We began with critical incident studies of recent urban operations including the Tet offensive in Hue City, Vietnam 1968; the US experience in Mogadishu on October 3rd, 1993 during the Somalian Civil War; the battles for Grozny and Chechnya in 1995 and 1996; and the 2002 Israeli operation in Jenin, West Bank. This provided us a broad corpus of cases spanning decades which depicts the nature of battle on urban terrain and the typical responses by Western forces to engage in these battles.

To complement these case studies we participated in debriefings of units returning from urban operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as observation of U.S. Military training exercises. What's interesting about many of these cases is the extent to which the under-powered, under-manned, and under-coordinated forces won decisive victories over vastly overpowering adversaries. These crushing defeats are a testament to the fact that the urban environment offers numerous surprises and characteristics that give tremendous advantage to those who know the terrain well enough to exploit it.