Jarnhamar said:
For sure everyone should be able to do urban ops but unless it's a training cycles priority it's easy for skill fade to kick in. What I was picting was a specialist company that can deploy in support of other units deploying from company down to section level to act as urban ops instructors/advisors/experts at the smaller sizes and mission specific force at Pl and coy.
If 1ppcli is deploying to a company or two to Africa then they would bring a platoon of dedicated urban ops guys.
The same theory for a recce coy, mountain coy, FP platoon.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't see light infantry battalions fighting as a battalion in a traditional battlefield role anymore.
3rd battalion dug in a defensive? I've seen how that ends a bunch of times ;D
Have them act as force multipliers and support other deployed units.
UOI hat on- 'Urban' is not a type of operation; it's an environment in which tactical and strategic objectives exhaust, and through which we need to pass or in which we need to operate for IOT (mission task verb here). The thought of 'dedicated urban ops guys' scares me because it suggests that 'urban' as an environent is something the rest of the army can dispense with being able to routinely operate in.
We should be practicing all manner of ops in 'urban' as we would in woods, on the Mattawa plains, in hilly terrain... Whether patrolling, offensive ops, defensive ops, stability ops, we could do any of that in rural, small town, or dense urban environments. We tend to conflate 'urban operations' with the smallest element tactics of kicking doors and breaching rooms, but it's not- those are small unit tactics, not operations.
Urban ops has been put on a pedestal, and I think the way the UOI community in the CA has become the guardian of some section and platoon level 'cool kid' stuff hasn't helped with this obfuscation. The UOI net became the natural means of disseminating some cool hands and feet skills into the army, but there's nothing inherently 'urban' about gunfighter drills and such. I think we need to reassess the way we treat 'urban ops' or 'OBUA' or 'FISH' or whatever it's called this week as if it's some sort of unique thing that must be separate from other training. It's not. When the platoon finishes tabbing through the woods, hits the ORV, settles onto the line of departure, and then surges forward to crush our enemies and see them driven before us, odds are there will be some sort of physical structures on the objective. 'Enemy LMG in outbuilding' should be as familiar and comfortable a section attack objective as 'lone enemy, base of tree'. Maybe if we stopped being so squirrelly about so-called 'urban ops' at section and platoon level, we would get more comfortable incorporating physically built up objectives in the course of routine training...
Any objective that is truly urban will be either something we're driving through, or occupying physically at no less than battle group but more likely brigade or division + level.