Urban warfare

And in order to do this, I need to send Tara a link.

All right, find your Urban Wars codename.

Whee!

All right, so I've created this find your Urban Wars codename.

And I put a bunch of codenames in there.

And what you do is...

Below is a list of traits pulled from field reports.

Check every box that fits yourself, a co-host, a case subject, whoever you're assigning a codename to.

He doesn't exactly say where he was stationed on Okinawa, but based on the details he gives, it sounds like at least part of this happened on Camp Hansen, which I happen to be very familiar with.

In one of those mock training villages Marines use for urban combat training, a MOUT town.

Combat Town it might be called, the name of this actual training area.

I trained on the ranges and stuff on Hansen.

We did a lot of our training in like, for recon, the, the abandoned housing down on Camp Foster or empty barracks buildings on Hansen.

I, I think I might have used the MOUT town on Hansen like once.

But take my word on it, all of those places, especially at night, gave me the creeps when I let myself think about it.

Just something about an empty building, especially on Okinawa.

It failed system by system, which is how cities usually become battlefields.

Urban warfare in Halo is often remembered through close firefights, but cities are not merely dense collections of rooms.

They are networks of movement, power, information, shelter, medicine, policing, and transportation.

The force that controls those networks can move troops and civilians while denying the same freedom to the enemy.

It could not command a battalion or understand the campaign like a smart artificial intelligence.

Its value came from knowing the city.

In urban warfare, a limited system with the correct map can be more useful than a powerful system looking at the wrong one.

The same network created an intelligence objective.

uh to headquarters where these people are involved but they're not involved there needs to be some you know democratic accountability is important so therefore you need to restructure the organizational um structure of your cabinets and of your headquarters potentially of your ministries of defense or your operations rooms to make that account to make that participation accountable essentially um i don't know how that's going to be done it's an interesting question am i going to look at that next project i'm not sure but for me it is a live question

Turning to your previous work and also one of my favorite books, Urban Warfare, you describe the idea of cities and micro sieges, which are fought block by block and often live streamed to a global audience.

How does AI enabled surveillance and target acquisition change that calculus? For example, does it make urban environments more transparent to attackers or Or do you think urban density still blunts the advantages of warfare that relies on algorithms rather than, say, intuition?

Yeah, so this is a great question.

I think that Ukraine, you know, the Ukraine, I think, shows, gives us some good examples of this, you know, battles of war.

bakhmut bakovsk uh maria pole etc especially the later battles over the last few over the last two two years from bakhmut forward where there's been that massive proliferation of drones so we we got a little bit quite a nice little um evidence basis of of what this is and what it might look like um and my set my central argument was that you know in terms of that urban urban combat book urban warfare book is that So, you know, it's not just about technology.

It's not just about the cities.

It's what you see in the current area is a massive contraction of military forces, even in Ukraine with the expansion.