SHARP CORNERS: URBAN OPERATIONS AT CENTURY'S END

This study was directed by the Commanding General, US Army
Training and Doctrine Command, in the summer of 1999. NATO
operations against Yugoslavia had just begun. Notwithstanding official
announcements that ground forces would not be needed for the time
being, expectations ran high that ground troops would ultimately have
to be employed. The precise nature of the operations they would be
called on to perform could not be foreseen, and consequently neither
the size nor the precise character of the forces to be committed could be
decided at the time. The range of possibilities was enough to give any
commander or operational planner headaches: American ground forces
could be engaged in direct combat within or beyond the province of
Kosovo, then the focal point of NATO operations, against conventional
forces or their surrogates. US troops could also be employed as an
element of a peacekeeping operation confined to the province itself, or
perhaps beyond, or any gradation of commitment between these
extremes. No one with official responsibility could envision a scenario
without ground troops of any sort.
Only one assumption could be made with any sort of confidence:
once ground forces were introduced, a significant part of their duties
would be performed not in the open countryside but in areas that could
to some degree be characterized as urban. Some such areas might be
very small, no more than a village perhaps, with a population
numbering in the tens. Some might be towns with only a few thousand
inhabitants. Others might be much larger municipalities, with
populations running to the tens of thousands. The question naturally
arose: to what degree was the US Army prepared for this mission,
ill-defined as it was at that particular time