There have been lots of discussions over the relative merits/safety/wisdom of staying in large cities. Cities concentrate population and resources. For that reason, they are targets for all sorts of things, some of them truly unpleasant. See the article below for a few details.

As far as Grozny is concerned, a lot of the story remains to be told. There have been numbers of civilians killed in the wanton shelling/bombing, those who didn't flee fast enough and far enough. All sorts of really interesting Russian weapons came into play, like fuel-air bombs which sought out basements and other underground shelters and killed everyone inside (the same type weapon news reports today mentioned were being stockpiled in Cuba. How's that make you feel, Miami??)

The full text of the Ralph Peters article mentioned below is available on the web at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/96spring/peters.htm. If you're still not convinced you might want to be a "country mouse," give it a read too.

Lee

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Newsweek February 21, 2000

The New Urban Battlefield

U.S. troops don't do cities. But someday they'll have to.

By John Barry, Newsweek

The battle of Grozny was long and bloodyfor Russian attackers as well as the Chechen defenders. But you won't see any condescending head-wagging in the U.S. military. As one senior Pentagon official said last week, "I'm not so sure that we'd do a whole lot better than the Russians." That's a problem; in the view of many military analysts, the killing grounds of Grozny offer a hellish view of tomorrow's warfare.

The U.S. Army used to have a simple way of dealing with cities: avoid them. The cost in street-fighting casualties was just too steep. That was one reason that, in 1945, the Army didn't try to take Berlin, a battle that Gen. Omar Bradley told Dwight Eisenhower "might cost us 100,000 men." Bradley was right. The Red Army, which did fight its way into Berlin, lost 102,000 men doing so; 125,000 German civilians died in the battle, and 150,000 to 200,000 German troops. If cities couldn't be avoided, U.S. military doctrine had a fallback plan: flatten them, which is what, in 1968, 8,000 shells from offshore warships did to the Vietnamese city of Hue.

Neither option now exists. In a 1996 essay in Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters argued, "The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world." The article hit a raw nerve. Three years earlier, in a battle in the back alleys of Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Rangers were killed and 73 woundeda 60 percent casualty rate. All the high-tech equipment that the Rangers were meant to have at their disposalsatellite images, laser-guided munitions and the likewere largely useless in the teeming streets. After Vietnam, the military spent billions of dollars developing the kill-at-a-distance weapons that looked so good in the desert fighting of the gulf war. Trouble is, such weaponry does no good when an enemy soldier is just a few feet away. A 1994 Pentagon study after Mogadishu baldly concluded, "Our current capability was developed for a massive, rural war... Since the future looks much different, new capabilities will have to be developed."

What might those new capabilities be? In the last couple of weeks a company of U.S. Marines has been trying to find out. The Marines have been "fighting" their way through the houses and office blocks of Fort Ord, Calif., an Army base abandoned in 1994. If the results mimic those at a similar exercise last spring, they won't be encouraging. In "attacks" on a naval hospital in Oakland, Calif., the Marines took casualty rates as high as 70 percent.

For the new urban warfare, the military needs new equipment. On its long wish list: handheld sensors to detect an enemy in the next room, and the sort of trolley that mechanics use to go under cars. Why? To rescue wounded buddies. In Grozny, Chechen snipers deliberately aimed at the legs of Russian soldiers, waited patiently for a rescue squadthen shot them, too. Some gear on the wish list is high techlike robotsbut none has the big price tags that attract lobbyists and congressmen. Still, unless the money is found, the price will likely be paid in American blood.

-- Lee (lplapinXOUT@hotmail.com), February 14, 2000

Answers

London Times February 14, 2000

City Where The Dogs Eat The Dead

Janine di Giovanni, the only British reporter based in Grozny, witnesses the devastation wreaked by Russian forces

THE Russians have wiped Grozny off the map. It is uninhabitable, even for the packs of hungry wild dogs. It is these dogs, according to Hussein, one pro-Moscow Chechen working as a volunteer grave-digger, which are tearing apart the bodies of the unburied throughout the city. "The dogs are eating the corpses," he says.

It is difficult to find a building not gouged by bombs or reduced to a pile of bricks. Apartment buildings with no roofs are booby-trapped and mined. There is no water, electricity, heating or telephones.

When this war started, there were about 400,000 people living in Chechnya's capital. But Grozny now has only a small, ragged band of civilians. The living dead are emerging from hiding places. They shuffle out of their cellars, clutching plastic soda bottles to fill with water. Some wear white armbands to distinguish them from fighters. Most are women, some are so old they are nearly bent double.

When the military curfew descends at 6pm, nearly everyone goes back to the cellars, but those caught outside tell stories of drunken Russian Interior Ministry troops looting, shooting randomly into cellars, taking women away.

The first unconfirmed reports of rape are filtering through. Alpatu, 40, says she left Samashki, in western Chechnya, on February 1 with three women friends, aged 39, 23 and 40.

They arrived at the first Russian checkpoint in Grozny and produced their passports. Alpatu was lucky - she was last in the queue. The others were marched off and not heard from again. "They were soldiers from Dagestan and North Ossetia," she says. " I've tried to find my friends. What is strange is we haven't found the bodies."

The rape stories are not limited to one side. Another woman, an ethnic Russian, comes forward weeping, clutching a photograph of a beautiful teenager: her 15-year-old daughter.

"Chechen fighters came on November 15," she says slowly. "They burst into the room, wearing black masks and carrying Kalashnikovs. They said, 'We need her', that was all." She has searched three months in vain for the girl."Nothing," she says, rubbing her red eyes. "She just seemed to disappear."

The Russian emergency services have set up four "feeding points" which include hot showers in an attempt to prevent an epidemic, as well as a full surgical hospital. But in the Staropromyslovsky district, once heavily populated and less damaged than other city areas, there were fewer than 200 people gathered. They wait silently for three hours in the freezing cold, shuffling their feet for warmth, for a bowl of buckwheat kasha, a cup of sugared tea and a loaf of dark bread.

More are creeping to the hospital, complaining of shrapnel wounds, infections, illnesses or tuberculosis.

Near Minutka Square, Lyobov Yasinsaya, 42, a Ukrainian doctor who has lived in Grozny for years, screams with rage and frustration. She says that she could not leave the city because her elderly mother and her four children were unable to travel, and she emerged from her cellar only ten days ago. "We had to steal to get food and we often had no water. Now the war is over, I have been standing here for two weeks, and no one will help me!"

She is covered with dirt and grime, her face hidden behind weeks of unwashed soot. She stares at her hands, cracked and raw. "I'm an educated person, I hate going around like this, but I have descended into the condition of a monkey."

Dzhanat Aktulayeva, 62, says she has gone through two wars as well as deportation in 1944 to Kazakhstan. Her son was killed in the 1994 war and she raises his three children on her small pension. "We've been tortured," she says. "Life in Grozny has been hell on earth."

-- Lee (lplapinXOUT@hotmail.com), February 14, 2000.

Thanks for posting this...

-- Mumsie (shezdremn@aol.com), February 15, 2000.

This is why they say "War is Hell". The only glory in it is the willingness of people to endure it to preserve their country. Such bravery is tragically beautiful. Few in the U.S. understand this, or what it takes to secure freedom. That is why it is so tragic that Americans are so lax in guarding theirs. It costs dearly to get it back once you have lost it.

It has been discovered that the Soviets lost closer to 350,000 taking Berlin. And they blasted through that city in much the same way, often employing direct cannon fire against a few german infantry in a strong point. If you want a real eye opener read up on that battle.

Watch six and keep your...

-- eyes_open (best@wishes.2all), February 15, 2000.

"She says that she could not leave the city because her elderly mother and her four children were unable to travel, and she emerged from her cellar only ten days ago."

Always have some sort of emergency travel plan. Don't stay at home without it.

-- CA 4x4 (4x4@my.house), February 20, 2000.