Small Armies, Big Cities

Rethinking Urban Warfare

By Louise A. Tumchewics and Reviewed by Nicholas E. Sarantakes

Article published on: July 1, 2025 in the Summer 2025 Edition of Army History

Read Time: < 5 mins

Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022, Pp. vi, 329. $98.50

This anthology provides a serious examination of how small armies engage in urban combat. The authors of the articles in this collection are a mix of academics and military professionals, mainly from the United Kingdom, but with an Australian, a Canadian, and a few Americans thrown in for good measure.

As in many books of this nature, the quality of contributions varies significantly. In a collective sense, they are quite impressive. Louise A. Tumchewics, in the introduction, makes a good case for why urban warfare deserves more attention. Cities are likely to be the battlefields where small, professional armies will fight in the not-so-distant future. Massive urban fights on the scale of World War II’s Battle of Stalingrad, for example, are unlikely.

Tumchewics did impressive editorial work in the production of this volume. She set up chapters with contrasting arguments and used chapter titles that stress elements and themes like civil-military relations, mass, maneuver, and influence operations. With that said, most chapters ultimately are case studies of particular engagements. Wendy Pullan, a professor of architecture, explains in her contribution that battles can change what makes certain cities valuable. In one of the few non-case-study chapters, Paul Latawski offers a 2,000-year survey of urban warfare. He argues that the same tactical and strategic issues keep popping up century after century. Alex Neads and Patrick Finnegan, with separate chapters on Ukraine and Ireland, document how certain locations can take on political significance. Tumchewics and Matthew S. Wiseman offer engaging case studies that support their thematic titles well. However, the chapters on influence operations and drones seem out of place. Tyrone L. Groh contends that cities are not neutral terrain; surrogates—or “allies”—are the human terrain that turn the geographic toward one belligerent or another. This argument is provocative. John W. Spencer offers an interesting account of operations in Iraq’s Sadr City and the use of walls to bring the fighting to an end, which has something to do with using the word “siege” in the title of the chapter, but not much.

Lt. Gen. Sir Andrew Graham offers a stimulating conclusion, drawing upon many of the chapters as well as his long military career. Graham agrees with many of the chapters, which argue that winning in an urban environment takes more instruments of power other than the military, but he bluntly states that urban battles ultimately require the use of force, and tactical competence is a strong factor in the final outcome.

Despite the high quality of this book, the authors’ arguments are rather conventional: urban warfare is a slow form of warfare; it is costly; it favors the defenders; and combined arms are crucial. Maybe, maybe not. The fact of the matter is that time is a relative consideration. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople took six weeks, and the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, lasted two months. Those might seem like lengthy battles, but compared to the siege of Leningrad, which took over two years, they were speedy affairs. At the Battle of Manila, roughly 1,000 U.S. soldiers were killed, which is nothing compared to the losses of the Soviets at Stalingrad. Terrain, like weather, is neutral. It seems that what really matters is how prepared a fighting force is for facing these conditions. Helping militaries get ready for these types of engagements is the main purpose of this anthology. Doctrine, tactics, and training need to be developed long before the start of the actual fighting and in this regard, this book is an excellent place to start that process.