Russia’s war in Ukraine suggests that “urban warfare is unavoidable," according to a senior U.S. general tasked with prepare the U.S. Army for potential future wars.
“I think the enemy is going to move to the cities to avoid classification as a target,” Gen. James E. Rainey, who leads the U.S. Army Futures Command, said Friday at the Center for a New American Security. “We need to wrap our head around that.”
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That prospect will present a dilemma for U.S. military planners. They will be required to avoid the wanton destruction of civilian targets that has characterized the Russian invasion of Ukraine in favor of more efficient yet complex tactics.
“You never want to get into clearing and the attrition that comes with that,” he said. “Why do you need forces? You know, again, not to clear an urban area but to be able to penetrate into an urban area for purpose — stay there, kill from there.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has devolved into the kind of war of attrition that has provoked international outrage toward Russia and spurred Western powers to increase military aid to Ukraine. The conflict has strained the arsenals of Moscow as well as the U.S. and its allies, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s team maintained that “we have a lot of capacity” to continue aiding Ukraine.
“When we put our mind to it, our $25 trillion economy, you don't want to take us on,” said Defense Department assistant secretary Douglas R. Bush, the Pentagon’s lead acquisitions bureau official. “We are, for example, rapidly expanding that capacity to meet some of the replenishment needs for Ukraine — maybe not as fast as some people think is possible, but I can assure you, it's happening quickly and American industry is showing what it can do. So I'm pretty confident about it.”
Rainey and Bush appeared for a public discussion of their efforts to design and supply the U.S. Army to fight over the years and decades to come — conflicts that they hope will be eased, if not deterred, through the combined efforts of the U.S and its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Bush said there are "several efforts underway right now” to enable defense companies from allied nations to manufacture precision-guided weapons, for instance, closer to potential conflict zones.
“So Australia, Japan, South Korea, those countries being able to do that is only a win for us,” he said. “So we are the arsenal of democracy, but other democracies can help a lot. And a network of them working together is way better than all of it being on our shoulders.”
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It’s not just weapons that need to be provided closer to the conflict but also medical care, Rainey added, given the difficulty of arranging supply chains into future war zones.
“The realities of what that's going to look like in a war at this speed and scale, and the horror of future war is something that we got to continue to do a lot of work,” the general said. “We have some fascinating things going on, but we can't work enough on that. I mean, that’s a priority. It's a moral responsibility.”