BATALLA DE SUSHA GUERRA NAGORNO KARAVAJ

NSIDE THE BATTLE OF SHUSHA, THE

URBAN FIGHT THAT DECIDED LAST YEAR’S
NAGORNO-KARABAKH WAR
John Amble | 11.12.21

Observers watched the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War closely, searching for indicators
of the character of warfare on tomorrow’s battlefields. The lessons extracted have
covered advanced technology and unmanned platforms, proxy dynamics, the ongoing
relevance of armor, and more. But some of the most important lessons have received
much less attention. They center around the increasingly unavoidable importance of
combat in cities and are drawn principally from the battle for the city of Shusha—a
fight that arguably decided the outcome of the war.

In this episode of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, John Amble takes over as host while
John Spencer moves to the guest’s chair. He has spent much of the past year studying
the Battle of Shusha, including authoring a a report about the battle. In fact, the week
this episode was released, he visited Shusha, walking the streets, observing the terrain
of both the city and its surrounding area, and gaining an important firsthand
understanding of how the battle played out. In the conversation, John offers a detailed
look at the context and conduct of the battle. He makes a compelling case that the
fight for this single city was the key inflection point on which the outcome of the entire
war hinged. He also explains what we should learn from the battle, and how US and
allied military forces should apply those lessons as they prepare for the future of
warfare in a rapidly urbanizing world.
You can listen to the discussion below or find the episode on Apple
Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to subscribe,
and if you’re enjoying the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, please take a minute and leave
the podcast a review or give it a rating!

he 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.

https://mwi.usma.edu/the-battle-of-shusha-city-and-the-missed-lessons-of-the-2020-nagorno-
karabakh-war/

https://azeridaily-com.translate.goog/reality/63479?
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