In doctrine, dogma dies hard:
Nowhere is this more evident than in NATO’s enduring obsession with the offense, particularly in the terrain of the urban environment. Despite being a fundamentally defensive alliance, most NATO exercises, training courses, and operational plans focus on seizing ground, breaching defenses, and clearing strongpoints. The result is a dangerous conceptual imbalance: armies that are prepared to attack in cities but not to defend them. In reality, they will likely have to do the latter before they ever do the former.
This is not an abstract concern. If conflict erupts in NATO’s sphere of interest, the first units to make contact will almost certainly be defending, not attacking. An adversary is likely to have the important first-mover advantage, seizing the initiative by making the opening moves. Initial objectives in such conflicts will undoubtedly include those large urban areas that straddle the main transportation infrastructure leading farther toward the adversary’s objectives. Potential adversaries know this in advance. They will plan to mass fires, integrate uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) with thermobaric payloads, and conduct urban shaping operations before launching a combined arms assault. They will not wait for NATO to organize a counterattack. War will come to the defenders.
Why, then, are NATO militaries still preparing to assault someone else’s trenches instead of holding their own?
The roots of this imbalance lie in what can only be described as a cult of the urban offense. It is baked into NATO doctrine, into training centers, and into the very language of tactical education. Urban warfare is taught almost exclusively through the narrow lens of clearing buildings, breaching doors, assaulting intersections, and suppressing enemy strongpoints. The imagery is kinetic, aggressive, and built around a World War II model of urban combat that focuses almost entirely on the tactical level.
Most of that sounds more like Delta Force’s hostage-rescue tactics trickling down through the Rangers to Big Army.
That model is outdated. NATO instructors still teach tactics developed to defeat Axis defenders in fortified cities. But modern adversaries are not relying on bunkers and machine gun nests. They are using thermobaric weapons, precision-guided bombs, loitering munitions, tandem-charge rocket-propelled grenades, and multispectral UAV reconnaissance. A shoulder-fired rocket that once might have created a breach in a wall now flattens a room, an entire floor, or even a whole building. In Ukraine, even basic UAVs are delivering thermobaric payloads through second-story windows.
Yet our tactics have not caught up. NATO battalions in the Baltics still train to assault trench lines. But whose trenches? If Russia crosses the border, NATO’s first mission is to hold ground, not to seize it. We are preparing to storm positions that we should already be occupying.
The problem runs deeper than doctrine. The way we train shapes the way we think. When soldiers spend months rehearsing assaults but never practice layered defense or mobile delay operations, they internalize a false belief that success only comes from attacking. Urban exercises often end at the point of entry (the break-in), not with the enemy’s inevitable counterattack. There is little emphasis on hasty defense after seizure, even though many major urban battles such as Stalingrad, Ortona, Aachen, Grozny, Fallujah, Mosul, Marawi, and Sieverodonetsk required forces to shift from offense to defense, sometimes repeatedly.
Urban training environments make this worse. Most NATO sites are sterile and overly simplified. They consist of a few one- or two-story buildings arranged in a grid, with no interior clutter, no civilian presence, no collateral damage, and no realistic fire effects. These facilities are useful for rehearsing movement drills but do not prepare troops to survive real contact. No NATO unit trains under thermobaric blasts crashing through upper floors or autocannon fire ripping through multiple walls. No site simulates the violence of joint fires in dense terrain or the intensity of enemy shaping operations that strike everything around a defensive position.
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This failure to replicate real-world conditions reinforces outdated thinking. If soldiers only train in sanitized environments, they will not learn how quickly a position can be located, targeted, and destroyed. If they never experience fire effects such as rounds passing through concrete, they will not understand the limits of cover or the importance of dispersion, concealment, and movement.
The lack of depth also prevents defenders from practicing fallback routes, alternate positions, and layered deception. Units become conditioned to static defense. And yet, many NATO militaries still express confidence in their ability to conduct urban operations at scale.
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First, defending forces must limit the attacker’s options. One of the defender’s most pressing challenges in urban terrain is poor situational awareness in the surrounding environment. Line of sight is limited, and urban clutter obscures movement and intent. While this affects both sides, attackers often retain the initiative and usually enjoy better intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance coverage from the outset. This gives them more options for break-in points than most defenders can realistically cover.
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Second, dispersion within the local urban environment must be maximized. NATO forces must abandon the one building, one squad mentality. Instead, available construction and fortification materials should be used to reinforce a distributed network of mutually supporting buildings. This creates layered strongpoints that can deliver interlocking fields of fire, absorb attrition in stages, and delay the enemy’s tempo.
Defenders should prepare loopholes for overlapping fires, establish mouseholes for concealed movement and fallback, and construct alternate positions that are ready for rapid displacement. These routes should be obscured from overhead observation to reduce vulnerability to UAV detection and indirect fire. Camouflage and concealment remain essential. Avoiding enemy intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance entirely is all but impossible, so survivability depends on signature reduction so fighting positions are not targetable or worth the attacker’s munition.
