Ambush! This happened to me in Iraq,
ambush initiated by an RPG. You would not be standing
in the middle of the street shooting back. Hi, I'm John Spencer. I'm the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute. I spent over 25 years in the US Army, but I've been studying urban
warfare for over a decade. Today we're going to be
looking at urban warfare in movies and TV and
judge how real they are. Grenade! It's very accurate to be behind a wall and you pop out for a second
to throw a grenade like that. Where he's throwing the
grenade is a little off. Grenades have a timer in them, basically, so they don't
blow up in your hand. Once it hits the target.
It's not throw, explode. 100% air support is that
vulnerable in urban operations, and why usually you don't bring it in. It's low-flying, it's slow, it doesn't have much protection, and usually you drop soldiers
offset of the urban battle. In this situation, they didn't expect that level of resistance. Go. Crossing the street can
actually be one of the most vulnerable things of urban warfare because there's so many angles, so many windows, so many doorways which you can get shot. So we teach things like
throwing smoke out there so that people can't see
you and going one at a time and mixing up the speed
at which you're going. If I didn't know this battle,
the battle of Mogadishu, I would say that this is not realistic where you have hundreds of
people shooting at a small unit, but that's really what happened. And they got the soldiers pretty accurate, but there's been a lot of
criticism about this movie and the depiction of the
Somalis and kind of the context of what's going on in
Mogadishu at this time. Hey, Grimes, stay away from the wall. You OK? Yeah! That's actually an iconic
scene, when he says, "Stay off the wall." That was real advice
because once the bullets are hitting the walls, then
they travel down the wall kind of like a bowling alley, and it can hit if you're standing on that. I wouldn't say it happens in all, because every city is different. You have mud, cement, glass,
metal is a little different, but that's real. Let's go, Maddox. You see the bullet holes in the glass because back then we weren't as prepared for urban warfare as we are today, so those aren't bulletproof vehicles. A lot of the weapons
there aren't really ready for that environment
that they're moving into, but they also were surprised
by what they encountered. So I'd give it, like, a nine
from realism in urban warfare, not realism in the
portrayal of the population and things that are going on. Chris Hemsworth is more
like Jason Bourne there with his hand-to-hand. Close-quarters fighting is
very common in urban warfare. We actually tie the weapons to ourselves, so if we get caught in that situation and turn a corner or
somebody grabs our weapon they can't take it away from us, but not the tactics that
you're seeing in that scene. He's surrounded by
people with bigger guns, so he's trying to disarm one
while another one's there. Personally, I would have
tried to disarm one of them with one of those rifles and then get your back against something so you're not expecting
a bad guy 360 degrees and then incapacitate them in some way. I can't say I've found
myself in a similar situation or we teach that, but it could work. Absolutely slow the person
down, buy yourself some time. I'd say you'd want to turn
corners as much as possible, and especially in a building like that, just to confuse them
on which way you went. Out of everything out of that scene, that's probably the most realistic. The fact that he's hiding behind a column, that column is a supporting column, so it has steel-reinforced concrete. Where some walls, it can be
paper-thin, it can be plaster. If you don't have that, then you do get behind things like
furniture and other things, anything you can to try to get you cover. Yeah, it was a lot of fun to watch, but I'd give it about a
one or a two in realism. I actually love this clip, and I wish I could show
it to more soldiers to think about buildings differently. Especially if you're defending a house, you want to take the stairways away, you want to take the doors away, and absolutely throw furniture down. But the scene is really great
too because it shows you that that's not necessarily
what you stay behind to protect you from bullets, because bullets pass through wood, through cloth and everything. That's a great lesson
that clip teaches you that we teach our soldiers,
is to stay away from windows. You crouch down to go underneath them, kind of slowly walk your way around them. Bullets incoming probably
wouldn't be that dramatic, but like that, absolutely we tell you to stay away from windows. Yeah, that clip is really important to what people don't even think about even in the military, called mouse holing, putting holes in walls, in floors to move throughout without being seen. It's very common in major urban battles. Actually, I would love for
soldiers to carry an axe or something like that, but
there are other ways to do it. Sometimes we use
explosives, sledgehammers, axes like that to make that hole. Real tactics, real everything, so I'm going with a
nine on that, actually. I mean, this scene seems
very familiar to me because I had my own deployments
to Iraq and to Baghdad where we were doing raids like these where there's only a few terrorists in a population of millions. For the advantage of your
equipment, you can see at night, but also to reduce the
risk of being observed and the risk to civilians. The fact that their night-vision goggles were always on top of their
head is not realistic. You'd want to cut the power or
eliminate the light sources, so you want to use those
goggles to your advantage. Execute. It's very common and very smart to have a sniper with overwatch who has angles that the people moving
into the house can't see. It's a really good call for the sniper to be the one to execute the first shot, because you want to save your
surprise to the last moment, and a sniper usually
has a silenced weapon. This sniper in particular, he'd probably be wearing more equipment, and usually it's a sniper and a spotter, so there'd be other people with him. The way they enter this
house is a very common, almost too common, thing
that's portrayed in movies. It's called enter and clear a room. Throwing a grenade can
be the preferred tactic if it's known to be an enemy location and you know there's somebody
in there with a weapon. Of course you're going to enter it with something other than your face. So, the way they're stacked on the door is about getting in there quickly. It actually evolved from SWAT tactics. These tactics were actually developed to limit that amount of violence because there may be
civilians intermixed in there. The tactics you see Bradley
Cooper employing there is what I would teach. You want to get behind
something that's going to stop the bullets that people
are shooting at you but also be able to return
fire. We call that cover. The windows are great to get down behind, kneel behind, still shoot from. Unlike the enemy in that scene running out into the open areas, that's actually the opposite
of what actually happens. They're going to stay inside the rooms, make you come in there. You're going to get off
the streets and the alleys. Butcher's on the move. Repeat. Butcher's on the
move. I'm in pursuit. When he goes off by himself and chases, that's not realistic. We don't move by ourselves anywhere. It's almost like a cardinal rule. So it would be another team
person right there with him and communicating to each other using some type of radio or something. If he says, "Moving," then somebody else would follow him out there. I'd give it a rating of around an eight. Ambush! This happened to me in Iraq,
ambush initiated by an RPG. Ambushes are very, very
common in urban warfare. It's meant to surprise the people, entrap them in a funnel like that. Although the bad guys don't usually just stand on top of the roof. You would not be standing
in the middle of the street shooting back. You wouldn't last long. We'd seek cover, use those
armored vehicles, which is great. Ideally, though, in the whole situation, it's called a "kill zone" of the ambush. You want to get out of it. That concept of having a, we call it a quick reaction
force, a backup team. Because you've been surprised, somebody needs to come to help you, and we usually keep forces
in their uniform ready to go in an urban setting like this to be that quick reaction
force to come to that aid. Let's go. Let's go! They ram the vehicle,
which is very common. Trying to lock them in that kill zone so everybody can shoot at you. So, I'm actually going to
give it a higher rating than I want to because
the ambush is so real outside of the tactics, so I'll give it a, let's give it a four. The drones are probably
the most ubiquitous change to urban warfare that's
happened in decades. As I go into Ukraine to
research urban warfare right now on the major battles, there's thousands and
thousands of drones being used. It reduces some of the
challenges of urban warfare if I can put a drone
in front of the soldier to see around that corner,
to see over that building. The aspect of X-ray vision,
we're not there yet, because we still can't
see through concrete. Especially not much can see through steel. It gave me a lot of feelings
of real stuff that's happened. Especially the use of the dump truck reminds me of the Beirut bombings where a dump truck was brought
to the front of the base, like in that scenario, but then exploded. This is why urban warfare is so hard. Dump truck could be a threat. Although that's probably unlikely that you're going to use
your vibranium shield to throw it up in the air,
but what it signifies for me is what we call a three-block war, where, when you're
fighting in urban terrain, you are actually very concerned about the civilian population
and protecting people at the same time as you're fighting, and there's restrictions on
what you can or can't do. So, no, that's a very plausible scenario that any soldier who has values is trying to protect
the civilian population while still trying to do it, the mission. So if the rating has to be for realism, I'll give it around a six. Eight to 10 Tangos, front gate. Left! By the trees. A couple little things in there. There are nice touches of
adding realism to the situation, like the red dot that
you see on your scopes on the modern weapons that
will kind of help you aim to the green hue that
you see on their eyeballs coming off the night-vision goggles. So, when you see some version
of night-vision goggles, kind of martian type of look. When you look around,
everybody's got green eyes. Get to the top of this building. Let's go. Blocked by buildings.
We got no vantage point. This roost is a bust. In this scene, they enter
a really strong building like that. It's a great idea. The strategy was called strongpoints, or a building that is really strong, it has lines of sight or directions you can fire
from in multiple directions, and in war it's happened
where a single building has been held for months just because it was the right strongpoint. He says it's a bust because
depending on what type, the direction, the building,
and where the enemy is, they got up there, thought
they'd have good vantage point, but they couldn't see
anything, so it was a bust. Take on your right. What we usually see in
urban warfare movies is everybody trying to get to the roof because it kind of is common
sense that I can shoot down, I can see people farther out, but depending on the context, you don't want to be
anywhere near the roof because you can also be seen from the air, from drones, from mortars, you can be hit. It's based on a real situation
that happened in 2012 at Benghazi where they're
attacking the embassy compound. That's a good idea to get up there so you can see where they're coming from and to take better
shots and not waste ammo from the rooftop for sure. I'd give that a pretty
high rating in realism, about a seven, eight, just based on the type
of weapons, the tactics, the chaos, the building
construction. It's pretty real. I think this is an important scene because one of the biggest
myths that TV and movies show about urban warfare is
that it's just infantry or soldiers shooting their weapons. Major urban battles are tanks, artillery, engineers, infantry. They're full-scale battles in concrete. Now, the damage that the
tank does to the building, that is unlikely that just the whole face of the
building is going to fall off. It's going to do a lot of damage, and that's why you have a tank, because a tank is mobile
protected firepower. It has that giant gun that can
punch through that problem, which is concrete and cover. But in this scene, they're all tracers. It's almost like a "Star Wars" ray gun. They won't all be like that. There's actually a myth that tanks are not helpful in urban
warfare, they're too vulnerable. But actually, the
history of urban warfare, if you go into a major urban fight and you don't have a tank, you're wrong. But the problem is that
the tank can't go by itself and the infantry can't go by itself. And as we see in this scene, the infantry worked to protect the tank, and then the tank protect the infantry. But tanks are vulnerable, as you see here. The Germans shoot from below
where the tank can shoot, in the basement. The size needed to take a
town or a village or a city all depends on what the
enemy is that they're facing, and I think they really didn't know. For that street, I think that looked
about right, absolutely, where you combine a tank
section, always two tanks, with an infantry platoon or something to clear a street like that before you discover where the enemy is. Outside of the lasers of the rounds, this is a very realistic
scene of high-intensity combat and the combined arms that you need, so I give it a nine. Ugh. Will you pause? The one thing that I can't
help myself on this scene is that everyone walks up to the wall and just sticks their rifle
over the top of the wall. That's absolutely what you don't do. You're just putting a flag
up saying where you are. I don't have any problem with
them moving to the rooftops. This is a hasty attack. Two different buildings, that's great; it gives you converging fire. So firing down from two
different directions. They can cover more of the courtyard. The scene in this movie
is based on the real battle of Mosul that happened in 2017, one of the biggest battles
really since World War II, 100,000 security forces against a entrenched ISIS enemy force that had to be cleared out. That's actually pretty realistic. You open an attack like that
with your biggest weapon. We call it the most
casualty-producing weapons. Duds do happen. The way
you usually get around that is you have more than a
single point of failure, more than one big weapon,
or, like they do here, which is actually accurate,
is once that duds, that's it. Your surprise is gone. Attack. It's actually pretty complex,
what they're trying to do, because they have moving forces with other elements shooting down that they have to know
and watch very closely on when to turn their
fire off as you advance. That's, in some ways, the
way I would teach it as well, that's as they're maneuvering in while another person's holding them down. Booby traps are very
popular in urban warfare. Pictures on the wall. Any and everything could be potentially booby traps. We see it right now in the Ukraine war when Ukraine takes back their
territories from the Russians. But you have to be hyperaware of all those booby traps, for sure. One is just awareness of every soldier not to move and displace things, and then we have bomb-sniffing
dogs that we'll bring in. I'm going to actually give
it around a five, six. Just some of it's a little off. He'll be on the footwalk over the gutter. We'll take him out from behind. The underground is a huge component of that three-dimensional
aspects of urban warfare. Many cities have cities under the cities, and in battles like this,
which, this movie is based on the battle of Stalingrad,
which was called the "Rat War" because there was such
a prevalent underground. Yes, those are possible
urban sniper positions. The characters on both
sides are loosely tied to real snipers that were prevalent in the battle of Stalingrad who were known to put themselves in the barrels
and the ventilation shafts. The cat and the mouse
between the two snipers, that didn't happen. We do train soldiers
to use the environment, and there is some aspect of
manipulating light and smoke. That's a real thing, right?
Reflective lights in the mirror, but you don't know where the sniper is, and unlikely that you're
going to have that ability to blind that, so, no, don't do that. I want to give it a
higher one because it is pointing out the
underground warfare aspect, but the realism of the
actual, this happening, around a three, I guess. That's pretty about as real as it gets. The IED, or the improvised
explosive device, is the weapon of the last 20-plus years. The invisible enemy that you
couldn't fight back against. The M2 .50-cal is still used today. It's a very effective large machine gun that has the size of bullet
and penetration of concrete that you'd want, where
other weapons might not. The accuracy of what
the bullets were doing to the building looked pretty accurate. Some of them you can
tell aren't penetrating. He didn't shoot that
many bullets at that wall to create that level of sprawling and honeycombing of that wall. The tactics there are pretty sound, where you have the machine
gun covering an upper level while the infantry are maneuvering lower so there's control there
and positioning themselves to enter that building where
they know the enemy is. I can't say that kicking
of the door is not real. It's called a mule kick. I wish the movies would stop showing it because it's not effective, but I have found many soldiers trying it. But it's not the most force you can put by kicking in that door.
You want to face the door. Soldier: On the ground!
[civilian crying out] That's an unfortunate
but very realistic aspect of that scenario and that chaos of when the soldier enters the room, but controlled and not
just firing at everybody. But then you have scared, frantic civilians even approaching you, making the soldier feel very unsafe. That's a very realistic and
impactful traumatic situation that is urban warfare. So if we were to take out the mule kick, I would give that scene a 10. My favorite urban warfare show or scene is actually "Saving Private Ryan." The aspect of the sniper and
basically using a casualty to draw more people out
is my favorite movie scene of urban warfare. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, why
not click on the video above?
