It is a great pleasure to introduce professor ethnic groups he's got a of already so I wanted to give you a title.
He's also a professor of sociology at the University of Exeter.
But more importantly, I think right now, as a visiting fellow for All Souls College, he's written, I think, on a number of different things.
Some of you know him from looking at some of the political tribalism in the sporting world,
but also in social theory, of course, and particularly with reference to the armed forces.
What do you think of those views on that? And the most recent book of notes, which we must point out to you.
The transformation of Europe's armed forces came out in Cambridge.
2011 was most recently. The combat soldier was correct.
This year we don't see university press does not have a reception quite like we should be talking about.
So you can tell you about that. And it's also worth pointing out that unlike many sociology theorists who simply.
Study the books and look at the material from a purely Chinese.
Take in the effort, make the effort to get out on the ground to Afghanistan,
work inside the headquarters as an advisor to try and help military personnel understand the species that sort of dealing with.
Tony, thanks for doing this particular presidential 43 yet.
Why don't you try it? Thanks. Thanks so much. Thanks for being here on a beautiful day.
I mean, three months ago I was on. I don't have a choice. I might be outside.
But anyway, thanks for being here.
Well, this paper like yours, I mean, there's a, you know, obvious provenance of this paper, namely the book that Rob just mentioned.
What have extracted out is is a set of discussions in the book about contemporary urban combat.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
But but I had no particular desire, no plans to work, you know,
to provide presentations and potentially work up an article as I'm doing on on the issue of urban combat and close quarters battle.
It came out of discussions with people. I also and they do these visiting fellow colloquium and I was asking my colleagues,
my fellow visiting fellows also what they like to listen to me talk about.
And I have a list of probably less interesting topics.
And when I mention I've done a bit of work on urban combat, various colleagues said, Yeah, you must do that.
And the talk went down as well as anything can go down well as a visitor.
Also, it seemed to go down okay. So that didn't encourage me.
That then encouraged me to maybe think there's something to this.
And so I take the liberty of presenting this to you and I'll be interested to see what your reactions to it are,
if there's any merit or wider validity in it.
One point on the title, I mean, the title is slightly hyperbolic and you know,
sensation is really a better title for this talk something like towards a pressurised military,
the case of close quarter battle, the case of of urban combat.
And that's what I'm going to talk to today. In the mid 1970s,
sociologists and social scientists generally sociologists began to note and publish on what seemed to be and I think they were correct in identifying.
It seemed to be a historic transformation.
Namely, Western forces in particular were moving from the citizen model, which is typified Western armies from, we might say,
the levee on March 1793 to moving away from these large scale citizen slash conscript forces to professionalised military units,
all volunteer much small of all volunteer forces.
Now, this rightly caused much interest at that particular time, but more recently, sociologists,
the social sciences more more generally have been much more interested in the kind of more technical, spectacular aspects of military development.
And in particular, if you look at the 1990s,
there's intense debate about the whole revolution in military affairs and the introduction of new digital and precision technology into the military.
And what it suggests is that in a certain sense, in no way am I denying the importance of the revolution in military affairs,
no one tool in importance of new technology, digital technology in particular.
But it seems to me that those social issues in the 1970s were, in a sense, onto something.
The professionalisation at one level just means a change in employment contract, briefly,
that you become a career soldier, paid for your pay for your potentially career service.
And at that level it doesn't seem particularly important or or a portentous development.
But what I try to suggest is that actually underlying that banal transformation,
a mere contractual relationship between the employed soldier and the state of factory
in the Ministry of Defence lies very significant cultural and social transformation.
Since those of interest to me and those that I'd like to talk about today.
Well, if we're going to talk about professionalism, of course, these two books are essential.
Samuel's the Soldier of State, and Yaniv, it's who's the professional soldier.
And I think they provide a useful definition of professionalism.
None of it is very clear. Professionalism consists of three essential things a specialised form of knowledge,
a responsibility to the society of which you're part, and a sort of corporate ethos.
Pretty reasonable definition in terms of the specialist knowledge, the expertise,
what he was thinking of and what he defined was, to use last word phrase, the management of violence.
So he particularly saw the emergence of a professional officer corps that was expert in the management of violence,
and particularly that phrase expertise, specialised knowledge seems to me to one to to to to hold on to in terms of professionalisation.
And bizarrely, but perhaps ironically, it points to something slightly paradoxical about professionalism that the best professionals,
the true professionals are actually amateurish about the vocation to which they're dedicated amateurs in the traditional sense of the word.
They are lovers.
They have a passion about the vocation which they have chosen, which gives them a kind of a intense interest in every detail aspect of performance,
collective and individual performance in that domain of expertise.
And I think in communicating that sense of passion, of amateurish passion, Janowitz and Shiels,
despite Javits and Huntington, despite many differences I have with them, I think they provide a useful point.
However, of course, famously, Huntington did not think that professionalism extended down into the domain that I'm interested in,
namely into the kind of domain of tactical activity in which soldiers, NCO and very junior officers are involved.
On the contrary, he was absolutely explicit in the opening of the book The Enlisted Men,
and therefore the activities of that immediate tactical level of the engagement
of the enemy with fire on the battlefield was not a professional activity.
It was a training, not a profession. Now, what it suggests is that perhaps too, you know,
he was writing in air despite the fact that he focussed on professionalisation, the professionalism of the officer corps.
Of course, publishing. In 1957, Huntington was writing in an era of the Citizen Army,
and indeed the primary kind of energy behind his work is precisely trying to explain and in
fact provide a normative basis of a pretty novel situation that United States oneself in,
namely in possession of a very large citizen standing army for more or less the first time in its history.
And so his his concerns. His. His his definition of professionalism only exists at the officer level, reflects the army to which he was writing.
If we turn now to the last ten years of conflict, to the intense operations in Iraq and Afghanistan,
I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to maintain the activities which have taken place
at the ground level of troops patrolling and fighting in the streets and deserts of Afghanistan.
The mountains of Afghanistan have not or could not be defined as professional.
Indeed, what it suggests is a very useful comparison.
Here is the performance of American citizen soldiers in Vietnam and their contemporary performance in the last ten years.
And that difference in performance, one ending up in defeat.
We need a massive disobedience.
The other ending up in highly problematic, but nevertheless not outrageous defeat and collapse as a result.
So what it suggests is that we can. And what I want to do today is to try and extend Huntington's definition of
professionalism as a form of specialism down to the lowest tactical levels.
And in effect, what I want to provide and I put it here, I want to try and analyse the micro practices of urban combat at the lowest tactical level,
talking here of squads of 1015 people down to protect four people in a in a stack, as I will describe later on,
in order to contribute to contemporary understandings of military professionalisation.
There's another literature to which I hope and perhaps think this work potentially contributes.
And in the last 10 to 15 years,
I think there's been an increasing interest by sociologists in forms of collective protest and indeed collective violence.
In fact, often unorganised collective violence in terms of stimulated by mass protests around things like G-8 and also in terms of,
although principally peaceful, but in terms of the Occupy movement in response to the credit crunch.
And indeed, Michael Biggs,
he's who's sat here is I see his work as contributing very significantly to this work on the dynamics of collective violence in the contemporary era.
Now, one of the key figures I would argue in this literature is Randall Collins, professor of Pennsylvania.
And he's produced a number of important works on on various forms of conflict.
One of his most recent was a monograph dedicated to violence and essential central point of that.
And it's a micro sociology of violence in all its manifestations in social life,
including military, but also including aspects like domestic violence.
What what is central argument is, is that human beings are incompetent when it comes to violence,
and that is typically in contradistinction to literary or filmic representations of violence.
Actually, human human violence is typically incompetent, badly executed, unwillingly executed and disordered.
Essentially, violence is almost overwhelmingly especially mass violence is overwhelmingly characterised by mass or individual incompetence.
And certainly I think his work on this is profound.
I have no disagreements in general with his point.
What would suggest is in terms of the military and thinking about urban tactics,
urban combat techniques is to professionalise military of the 21st century,
is explicitly seeking to overcome the kind of natural I use in inverted commas,
the natural crowd dynamics of which Collins and various of his colleagues,
including Michael potentially and very usefully have illustrated the idea of
professionalism at military level is to eliminate natural and incompetent,
collective and individual reactions and responses and replace them with refined and established established responses.
Now, clearly, in many cases, professional military style, that chaos and disorder is is what follows combat and especially urban combat.
But I would suggest that the attempt is there to overcome the natural individual and collective reactions of panic,
fear and flight or forward panic by more tempered and refined and effective response.
And so therefore, in talking to close quote battle,
I'd like to try and fuse these two interests in a story about military professionalisation and also
in the micro dynamics of violence that many sociologists found interesting in the current era.
So defining what I mean by close more to battle.
I'm. Urban warfare. Since the beginnings of civilisation armies, humans have engaged in forms of urban warfare.
They have fought in or for cities. And we only need to go back.
You know, there's various sackings of cities and destructions of populations,
and the Bible famously is book to the Aeneid has a actually really motive and powerful description of the sacking of Troy,
and especially the destruction of the palace and the murder of Priam by Paris
is a powerful story about urban urban combat in the pre kiss Christian era,
although Virgil himself never served in the military, but presumably took some of the descriptions from his own knowledge of of that of that period.
And. Urban warfare has remained a key category of human conflict since that time.
If you look at Christopher Duffy's excellent work on fortifications and siege warfare, medieval and early modern Europe,
we find that continual use of or continual happenings of urban combat, of fighting in and for cities.
And this is one of those bands of time sports actually in Lille.
And now, of course, in the 20th century, especially in the Second World War,
there was very extensive urban fighting and much of this urban fighting generated quite high levels of skill among the combatants.
And this is an image of Stalingrad, which was, in my view,
the both culminating and the most the largest and most brutal of all urban combat in the Second World War.
And Stalingrad provides, I think, a very interesting example of the nature of urban warfare, urban warfare, as distinct from close quarters battle.
And of course, just give you an example of this, that in fact, the bear market,
after much difficulty, did develop certain techniques for fighting in the urban area.
The Soviets similarly developed similar techniques.
Now, one of the examples here is the assault on the barricaded gun factory in late October and November 1942.
And those some very sophisticated assaults occurred around these factories,
one in particular on this house, a commercial house on the 11th of November.
And what the Vermaak did was to generate special stormtrooper battalions,
pioneer battalions in these assaults on the factories, and assigned one to be sort of this fortified house back here.
And if you look at I'm not going to go into this, but it was a it was a well-planned, well executed type, brutal and very bloody assault.
But what did suggest here is, although here is clear evidence of the refinement of the planning and execution of urban tactics at the battalion level,
there is little evidence of something that I'm going to call Sea Cube micro expertise,
micro practices at the level of the platoon and the squad and the section I at the level of teams of of four,
eight, ten, 20 soldiers, it became sophisticated.
But it still these these techniques I'm going to talk about hadn't really developed in the 1980s.
NATO's began to take increasing interest in urban combat as a way of responding to Soviet
threats and new Soviet doctrine on how they were going to take or avoid fighting in cities.
But again, in the end, I'll come back to this infantry man's guide.
There's no development of what I would suggest and what military practices would call close quarters battle,
namely refined skills in terms of entering and clearing particular structures and buildings.
That general there's sophistication at the level of planning and execution, but at the level of micro tactics, it still retains an unrefined method.
Now in the 1990s, in there's experience of Mogadishu, Grozny and Sarajevo,
Western countries again renewed this interest in urban combat and renewed this interest in a very serious and very serious,
much more serious way than they had in the past with the emergence towards the end of that decade,
especially into the first decade of this century, with the development of new training manuals and new training facilities.
But even then, up till the early 2000,
I would suggest to you that the specific practices of CQ be a close call to battle were not present within the general conventional military.
Where then did CPB come from? What I'm to you is that while the conventional forces from the eighties on and specifically
accentuated from the nineties became increasingly concerned with urban combat,
there was a development occurring at a lower, more covert level, namely amongst special forces.
In the 1970s, and one of the key, if not the key catalyst for this increased interest in the micro techniques of room
clearance and building clearance was the emergence of international terrorism in the 1970s,
and particularly the Munich crisis in response to Munich crisis,
where Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at that in some hideous event,
in a hideously incompetently managed event by German federal federal authorities at that time.
Western governments development began to develop an interest in the question of fighting in enclosed urban spaces,
and they developed special forces units in order to develop and execute these counter-terrorist
operations and those few organisations that were critical to the developments here,
the SARS in Britain, Special Air Service, Delta Force in America.
Gasquet no one should screw up annoying in Germany and the Jean-Marie the group more de security that haven't
done to us here in France were key groupings in developing these micro practices of urban clearing techniques,
namely trying to overcome the problem of entering buildings and eliminating terrorists while not minimising the risk posed to civilian hostages.
And from these events that the close quarter battle techniques, which I'm going to talk about today, developed and were disseminated,
but for approximately 30 years, from 1970 to, say, mid seventies right through to the early decades,
the early years of last decade, the early years of the 2000,
effectively CCP techniques, these micro practices of entering buildings and eliminating that is killing that to be honest,
killing of terrorists or subsequent insurgents became and remained the preserve of
covert special forces and was not disseminated out to conventional infantry soldiers.
Well, this began to change, especially in Iraq, and especially following the assault on Fallujah in November 2004,
when the US Marines found both that they had incurred more casualties than they needed to
because of incompetent urban tactics and in fact had caused many more civilian casualties than
they needed to by the use of old traditional Stalingrad esque tactics in an environment in
which there were still many civilians in the in the buildings that they were seeking to clear.
This was further affirmed in Afghanistan, where,
although most of the fighting is taking place in these curious kind of rural and urban environments through and in compounds, villages,
this requirement to execute precision close quarter battle techniques in which potentially armed insurgents had to be engaged and shot,
but at the same time, civilians had to be protected. This became even more essential in Afghanistan.
So what we see is the development of see keep tactics, close quarters,
battle tactics in the end to preserve a special force from 1970s disseminating out to the conventional forces in the last 10 to 15 years.
Now, quick word or method sinkings represents a very significant problem in terms of sociological method,
but it's very difficult to see to observe these techniques in practice.
It is some academics have embedded in forces, in combat forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But CTP represents an additional problem, even those who are embedded.
And if you look at journalism, but some of you've done very good work.
I mean, I think you're being west or or have you not in many cases, even though they embedded in particular units,
they did not witness the actions that they subsequently described.
They were not present or in a different part of the field of battle.
So they don't see the action that they subsequently described.
Combat is confusing, it's dispersed, it's difficult. And therefore, even those academics who have been embedded and some of them done excellent work.
In many cases, they've relied on the old technique of post action review.
Certainly I've never met it, so I have relied on that post action review.
We might say, Well, could we get around this problem of not being physically witness?
And let me just say, of course we seek you be. The action happens inside houses.
So it's very difficult only to sort of lead troops in each squad, actually see what occurs in each room.
So it's very difficult to see be accentuates and multiplies the problem of participant observation.
In terms of sociological research. So then the question is joint, can we use video footage?
Ronald Collins I think it's very intriguingly suggested the emergence of video footage of helmet cameras,
of GoPro cameras has been has may be of huge benefit to micro sociology.
Certainly the micro sociologists of crowd bonds have used it very impressively on video footage.
The problem is here is that I've done a brief survey of YouTube and various other sites.
The footage is actually on the Web is again, not that that significant.
It's not of troops entering rooms. It's a firefight for the distance.
The context in which these fights occur is never specified.
So they're very dangerous to use them in terms of empirically to look at issues so that they present problems.
So how do I get around this problem? Well, since you're focussed on training,
I got to focus on training in order to try and understand the techniques of post quarterback or the micro
tactics of urban clearance clearing in order to get a sense and understanding of these methods and techniques.
And these are some of the sites I did work out. I basically spent a week at most myself.
This is the US Marine massive range to 2020 on farms out in California.
This is down to Pendleton, their information centre.
This is the Canadian Urban Training Centre. This is one of the British urban training centres in Norfolk.
Again, Norfolk spent significant amounts of millions constructing compounds that we weren't fighting in of 2014.
But that's a different that if we question Hamburg in Germany,
this is a beautiful old 18th century village where the German troops still train
component and then the the premier French training site in Piccadilly perform soon.
And this training actually I'm pretty confident is the training here the finger trained on before Operation Michael in March 1982.
We've been training our in the German lines. We're just in front of this training area.
But this is Soul Soup, which is a very elaborate training area.
Now, the key so I spent significant effort on all those institutions.
This was this sort of unprepossessing shed was where I did the principal research.
This is the Royal Marine Command, a training centre down Lympstone in Devon.
And this is urban. This the compound is like where they do urban training.
It has huge advantages in this country, I've got to say, from the gantry over which you can stand it stand on,
which is not overlooking the training and indeed the directing staff stand on the country
and direct and criticise the squads as they go through run through their exercises.
So it presents not an optimal,
but certainly seems to me to be a highly instructive way of seeing contemporary urban combat and certainly the doctrine of urban combat.
Now, this still is not the front line, although the techniques are used on the front line.
So in order to bridge that gap,
what I tried to do in the research is to use a series of interviews with directing staff and with candidates who served in Iraq and Afghanistan,
in many cases have been involved in in actual urban fights to to fuse the discussion
and the description analysis of training with actual operational realities.
And that's also been supported by some memoirs which actually are quite useful.
So that's the data that I'm going to talk to today.
What is the problem with urban combat? Well, let me get through this.
Combat in the rural area is, although terrifying and difficult, is essentially simple.
It involves effectively small groups. And I'm going to actually talk to no higher group in the sectional squad.
I have about ten soldiers in the case of a sexual squad in rural operations, it's essentially a task to clear a trench or to trench.
They've got two objectives and they manoeuvre with fire.
So they move and fire in order to cover each other, to clear those those trenches.
Throughout those processes, they are able to maintain their attack formation, that combat formation.
In other words, in rural environment, infantry tactics, although an execution is liable to breakdown and collapse, is essentially simple.
It's one or two threats executed in established combat attack formation, and therefore the fundamentals of it are simple in the urban environment.
All of those simplicities are eliminated. Two critical things occur in the urban environment.
This is another image of soldiers who and this is a disastrous attack, a trainee attack executed by a French company that went horribly wrong,
indicating that one might say what occurs once troops get into buildings.
Two things happen. First of all, destruction of building breaks are also formations and introduces a turbulence of the roads that people don't.
Because as you move down a corridor, you might move down in original combat formation, but people have to go off inside groups to clear SGT.
And so by bit by almost immediately on entering the building, the actual order of who's who's where,
the spark in an order of a squad as they enter has changed around.
And the the the, the initial combat from the initial formation has been utterly reformed and will be continuing reformed throughout the building.
The second point is this the number of threats is multiplied by a very significant number instead of simply one enemy trench or two.
And in trenches, there are multiple threats as one moves down, as troops move down a corridor, an urban environment.
There are multiple threats in front of doors, left and right, stairwells,
holes in the ground, potentially IEDs, civilians, insurgents, suicide bombers.
The the moment there's a multiplication of threats and therefore, urban combat.
And this is where close quarters battle has been developed.
Urban combat requires a very specific and.
Not totally novel, but a skill so accentuated and magnified in the urban environment.
It might as well be a novel skill. Soldiers in the urban environment on entering buildings when seeking to clear buildings,
need to identify the risks that they face, and they need to identify the risks or threats the face on each room that they enter.
They need to prioritise those threats. Which ones are the most dangerous?
In other words, which threat is likely to kill them or their fellow soldiers most quickly?
And they need to assign team members to the neutralisation of each of those threats.
Sometimes threats are things like furniture that might conceal weaponry, quite benign threats.
But sometimes, of course, obviously rooms will contain insurgents,
sometimes barricaded into into the rooms or in Fallujah, not only barricaded into rooms,
but also high on various forms of drugs, which may make the maid actually stopping them for fighting a very,
very difficult fight and very violent, very serious wounds.
So you get three problems. Identification of threat.
Prioritisation of threat and identification, assignment of the Neutralisation threat, the team members and military militaries, western militaries.
They have a have words for understanding this problem in descriptions they call.
They call it the requirement to break things down. Break things down is the ethnographic word they use to mean the identification.
Multiple, multiple risk prioritisation and assignment.
Now, how does this this this this neutralisation of multiple threats work in practice?
Well, what if it actually used to happen in urban combat?
At the squad level, this is right through from Stalingrad,
right up into the into the Iraq assault in 2003 and into Fallujah in 2004 is effectively the lowest level infiltration entry building
that threw a grenade into any room they thought there was someone in and they would charge into that room firing machine gun,
machine gun or automatic rifle fire into that group room as this as this is evidence of.
Now, this this is pretty plausible, especially not very well trained soldiers, a pretty plausible technique.
It certainly is a technique that one can think has certain beneficial moral effects of throwing grenades and firing weapons at large numbers.
There are problems, obviously,
to the problem of collateral damage which and killing of civilians of instances which has actually happened when these techniques are used.
But more surprisingly, is that the spraying of machine gun fire is not a very effective way of clearing a room.
I give you the example of that. You would delay it. You're actually going to stall in on an action, a house clearance in Fallujah, November 2004.
Before the first time you went into that house, you go into the first room and he was armed with a, well, minimal machine gun.
Was a belt fed handheld machine, a kind of launching gun.
The belt has 500 rounds on it and his belt was full.
He went into this room in which there was insurgent insurgents barricaded behind a sandbag.
And he pressed the trigger on this machine gun.
And the military the military people here will confirm pressing the trigger on a machine gun and let it fall right through the hole.
Belt is called going cyclical. He went slightly for five, 500 rounds into this room.
He didn't hit anybody. He subsequently killed all the insurgents building when they went upstairs and killed nobody.
So that the use of the spray technique is is not only extremely dangerous and undesirable in a mixed environment,
whether civilians, insurgents, but actually is highly ineffective.
And one of the key elements of CQ being as it was developed in the 1970s, as it's disseminated out to regular forces from 2004 in particular,
has been the emphasis on precision shooting within the urban environment,
within buildings as you enter and clear them and enormous amounts of time spent and this is one of them
is that this is real Marines training down on death and actually on a day pretty much like today,
two years ago, and they spent enormous amounts of time engaged in precision shooting at extremely close range,
their 50 metre mark here, they never far from moving 25 metres away.
They practice firing accurately from 25 metres down with rifles and here with pistols transitioning to pistols,
his Canadians doing exactly the same thing.
Now, one of the curious things about about contemporary shooting is that, you know, we might think, oh, shootings, a manual.
You know, we pull triggers with our fingers and we hold weapons in the hand.
And therefore, it's all about what you do with your arms and hands and arms.
And they're not irrelevant in any way. But in fact, one of the key things that occurs in TV courses is training foot placement.
But foot placement becomes absolutely critical in the ability to perform precisely both because stable foot provides,
you know, sound basis for rocket fire. But also the techniques that are used are in terms of foot placement, do two things.
One, and this is a pivot. The interest rates, this is a major pivoting is to the two things that are required.
In the beginning, combat formations become very, very concertina because they're working in small rooms and corridors and therefore,
foot placement is critical in terms of make sure people don't shoot each other.
And these methods of pivoting are designed to stop people, pull it, putting a barrel against someone else's back and shoot them in the back.
They they keep a barrel out of the way.
There's more critical importance to the foot placement and the emphasis that is placed on foot placement throughout the throughout curve urban combat.
Let me say this is work to make it work is highly likely not to work.
This is just just watch. This is a video of the same Marines training down stop range.
I just run through once more. Now, the interesting thing, although it is interesting, that is what the soldiers do.
You'll note after they follow the weapon, they do this really odd thing.
They got this an ice sheet. When I was watching the train, I couldn't find what was going on.
I could understand what on earth they would do, why they would use with bulb every time off they thought.
Well, this became apparent once they moved from the live firing on the range to tactical collective movements in the combat.
Come on to this. And second.
One of the crazy things in the urban environment, which is central to CTP and essential to precision fire, is the use of angles and arcs.
Effectively, all buildings consist simply of a series of angles that consist of a series of corners, two opposing corners.
And these and in theory, building the it is the factory, the force,
the troops would use the angles the most effectively that would be most successful one.
And let's just think about what corners and two opposing angles doing the things
they offer you cover so that they can protect you from the fire of your enemy.
But of course, they're also extremely dangerous because if you move around a corner, you expose yourself to fire and you can't see.
So the moment to move around a corner is the most dangerous element in urban combat and warfare training in foot placement,
in the sensitisation foot place, which goes on in these urban training courses, both in America, in Canada, in France and in Britain.
What they seek to do is to sensitise the soldier to the importance of blowing themselves off with corners
in order to maximise the chances or maximise their bodies to see around the corner while under cover.
And the rocking movement is a rock, and we can imitate the eye soldiers line, a torch line that puts up with a corner.
They're trying to look round and they walk around with their weapon showing.
In other words, they try and maximise the cover, but also maximise the arm at which they can engage targets.
And so since the entire you could say, and indeed I've heard directly staff say this,
the entire principle of internal room flares is all about arcs and Engels pathology with tactics.
And so it's all about angles.
If you look at the back of a Baghdad assault in which an Osama bin Laden was assassinated, note where all the firing took place,
all the all the six individuals who were killed in that assault were killed on all angles
that the Special Forces troops hit behind angles and fired at the targets from angles.
And Osama bin Laden was killed as he crossed his room.
So we looked at his bedroom and the Special Forces soldier stood on the stairwell in cover and shot him from that.
From that point,
if you look at the it looked look at that whole assault all shot for the shots were all made from these from these using arcs and angles.
And we can see regular troops doing the doing the same thing you look.
But I think just very quickly about China, I'm going to go into collective fuels so that we stop one.
CTV recall position for it is an acquired skill.
Therefore, the form of training has changed in the past, and I'm sure those who had some military training remedies,
bad shooting, inaccurate shooting was seen as moral failing to be improved by physical exercise.
Normally push ups or running up hills or through mud or some unpleasant form of activity.
What you find in the temporary post-war battle training is a professionalisation of the pedagogy of shooting
and is an emphasis on the acquisition of a skill and therefore a careful and progressive training.
Now, I'm not going to talk more about that.
One of the interesting dimensions of this training is that it has begun not only to emphasise the physical dimension
of military performance and the attempt to inculcate muscle memory into the body of the contemporary soldier.
But actually there is a systematic attempt to colonise the mind, the psyche, the emotional states of contemporary urban soldiers,
and all the CPB courses which currently run within American, North America and Western Europe,
have a dimension of psychological training and psychological preparation.
And one of the one of the interesting ones here, I mean, they're all interesting.
But the Canadian Army developed this technique of resilience where they teach all their soldiers these mental techniques for calming themselves,
for steadying themselves in combat, actually, every kind of divine derived deliberately and explicitly from sports science,
that there are various things that mental visualisation and arousal reductions,
breathing through deep breathing to breathe deeply, to stop yourself being being scared and shaking.
But within this program, the Canadians are given they give this video to every single soldier they tried to collective video,
and they have quite detailed discussion of the human, the development, the evolutionary development of human mind.
And then eventually what they're trying to argue is that art would probably say this absolute nonsense.
It's not my nonsense is all it is. Is that the human mind?
The most fundamental part is a sort of all the amygdala,
which is the sort of armed thing right in the centre of our brain where our flight and fight response is our most fundamental biological responses,
all apparently contained in this amygdala.
And that's where those fundamental responses occur.
And eventually, what they're taught to try to do is to control those basic instincts which have
been lodged in the amygdala by the use of frontal frontal lobes and the cortex,
and they use visualisation, breathing in order to do so.
This psychology might be nonsense, and it may indeed, and it seems to have some individual effect.
But let us note the collective effect. The collective effect is that the internal workings of a soldier's mind, their emotional state,
their attitudinal state, becomes the possession of the squad and the platoon of which they are part.
That actually the psychological training publicises the most personal and
emotional elements of a soldier and makes it accountable to his colleagues in the
urban environment with an explicit purpose of enforcing and encouraging good
soldierly performance in this highly complicated and difficult urban environment.
And just a problem here. One of the worries about the Canadians is the resilience.
Development was partly a way of overcoming the problem of post-traumatic stress disorder and the risks thereof and various Canadian soldiers that are.
The problem is with this training. Once someone's had it, if they then collapse.
They are morally responsible for themselves. They have not properly internalised these psychological techniques.
And that seems to me very interesting evidence that although perhaps in our own Ridgway unacknowledged way,
the armed forces are actually aware of what this psychological processing is trying to do.
It is publicised and it is mainly accountable. Even your internal state as a close quarter battle operative,
one section of the talk and then imperative section talk and then all come to a conclusion on.
We talked about individual techniques of shooting foot put position.
But of course, soldiers don't work alone in the urban environment.
They work in what is called stacks. This is that it's not a technical term.
It's just a row of people who are going to enter a building and enter a room together as a team.
Stacked normally consist of between three and eight people.
Ideal number normally about four. And that on the stack operates as a as it is a team.
And indeed the ideal in close quarters battle is that the staff will operate as effectively
to slightly manipulate the language as a single weapon system that there are for people,
for rifles. There is a kind of hedgehog which operates completely in a coordinated manner.
So the question is how do you get a team of four a stack to work together in the urban environment in order to identify.
Prioritise and neutralise the multiple threats they face.
Well, the key method is drills. Why drills?
Because in combat environment and especially in urban combat environment, teams do not have time to discuss and coordinate their actions,
deliberate upon their actions as they encounter as they go into buildings.
In terms of encounter ended their responses, their collective responses must already be effectively internalised.
There must be a set of algorithms that are effectively that they respond to the team on command of particular individuals within the team.
And the stacks are taught a series of drills which are intended to maximise
their chance of success and minimise the casualties within the urban event.
This is an image of this. This is actually on the gantry in the compound, looking down on a stack as it goes into practice room clearance.
And one of the key techniques of of rampage, of course, is getting into the room in order to clear a room, you probably go to get into it.
And normally you've got to get into it through the door. I mean, in the past, people said, oh, we blow a hole in the wall.
But what the American Marines, the US Marines noticed in Fallujah is that you're clearing thousands of buildings.
They haven't got that many charges to blow holes. So a certain point troops just had to go through the door.
There was no other way into rooms. The idea of blowing holes and surprise you going to be did not exist.
You had to go through the room, through the door, into the room.
So the question was then the question is how do you minimise the risk to yourself and the established technique?
And you'll see this right across Western forces. It's a certain five step entry that the team will stack up and they will clear in five stages
areas into the into the room until they're stood in what is called the dominant position.
All four of them are lined on the back wall,
pointing their weapons and covering the entire area and potentially shooting engaging targets if they need to.
And this is what step entry looks like. So the first two individuals go in and slightly counter-intuitively, they don't go straight into the room.
They actually go sideways and clear the corners first.
Because, of course, you walk into the room, the chances are most likely for insurgent hides in the corner.
He shoots you from behind if she shoots you from behind. So the first two people actually split and go sideways.
The third person comes in from the middle,
fourth person comes in and they form what's called a on the initial baseline on the in the dominant position, all covering the entire room there.
And I have examples of troops actually doing this in, in, in the operating environment in, in Afghanistan.
And the key point here is to stay away from the door. The door is to try to funnel.
Why is it dangerous? Two reasons.
One, anyone defending a room, if someone is going to burst in this room and we were all armed and feeling fairly aggressive,
we were, of course, pointing the weapon at that door and wait till it came in 24.
So the door is always the most dangerous point.
The other thing is that you walk through a door, you silhouetted always you're silhouetted by the light behind.
So it's a very dangerous area. So the troops are taught to clear away from the door and stand away from this fatal funnel.
We can talk about this in questions. The drills get more complicated as the rooms get more complicated.
And what's interesting watching people training is that the five step injuries really I mean, we could we could do faster entry.
We could do for 10 minutes, and we wouldn't be able to do it really easily if we wanted to.
Not that we wanted, but we could do it.
But it's the rules get more complicated with different rooms and alcoves, doors, open cupboards, various things.
The drills get more complicated and they get more numerous.
And essentially, what an effective CQ be infantry squad does is to develop a kind of algorithm of algorithm,
encyclopaedia of drills, which are called upon in the light of the immediate situation which they confront.
And they'll have drills for left hand corners, right hand corners to shake corners,
L-shaped rooms, square rooms, oblong rooms, rooms with multiple threats in.
And if one of the drills for this is this back to back drills so that what a well-trained
CVB team develops and so is this cyclic repertoire of 12 drills cued on command.
Very fine point, and then I'll go to the conclusion.
One of the problems, even if and notwithstanding the inculcation of a set of collective drills for all manner of possible threat,
all manner of possible building, of shape, of room, of size, of room, etc.
There's still the still significant difficulties in seeking B.
First of all, even if it's a standard drill that has to be executed, someone has to call it someone has to command.
Right. For step entry. Go in. We got. You get examples of of command structures such as that.
So someone has to call that command. Secondly, sometimes drills have to be adapted because the environment is totally unique.
There's a strange, you know, a form of rogue or a form of threat that has not been encountered before.
But even if it's quite simple, drill, someone's got to call it.
And here's the problem that goes back to round turbulence in traditional infantry tactics.
If you go a section, the corporal or the fire team leader calls the manoeuvre.
But of course, in the urban environment, nobody knows who's going to be in the command position.
Is Stack the command position in the British and US stock is a two man he commands and is a he.
In those examples he commands the drill and it could be anyone.
So what you find with sheet B teams is not just adequate for people to have various bits of, you know, do archipelagos, especially for them.
Everybody needs to be in possession of the encyclopaedia and to be able to enact every single form of action in every every point in the stack.
And what it suggest is the emergence of this I to initiative based tactics.
What it what it pressurised what it sort of engendered is a intensification of this specialised sort of dissemination intensification of
the specialised knowledge across the entire assaulting everybody in the assault team needs to be up to a very significant level of skill.
One point this goes back to the moving point. Why do seeking B operators all try and fulfil the same movement template?
Because the movement of the body cues reactions from the rest of the squad.
And if individuals begin to develop their own individual brilliant samurai techniques, people won't know what to do in following them.
So it's very important that everybody works on this, you know, works their body on the same template and takes the same,
the same very odd body shape that you see with CGP trained soldiers so that as they go into a room, the second,
third and fourth man can just read what they need to do from the body shape that the individual adopts.
For the point, this is my absolute conclusion that the developed could keep tactics.
Its dissemination out to regular troops in nature in Western countries seems to represent a
professionalisation of the armed forces in the manner that Huntington would describe it,
notwithstanding the fact that he didn't think professionalisation was relevant for tactical level
operatives and the soldiers themselves think that there has been an improvement of technique.
And Marines I've spoken to compare the performance of Marine commandos for now for Peninsula when they arrived Iraq in 2003,
in which there were numerous self-inflicted cock ups and indeed very serious injuries inflicted by force urban tactics at that particular point,
with the contemporary Royal Marine trained in urban combat, does this mean we're talking about mere professionalised amelioration of progress?
Hmm. Foreign point. It is very useful to remember Max Weber's point about professionalisation.
It is not just about skill. It is not just about the development of new forms of expertise.
It is about monopolisation. Professionals are critical status groups that,
to paraphrase labour monopolise ideal and material opportunities and indeed the
skills they profess to have are a key way of monopolising those opportunities.
Now, what it's suggested to CTV certainly seems to be a development of skill at some level.
But it is is it an optimal development? Well, it's hugely costly in terms of the investment of training resources.
And we have no idea whether that that investment is sensible into in and of itself.
We have no idea whether it's optimal in terms of the output that you get.
It is predicated on the belief that militaries will be fighting in urban areas in the future,
despite the increase in road noise, the human population living in urban areas.
There is no in anyway no definite, definite deduction to be drawn that the next campaign will be in an urban environment.
The Canadians worried about fighting off in the Arctic. There's not that many cities out there.
So with the development and the investment in CTP minimally have to say it's under development.
And then we come to the question, well, if it's undetermined by the strategic and operational environment,
why have Western forces been so attracted to it?
Why is it got such an allure? And here I just this that CPB tactics haven't moved because they've been the preserve of special forces.
They are high status tactics.
And therefore, Western conventional forces have been when they had very keen to embrace these kind of tactics, not ironically,
primarily to defend themselves against strategic threats to future bombs, to defend themselves against financial budget shootouts.
Now, thanks very much.