![\"IDF1\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2015\/12\/idf1.jpg?w=620\")
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I traveled recently to Israel to visit a state-of-the-art military training facility in the southern Negev Desert opened by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) last year. The facility, at the Tze\u2019elim army base, is meant to simulate urban operations of the kind the Israelis have so often faced in their conflicts with Palestinian and Lebanese militants. Though the degree of emphasis the IDF has placed on military operations in urban terrain has waxed and waned, since the mid-1980s at least it has maintained an extensive training infrastructure for this purpose, which from time to time other armies have admired<\/a>. After the Second Intifada, however \u2014 a conflict that was fought almost exclusively in the densely built-up environment of the West Bank and Gaza \u2014 the need for even more and better urban warfare training was deemed all the greater.<\/p>\n Known as \u201cBaladia\u201d (Arabic for \u201ccity\u201d), the core of this facility is indeed a small city \u2014 or large town \u2014 of some 600 buildings of a range of types, including five mosques, several cafes, a clinic, a town hall, a casbah, an eight-story apartment building, a cemetery, and a \u201cyouth club,\u201d all arranged in Middle Eastern fashion with narrow winding streets, alleys, and passageways running higgledy-piggledy throughout. Some War on the Rocks<\/em> readers may be familiar with the place as American and other forces train there quite regularly \u2014 and it may remind other readers of their deployments to Iraq. (There was a good Vice News video report<\/a> on it a year ago that is worth watching).<\/p>\n The wider purpose of my visit to this base was for research on a new book I am writing on the resurgence of fortification strategies in contemporary security affairs \u2014 Israel, for obvious reasons, being an important case in point. Specifically, though, at Tze\u2019elim I was hoping to answer a few questions:<\/p>\n 1) Does the Israeli defense establishment believe there has been an \u201curban turn\u201d in military and strategic affairs? Does this mean there is a need to develop (or perhaps more accurately re-develop) skills in modes of conflict such as fortification and siegecraft, tunneling and counter-tunneling, and urban warfare generally, that have been out of fashion for a century or so?<\/p>\n 2) Do the Israelis think there is something important to contemporary urban operations that was illuminated by \u201cpostmodernist\u201d thinking, as is commonly portrayed in the academic literature on the subject?<\/p>\n 3) Is there anything actually new<\/em> about warfare that the IDF has learned in the urban warfare business?<\/p>\n The answer to these questions is emphatically yes in the first instance \u2014 clearly, with respect to Hamas in Gaza and to a large extent also Hezbollah in Lebanon the challenge is inextricably bound up with the urban and peri-urban areas in which these groups operate. In the second, emphatically no (and, moreover, the fascination with such ideas caused much harm to the effectiveness of the IDF in its 2006 war with Hezbollah). In the third the answer is more ambiguous \u2014 there is very little new that has been learned though why that is important takes a bit of explaining and is interesting in itself. Indeed, the Israeli case has a lot of generalizable potential.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a view of Tze\u2019elim from the perspective of the minaret of the mosque in the central square. There are plenty of photos of it available on the web but I rather like my own sketches. No doubt you can tell from my excellent penmanship that that\u2019s a German unit training down there with a Fuchs armored vehicle in the foreground.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n