Two years ago, John Spencer wrote an article titled “A Soldier’s Urban Warfare Christmas Wish List” for the US Military Academy’s Modern War Institute. As the chair of urban warfare studies at MWI, he had spent a lot of time thinking about tasks soldiers would be required to perform in urban environments, but didn’t have the right equipment for. Here’s the list of the 10 items, but not the explanations. Visit the link for that.

1.) Industrial foam thrower

2.) Speaker drones

3.) Keys to a mining robot

4.) Rapid barrier emplacement wheels

5.) Grenade launcher–deployed curtains

6.) Tear gas

7.) Ballistic Shield

8.) Car battery recharging cable

9.) Disposable drone swarms

10.) A credit card and an amazon prime account

This year, he took another swing at it. While some of the items are still material in nature, they run the gamut of the DOTMLPF capabilities. He also upped the number to 12 capabilities.

I’ll share the list but not the discussion. Once again, for his reasoning, you should go read Spencer’s article.

1.) City watchers

2.) Warfare Watchers

3.) Google War

4.) Assistant company commander, platoon leader, and squad leader

5.) Body and vehicle cameras

6.) Remote, persistent, on-call mentor

7.) Tear gas

8.) Flamethrowers

9.) Winches on all vehicles

10.) Lightweight persistent smoke generator

11.) Dismounted remote firing stations

12.) Urban training battle effects

On Christmas Day, MWI released a podcast to discuss the list. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or TuneIn.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2020 at 10:30 and is filed under Profession of Arms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.