have an old java application and the GUI did not work 100% with Windows7, especially if Windows AERO Effects are active. I fixed the problem for all java.swing GUI Elements by setting UIManager.setLookAndFeel("com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsClassicLookAndFeel")
But the application contains one Error Dialog Class JMessageBox which only imports
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;

And always when a dialog from the class JMessageBox shows up it has pixel errors like this:

So my Question is, if there is a way to tell java.awt to use WindowsClassicLook similar to the settings I did with java.swing

A: if anyone has the same problem I fixed it by using java.swing.JPanel instead of java.awt.Panel. I could just change the class in the variable Definition.