WASHINGTON, April 29 (UPI) -- Top Marine Corps commanders will go to Chicago to study the problems of fighting in urban areas, as part of a two-year project focusing on tactics for winning future wars.
The officers will visit the city May 5-7. Military planners believe future wars will be fought across urban landscapes, and population projections show about 70 percent of the world's people will live in cities and suburbs by the year 2010.
Later this year, Marine commanders will also visit New York City, Jacksonville, Fla., and Charleston, S.C., for further study.
Fighting in a city requires different tactics than combat in open country, Marine officials said. Troops must learn to cope with, and take advantage of, skyscrapers, sewer systems, bridges, mass transit systems and tunnels if they are going to drive a determined enemy out of a modern city.
The Marine Corps Warfighting Center in Quantico, Va., will run the training program with the help of Chicago police, with about 60 Marine officers taking part.
WASHINGTON (AP) - As the Marine Corps looks ahead to the next century, it predicts few wars waged on open battlefields. Big foreign cities are more likely the site of most future conflicts.
But the Marines are ill-prepared for combat among skyscrapers and sidewalks. So as part of a two-year experiment in big-city warfare, about 80 Marine officers wearing camouflage uniforms will visit Chicago next week to tour the subway system, a water filtration plant, bridges, the police and fire departments - even the city's underground tunnel network.
"Our tactics, doctrine and technology have not kept up with urbanization," Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the corps' commandant, told the Armed Forces Journal. "In future conflicts, our enemies will lure us into the cities in an attempt to mitigate our capabilities and make us fight where we are the least effective."
The program, begun last summer, has included training in a four-block model town at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and envisions later practice war games in Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville, Fla. It is to culminate in a mock battle in an as-yet-unidentified West Coast city.
In Chicago, officers from Camp Lejeune's 1st Battalion, 8th Marines; from the corps' Quantico, Va.-based Warfighting Laboratory and from the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental) will get a 2 1/2-day tutorial in what makes the Windy City tick, said Lt. Col. Jenny Holbert, a spokeswoman for the 3-year-old lab.
Chicago was chosen because it has features typical of the big, complex cities U.S. forces could someday find themselves fighting in: a river, shore access, subways, even a drawbridge.
Big cities are considered likely scenes of combat because 70 percent of the world's population will live in urban areas by 2020 and because cities tend to have such classic ingredients of conflict as poverty and cultural, religious and social tension.
Krulak established the warfighting lab in 1995, and it has a budget of $32.5 million this year. The Marines want to learn how to maneuver around city infrastructure, communicate while in close quarters with an enemy, minimize the impact on civilians and care for casualties when medical facilities may be offshore.
In return for playing host, Chicago will receive some military communications and other technologies that could help during a civilian disaster such as a major storm or water supply cutoff.
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[posted May 2, 1998]
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