Armenien vs. Aserbaidschan

[Quintus Fabius]

https://mwi.usma.edu/the-battle-of-shush...abakh-war/

Despite all the coverage, the lessons missed about the Nagorno-Karabakh War are the ones showing how urban warfare remains a key part of modern combat. The most important battle of the Nagorno-Karabakh War occurred in the city of Shusha. Once Shusha fell, Armenia surrendered and entered a lopsided agreement, ceding massive amounts of their previously held territories.

Nicht nur die immer weiter voran schreitende Urbanisierung weltweit, die immer größere Zahl von Megastädten und städtischen Komplexen sondern schlicht und einfach auch die militärische Notwendigkeit werden den Kampf immer mehr in Städte hinein verlagern. Auch der Krieg am Berg-Karrabach hat dies einmal mehr gezeigt, und dies in einem Gebiet das nun wirklich nicht urbanisiert ist.

The Urban Warfare Lessons

The lessons of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War have yet to be fully discovered. This analysis required translating multiple foreign reports and news stories, validating social media announcements and video posts, and piecing together an accurate picture from the partial and sometimes conflicting reports from the frontlines. Military analysts, international relations scholars, and other groups have begun to highlight the unique aspects of the war—from the dominance of a modernized Azerbaijani military equipped with the latest types of drone and fire support platforms to geopolitical practices of proxy warfare by Russia, Turkey, Iran, and others to the use of social media to influence multiple different groups in modern information warfare campaigns.

The war also highlights major urban warfare lessons that deserve attention. These lessons include the following:

Cities remain operational and strategic objectives in war. The capture of Shusha was a major strategic victory for Azerbaijan, and it ultimately decided the outcome of the war. Once Shusha fell, Armenia was forced to surrender out of fear that Azerbaijani forces would be able to target and possibly seize the territory’s capital, Stepanakert, just a handful of kilometers away. Cities have always been operational and strategic objectives in war. They are the centers of political and economic power for nations. They also start, grow, and expand along trade routes, key passes through ground that is otherwise challenging to maneuver through, or coastlines where ports connect global naval supply lines. In short, they are very often built on key terrain, and at the very least they offer control over important lines of communication. As cities grow in number, size, and complexity, some argue that military forces should simply avoid them and the unique challenges they pose. Shusha shows that this is simply not an option. They are unavoidable and militaries must prepare to operate in them to be effective in any war.

A full suite of modern, joint force capabilities is needed to seize and hold decisive urban terrain. Air superiority, bombing, long-range precision strikes, and unmanned aircraft systems are all enabling warfighting capabilities. It was not just the latest attack drones that won the Nagorno-Karabakh War. Urban warfare is also not solely an infantry fight. The decisive operation of the war, the physical capture of Shusha, required combined arms capabilities that leveraged special operations forces, fires, armor, engineers, and infantry in both the shaping and decisive operations. This was especially apparent by the use of fires, mobile protected firepower, and infantry units to clear urban terrain in building-to-building combat. Put simply, it required ground forces to seize and hold terrain and a host of other capabilities to enable it.

Militaries must prepare for both urban offense and defense operations. Both the 1992 and the 2020 battles for Shusha show that militaries must be capable of offensive operations to seize decisive terrain—especially cities—in military campaigns. Equally so, they show that any military that seizes terrain must also be able to defend it. In 2020, had the Azerbaijani forces that seized Shusha not been able to defend it from the determined Armenian counterattacks, their gains would have been lost. The defense of urban terrain may also buy time for a military waiting for another supporting country or the international community to come to their aid. Both battles for Shusha also show that when defending urban terrain, the defender must have layered defensive plans that include broad imagination and wargaming. Both Azerbaijani (1992) and Armenian (2020) forces left the cliffs surrounding the city unguarded assuming they were impassable.

As analysts and researchers study the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, they will continue to unearth valuable and wide-ranging lessons for the future of war. Whether the brief conflict signals a change in the character of warfare is perhaps not yet clear. But one thing in particular certainly is: the war shows that militaries must be prepared to fight for—and fight in—cities.