Dear Mr. Andrew Mtewa,

In my point of view, guerrilla warfare is the natural method of a fight against a powerful enemy. For this reason, the

guerrilla adopts the strategy of nibbling at the edges of the enemy, of harassing and tiring him rather than confronting him directly. We can be said guerrilla warfare is "hit and run," or "fighting and running away to live to fight another day."

The primary challenger of a successful rural guerrilla war are mobility, surprise, the permanent presence in the operations area, local superiority in forces, the support of the population and intimate knowledge of the terrain.

I hope I have been of some help,

Andrija

The challenges of urban warfare are numerous. However, among them are difficulty in knowing and isolating the enemy from the rest of the population. in most cases, guerrilla fighters melt into the population and hardly bear any form of identification. bearing in mind that they are usually the same as the population in so many respect as ethnicity, complexion, tribe and even looks, it makes it delicate isolating them and dealing with them decisively.

Second is the issue of avoiding collateral damage which may result from military action. unlike conventional warfare where the battlefield is clearly demarcated, urban warfare occurs in residential areas where the guerrilla co-habit with the rest of the population. This limits the action the military can take and may therefore confer some advantages to the insurgents and helps prolong the war thereby wearing down the security agencies which is the main aim of the guerrilla warfare.

Another challenge is the issue of crowd control. Guerrilla warfare by its nature impose some hardship on the entire population. this is understandable since the security agencies would not know who is and who is not the enemy. there is thus the tendency to treat all people as suspects and this could lead to revolt or at the resentment of security agencies by the people. this could be very dangerous and may jeopardise the success of the military operation against the guerrilla.

Above are some of the challenges. For the solution, most conflicts involving guerrilla warfare are politically based. so the most effective solution is to try and resolve the political issues politically. However, this should be done while the military is taking on the insurgents and possible is already having an upper hand. Like terrorists, it is difficult to negotiate with insurgents while they are dictating the pace.

Militarily, effective and timely intelligence is the key to the success of any counter-guerrilla warfare. The security agencies must have effective ways of knowing the next move of the guerrilla and foil it before they strike. It may be necessary to infiltrate both the leadership and the entire structure of guerrilla organisation to keep abreast with developments within the organisation and possible cause division and suspicion among the members. ultimately this may weaken them and provide the incentive for negotiation.

There is also the need to win the hearts and minds of the populace who may know this guerrillas and be willing to volunteer information that can assists the security agencies in countering their activities. In this respect, the security agencies must resist the temptation of revenge and undue high handedness. They should adhere to responsible ways/rules of engagement to respond to any provocation. Observing rule of law and respect for human rights of the people and even arrested or surrendered guerrillas would greatly assist in that direction.

Finally, good governance is a panacea for most of these conflicts.

I hope this adds to what has already been said about your question. thank you.

I have just ended coaching a Ma Research Paper on Urban Warfare. The option taken by the student was that Urban Warfare was the war of the 21st century.

Elements were:

- population tends to concentrate within cities,

- megalopolis will dramatically increase (have a look at the number of cities with more than 01 million people and the current forecast for the decades to come),

- however, I do not share the idea of "urban warfare = fighting against guerillas". Of course, conventional armies could face guerillas, freedom fighters or insurgents... But they could also face other conventional armies (remember Stalingrad during WWII) or even organised crimes (these organisations could indeed use guerilla techniques, but it does not mean these are guerillas as such. Think of the situation in some areas in Mexico nowadays).

If you look for references, see Kilcullen's ’’Out of the Mountains’’ book as a first one.

Professors Andrija Kozina, Sani Sulaiman and Michael Alexandre just gave a very exhaustive and comprehensive panorama about Urban Warfare. I will add onle the nowadays problems with the use of the “human shield” using civilians. Urban warfare in some cases can be executed by special trained forces what is desirable. However that can be done in some particular cases.

Dear esteemed colleagues.

Thank you for your views you have shared with me and others on this forum. It is really a pity that this keeps going on. Your views have been so enlightening to me

kind regards

You are welcome, wish luck in your work.

I think it is important to define the term urban warfare. Urban warfare is generally regarded as combat which occurs in built up or urban areas. The type of combat or warfare is thus defined by its geography. This is similar to desert, jungle and or mountain warfare.

Urban warfare could be part of a conventional or irregular war and could be a war of total or limited objectives. These are all aspects which dictates the type of tactics used. During a conventional war a city or built up area represents urban terrain which must be negotiated and reinforced in a similar way to trenches and bunkers in the field. During an unconventional war, within a city the guerillas hide within the population and their strength lies in popular support, intimate knowledge of the terrain and the ability to achieve surprise.

Michael Alexandre made the interesting example of Stalingrad. This provides a fascinating case study of conventional operations in an urban space. The Russian military used defence in depth, strong points and proximity (among other methods) to defend against the German attacks ub the city and Assualt troops and storm groups to counter attack. This of course was part of the Second World War, which was a war of total objectives. Therefore civilian casualties and brutality was not a central concern of the belligerents.

During the German invasion of Russia, there were many cities which were besieged. This all falls within the ambit of conventional operations.

The challenges faced by military forces in urban warfare remain similar.

In modern times there are several battles and operations which have taken place in cities where the challenges and complexity of urban warfare have been made apparent. The Battle of Mogadishu (1993) provided many lessons in modern urban warfare. The rise of non-state actors and the combat in many Middle Eastern cities including Allepo and Mosul (and many more) provide no end of a lesson to the suffering of civilians in war.

The central challenge in terms of protecting civilians during urban warfare lies in the concentration of people found in cities. At the risk of stating the obvious urban areas provide areas for large parts of the population to live, by compressing them into a given space. This in turn increases the risk of injury and death during fighting. The probability of sustaining civilian casualties by stray bullets and area weapons increases exponentially because of the amount of people that live in cities. There are also modern cases where civilians are targeted in fighting and, as I am sure everyone knows, that there have been several chemical weapon attacks which targeted civilians.

In terms of containing urban warfare, I think that it is the same as containing any war. It remains political. The cause and conclusion of the war will be political. The war itself may take the form of urban warfare. I think that there is a humanitarian part that can be done to ease the suffering and spread awareness of urban warfare. Organisations such as the UN and its agencies as well as ICRC, IRC and many other NGOs are doing a lot of work in this regard.

If you want a recent type of urban warfare look into Antifa's tactics in recent years. They have been listed as a terrorist organization by the federal government for their violence, wearing masks and using some sort of weapon to attack individuals who are trying to speak about anything right leaning at all for example freedom of speech is being attacked by this group.

As far as containment that is up to the local government, for example in several states unless it is Halloween, it is illegal to wear a mask in public, which came into effect after several armed robberies in that area with people wearing ski masks and such. In recent years the police have done nothing to oppose these groups and this has caused violence to ensue. An example would be Black Lives Matter when a non member killed two police officers in Texas in the name of Black Lives Matter who chanted "What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want them? Now," in several of their marches and protests.

So this is a bit of a slippery slope question because first we must define what we consider urban warfare, then we must decide the proper actions to take against it because these individuals blend into the community in which they are participating in such actions.

Politically, the biggest challenge is in avoiding own casualties. If facing a guerrilla force, the latter will seek a political victory by eroding support with the people back home by causing an unacceptable trickle of casualties, until the other force withdraws. This happened to the USA in Vietnam, and to several European nations including the UK in Afghanistan.

Even guerrilla warfare needs a brain, a coordinator, at leat a thinker, to plan and decide which targets To attack. The military action counter guerrilla is other matter, and it demands micro-tactic though. Technological tool, fuzzy-logic, and the probability-plausibility-possibility interactions might lead the searching to know in advance which will be the next guerrilla attack. Whether you know or at least suspect where will be the next guerrilla objective, it could follow the track in retrospective and meet the coordinator of the event. Before military actions, it is much better to train on the enemy thinking. I hope this can help you, but I am afraid that is more entangled now. This mirrors my personal experience upon Peru, Colombia, and some countries of Africa.

I should add that historical analysis showed that urban areas were harder to defend than rural terrain in high intensity warfare – see David Rowland's (1991) paper in J. Operational Research Society (Vol.42 No.7 543–553). More defenders tend to surrender because they get infiltrated.