Get Ready For Brutal And Deadly Urban Warfare In Ukraine

         As a professional military officer anywhere in the world, you have one worst nightmare. You're called into the office of your superior officer. You're handed a set of orders instructing you to attack and take control of a medium to large urban area.

    Let us look back into history to see some results of battles inside a large urban area as follows:

 

Battle of Stalingrad (1942):

German killed and wounded: 800,000

Soviet killed and wounded: 1,100,000

Civilian deaths: 40,000

 

Battle of Berlin (1945)

German killed and wounded: 92,000 to 100,000

Soviet killed and wounded:    70,000

Civilian deaths:                     125,000

 

Battle of Manila (1945)

US soldiers killed:                     1,010

Japanese soldiers killed:         16,665

Filipino civilians killed:    100,000 to 240,000

     What the Russians face next in Ukraine is the battle to take large urban centers like Kyiv. I have sat through a couple of hours of interviews with retired US generals who commanded US soldiers and marines who attacked urban centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every one of these men gave one shocking statistic as follows:

         For every defender inside an urban area, the attacking force needs 10 soldiers.

     These retired officers doubted that the Russians could muster the number of troops necessary to meet this ratio. They took note of the Russian tendency to use massive artillery bombardments to reduce a city to rubble and kill many people inside. They pointed out that these tactics had been used in the urban battles cited above. Still, troops had to go in and take ground. These generals were also skeptical of the training and motivation of the Russian soldiers who would be assigned to take these cities. They felt that there would be desertions and soldiers making a half-hearted effort to fight.

    I was in a Zoom meeting Friday morning with the Editor of The Economist magazine coming from London. Her Russian experts predicted that Russians would follow their warfighting doctrine. If conventional forces cannot get the job done, resort to chemical weapons or tactical nuclear weapons. They said that Kyiv would suffer a fate similar to Aleppo in Syria.

    What will the world do if such weapons of mass destruction are used in Ukraine?