Historia

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The Battle of Grozny: Deadly Classroom for Urban Combat
by Mr. Timothy L. ThomasForeign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS.
This article first appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of
Parameters, pp. 87-102.



Best policy in war-thwart the enemy's strategy,
second best-disrupt his alliances through diplomacy,
third best-attack his army in the field,
worst strategy-attack walled cities.
- Sun Tsu, Art of War.



The battle for Grozny, the capital of thesmall Russian Republic of Chechnya, took place in January 1995. It pitted a hastily assembled and unprepared Russian force against a Chechen force of regulars and guerrillas equipped with Russian weapons and a belief in their cause. The Chechens held their own for three weeks but eventually lost the city to the Russian armed forces in late January (the Chechens retook the city in August 1996).Both sides learned or relearned many lessons of urban combat, most of them the hard way.1 This article examines the most important of those lessons, the interesting and perhaps surprising conclusions drawn by the Russians about modern urban warfare, and their implications for US soldiers and urban warfare theory.

Background

The Russian Republic of Chechnya is located in the southeasternpart of Russia near the northwestern end of the Caspian Sea. Chechnya declared its independence from the Soviet Union in October 1991. This declaration by Chechen President Jokar Dudayev was not unexpected; the region's history is scored by episodes of intense Chechen-Russian battles that encouraged hatred toward Russia and a desire for independence. Further, Russia was in disarray at the time,with then Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin in confrontation with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev over the issue of sovereignty. Yeltsin encouraged Soviet republics (but not semi-autonomous ones like Chechnya) to "take all the sovereignty they could swallow." Dudayev interpreted Yeltsin's words to fit his situation.

Grozny had nearly 490,000 residents in 1994. It included manymultiple-story buildings and industrial installations and covered some 100 square miles. (By comparison, the Joint Readiness Training Center for urban combat in the United States covers less than a tenth of a square kilometer, offering but one indication of how urban training can differ from reality.) A Chechen opposition movement developed in 1993, finally attempting to overthrow President Dudayev inlate November 1994 through an armed attack. The attack was repulsed by Dudayev's forces. Russian complicity was at first denied by Moscow, but then acknowledged when Dudayev paraded several captured Russian soldiers before TV cameras.

The indignity and embarrassment over the exposure of Russian involvement caused Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin, in his third year in office afterousting Gorbachev, to order troops to start moving into Chechnya on 11 December. Planners had less than two weeks to move and position forces and supplies. By New Year's Eve, Russian forces had Grozny surrounded on three sides and entered the city from the north, moving headlong into hell.

The first unit to penetrate to the city center was the 1st battalion of the 131st "Maikop" Brigade, the lattercomposed of some 1,000 soldiers. By 3 January 1995, the brigade had lost nearly 800 men, 20 of 26 tanks, and 102 of 120 armored vehicles. For the next 20 days and nights Russian artillery rounds rained down on the city, sometimes at the rate of 4,000 an hour.2 Local residents left the city or took refuge in basements while the Russian armed forces fought Chechen "freedom fighters" or "bandits"...