Intro — Five Miles of Hell

Dust chokes the sixth floor of a shattered apartment block. Gunfire echoes through broken hallways as a column of T-72s crawls up the avenue, pounding anything that could be a threat, regardless of the reality. The skyline is distorted and barely visible behind a thick haze from the burning city below. Inside, the air is heavy with pressure and the stench of gunpowder and death.

3rd Platoon is out of ammo, out of options, and holding a position the battalion can’t afford to lose. Soldiers’ blood intermingles in an ever-growing pool on the floor. The lone medic moves with urgency, her aid bag nearly empty. No gauze, no tourniquets. Just triage and hope.

Three kilometers back, the battalion commander is hunched over a map in a sandbagged basement. Radios crackle as multiple stations check in and out simultaneously. His troops need everything: water, ammo, bandages, and fast.

At the combat trains command post, seven kilometers to the rear, three MTVs are hastily loaded with the last of Class V and VIII that can be scrounged. The route these supplies must take forward is a narrow moonscape of craters and shattered buildings. The lead MTV hits a 152mm shell hole, snapping the front axle. The bump plan kicks in, and the drivers of the stricken vehicle hastily toss whatever they can into the beds of the remaining two trucks. The reduced convoy continues to press forward, overloaded and exposed, weaving through wreckage and blast scars.

The SSG in the lead vehicle is fighting both the rubble and the map of where streets and city blocks used to be. Every turn is a gamble. What should take 20 minutes becomes an hour-long gauntlet. When they reach the line, there’s no time to unload before the exposed vehicles are hit. Lancet loitering munitions plummet from the oily black sky and rip into the thin-skinned truck cabs. In a matter of seconds, the trucks, their crews, and the desperately needed supplies are gone.

Out of options, 3rd Platoon begins to displace, falling back under constant fire. A BMP-2 swings around a corner, its 30mm cannon spitting rounds that tear through concrete, bodies, and any last thread of cohesion.

This is what sustainment looks like in the urban fight: fractured routes, contested corridors, and last-mile logistics under constant threat. It is not just a supporting effort: it is survival. And in dense, high-intensity urban terrain, even five miles behind the front-line is a combat operation.

As cities grow into sprawling megacities, the battlefield is shifting. Urban warfare is no longer the exception as it is becoming the norm. This has been seen played in recent conflicts across multiple continents: dense, chaotic, unforgiving. While doctrine often focuses on planning, fire, and maneuver, one critical aspect remains underappreciated: Sustainment.

In urban combat, getting the right supplies to the right place at the right time becomes a complex tactical fight of its own.

Urban terrain does not just complicate sustainment; it redefines it. Like other warfighting functions, logistics face significant challenges in urban environments. But here is the difference: sustainment becomes decisive. The intensity of resource consumption; ammo, fuel, medevac, and reinforcements are staggering in the dense contested terrain. Recent fights in Bakhmut, Mariupol, Hostomel, Gaza, Mosul, and Marawi have shown us that clearly. Limited space, high attrition, constant contact. For Army planners, the question is not if sustainment breaks; it is how to keep it from collapsing in the first place.

The U.S. Army is not postured for success in large-scale combat operations (LSCO) within urban terrain due to fundamental gaps in logistics doctrine, force structure, and planning assumptions. Current sustainment frameworks are designed around open terrain maneuver, and predictable distances are misaligned with the realities of dense, contested urban terrain. Urban warfare requires a dedicated sustainment doctrine (akin to ATP 3-06), refined planning models, and revised tactics and techniques that adapt current sustainment formations to dense, contested terrain.

Standing Doctrine & SOPs

Today’s logistics doctrine is built for open terrain and fluid maneuver, not cities. It assumes standoff, rear-area security, and freedom of movement that simply does not exist in an urban LSCO environment. Combat Trains Command Posts (CTCPs), Field Train Command Posts (FTCPs), and Brigade Support Areas (BSAs) are doctrinally spaced at 5–10 km, 15–30 km, and 30+ km from the fight (FM 4-0, ATP 4-90). That might work in traditional maneuver warfare, but in a dense cityscape with contested corridors, blocked line-of-sight, and threats ranging from snipers to loitering munitions, those distances collapse extremely quickly.

At the tactical level, our sustainment formations are optimized for throughput, not survivability. The FSC pushes to maneuver battalions with limited protection, no organic route clearance, and barely any last-mile redundancy. Their primary delivery platforms, Load Handling System (LHS) and Palletized Load Systems (PLS), were designed for pallets, not precision in tight terrain. These trucks are massive, with a turning radius of over 10 meters solo and over 27 meters with a trailer. They simply do not fit in the urban fight.

Distribution Platoons, Maintenance Support Teams, and even Medical Evacuation Teams from the HHC are not built to fight their way into or survive within urban enclaves. They are built to move volume, not survive contact.

The Army is applying maneuver-era sustainment models to terrain they were never designed for. As friendly forces push deeper into the city, every resupply route becomes a tactical problem, every node is exposed, and the system grows less resilient precisely when demand is highest. The result is a slowed tempo, increased losses, and a sustainment structure that degrades under the conditions it is most needed.

Planning

The first and most immediate challenge to sustaining an urban fight is expenditure, and it is not marginal. Urban combat burns through ammunition at rates multiple times higher than traditional operations. JP 3-06, MCRP 12-10B.1, and RAND’s 2022 report “Urban Combat Service Support Operations: The Shoulders of Atlas” all point to a consistent reality: ammunition consumption in cities can reach 3–5 times the norm, especially in the first 24–48 hours of fighting.

The casualty rate follows the same trend. Close-quarters engagements, restrictive movement, and constant exposure make urban terrain some of the deadliest ground to fight on. That means more trauma, more medevac (more realistically CASEVAC), and more medical sustainment. All under constant threat. (ATP 4-02.2, ATP 4-02.55)

Then there is the human cost before the first shot is fired: moving block to block in 60+ pounds of kit, clearing stairwells, breaching walls, and fighting vertically. The physical demands spike, driving up the need for Class I: food, water, electrolytes, at a rate planners often underestimate. The deeper units go into the city, the harder it gets to keep warfighters fed, supplied, and alive. Urban terrain compounds consumption across every category simultaneously, at rates that standard planning factors do not capture.

Urban terrain does not just demand more from sustainers; it also gives back less in terms of mobility. The density and complexity of the city severely degrade our ability to meet that increased demand. The Brigade Support Area (BSA), as currently configured, is simply too large and too exposed to operate inside the urban fight. There is nowhere to hide the formation of HEMTTs, fuelers, and wreckers in a city choked with debris, vertical structures, and subterranean threats. On the topic of wreckers, sustainers need to start thinking about and training in “non-standard” recovery methods for either self-recovery or for clearing an MSR or ASR for follow-on vehicles. The Army simply does not have enough H8/9 Soldiers to do it all.

Dozens of thin-skinned trucks cannot maneuver through low parking structures or tight alleyways. Subways and tunnels present their own problems: limited clearance, ambush risk, and the potential for collapse. That leaves sustainers operating from outside the city, however that is not necessarily the best answer. Roads in and out are cratered, choked with rubble, or tactically impassable. As the 507th Maintenance Company learned in Nasiriyah, any road wide enough for a Logistics Package (LOGPAC) is wide enough to stage an ambush or draw indirect fire. The enemy knows this. A great paper on this — “Possible approaches to assessing terrain mobility after the effects of artillery munition” published by Cogent Social Sciences in 2024 at tandfonline.com — highlights the impacts of cratering with in-depth math and calculations.

The situation becomes exponentially more complex when civilians enter the battlespace, which they always do in urban combat. Displaced populations clog critical MSRs, constrict supply corridors, and place a dual burden on sustainers: keep U.S. forces in the fight while delivering emergency aid to those caught in the crossfire. History is consistent on this point. In Manila in 1945, U.S. 6th Army sustained high-intensity combat while simultaneously feeding and sheltering over one million displaced Filipino civilians, not as humanitarian assistance, but as an operational requirement to win. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq and again at Fallujah, sustainers managed simultaneous combat resupply, detainee handling, and emergency civilian aid under active contact conditions. The terrain changed; the burden did not.

FM 4-0 and JP 4-0 acknowledge this dual role doctrinally, but neither goes far enough in specifying how sustainers should plan for it under contested urban conditions. Urban LSCO does not just require keeping maneuver forces fed, fueled, and fighting. It demands planning for enemy prisoners of war, allied partner forces, and large-scale civilian displacement, often simultaneously, in terrain that restricts movement, disrupts comms, and collapses traditional supply timelines.

So, the question stands: Are Army sustainers and the enterprise at large prepared to simultaneously support the force, manage POW operations, and deliver humanitarian relief in a megacity under contact?

Moreover, the urban environment shreds command-and-control. FM communications degrade in concrete canyons, line-of-sight is gone, and signal bounce corrupts transmission clarity. Sustainment elements will be forced to rely on alternate comms, preplanned timing, and dead reckoning, often while under fire.

What Do We Need to Change to Prepare for This?

Short of being able to generate a fully equipped, environment-specific unit tailored to sustain an urban fight, the Army must make the formations it already fields survivable, adaptable, and lethal in terrain that was never designed for logistics throughput. With the introduction of Mobile Brigade Combat Teams (MBCTs) to replace the existing IBCTs, the Army should look to the horizon to best equip these formations for LSCO. Urban LSCO is not coming; it is already here. And right now, our sustainment enterprise is training and resourced for the wrong fight.

Here’s what needs to change:

#1 — Build Urban Sustainment Doctrine

There is existing doctrine for maneuver in cities (ATP 3-06 and 3-06.11). These must be accompanied by one for urban sustainment. Sustainment in urban terrain is not a scaled-down version of maneuver support; it is its own problem set. The Army desperately needs a published, urban sustainment doctrine that addresses:

• Compressed node positioning
• Urban-specific Class V planning factors (and other commodities)
• Redundant medevac and CASEVAC in contact (1SGs and CSMs, we are looking at you). We all know AXPs, but the same rigor applied to Ambulance Exchange Points must now be applied to Casualty Exchange Points, or CXPs. This planning must account for contested terrain, degraded comms, and the inability to rely on traditional CASEVAC.
• POW and displaced civilian sustainment planning
• (FM 4-0 and JP 4-0 touch this, but do not go far enough.)

#2 — Task-Organize Sustainment for Survivability

The FSC cannot be the last mile by default. Sustainment elements must be able to operate under contact, not just avoid it. That starts with mission command nodes like CTCPs and FTCPs that are built to collapse, shift, and reconstitute while still maintaining support forward. This is not suggesting that FSCs are fighting off teams or squads of enemies. It is the threat from the environment, be it FPS drones, artillery fire, or precision-guided munitions. Sustainers, I do believe, will face less and less direct fire engagements, and the few they do probably are planned ambushes by a near peer and won’t be survivable. However, what is being said is that sustainers need to understand the mission does not stop after first contact. There will no longer be the ability to conduct a security halt and get 360 security while waiting for reinforcements.

Every sustainment push into contested terrain must include dedicated security elements. Not attachments in name only but maneuver support that’s trained, integrated, and committed to defending the logistics fight. This is not a doctrinal gap, FM 4-95 outlines the need to protect sustainment operations. The failure lies in how units train, as most sustainers will attest: at a CTC, the only security is one gun mounted on the roof of a PLS.

#3 — Prepare Sustainment to Take Contact

The idea that sustainers operate “in the rear” is dead. In urban LSCO, and frankly, any LSCO environment in general, every echelon is inside the threat ring. What is hard to understand is that it is not just the BSA or DSA in the threat ring; the CSA and even the JSA can be considered in contact to some degree. IDF is not random anymore. Loitering munitions hunt by pattern. Drones do not just surveil; they kill. And the further into the city US troops push, the more exposed every logistics node becomes.

Logistics units must stop training just for notional ambushes and start training for persistent, overhead threats and area fires. Sustainment convoys must rehearse movements under degraded conditions, with simulated GPS denial, electronic warfare, and real-time route disruptions. Soldiers should know what it feels like to go firm under indirect fire, to react to a loitering munition sighting, and to reposition under ISR.

It’s not about simulating danger; it’s about building instincts that take over when plans fall apart. What happens when the LOGPAC takes a drone hit? When the CTCP has to displace mid-resupply? When resupply routes get cut by collapsing buildings or mass civilian movement? Train that now, because there will be no time to figure it out later.

#4 — Rebuild Mobility for the Alley Fight

LHS and PLS will not fit this specific fight, especially pushing through contested cities already subject to battle damage. That is not a critique; it is simple physics. These platforms were built for throughput across wide MSRs, not maneuvering through rubble-choked intersections and alleyways. Urban terrain requires sustainers to build mobility solutions around what physically fits the environment, not around what doctrine assumes is available.

That means modular, scalable platforms: JLTVs, modified M998s, dismount-capable sustainment loads, even tactical hand carts in urban environments. There are already examples of these across the world and in NATO, such as the Rheinmetall HX series and, especially, the HX ALHS, as well as part of the FMTVs made by Oshkosh, which have the M1148, an MTV with a load-handling system.

It also means unmanned systems, ground or aerial, that can push small loads through danger areas or serve as decoys for loitering munitions. If a drone can carry a grenade, it can carry a blood bag. If a UGV can breach a building, it can carry Class V.

From May 11 to 31, U.S. and NATO forces executed a decisive proof of concept during Swift Response 2025 in Lithuania: drone-enabled blood resupply at the edge of the fight. On the ground were elements of the 173rd Airborne, 160th FSSD, 519th Field Hospital, 68th Medical Command, 7384th U.S Army blood supply detachment, and multiple allied and Lithuanian medical units.

Forward-deployed medics, operating under simulated combat pressure, received blood products via heavy-lift TRV-150 and Flying Basket drones, enabling rapid replenishment to forward surgical teams and Role 2 stations. The mission was clear: close the sustainment gap in combat casualty care and increase troop survivability when traditional lines of supply can’t keep up.

Sustainment in cities demands physical route validation: tape measures and geometry, not doctrinal assumptions. Platforms that cannot navigate the terrain cannot deliver, and delivery failures translate directly to operational culmination.

#5 — Harden Comms and Execute Without Radios

Every S4 and SPO shop needs to plan for a total FM blackout. In urban LSCO, comms will not work as expected. Concrete kills line-of-sight. Signal bounce corrupts clarity. Jamming and EW should be expected. So, when the net goes down, and it will, you need to be ready to move, resupply, and recover without a single transmission.

That means pre-mission linkups. That means rehearsals without radios. That means analog route cards, pre-set execution timelines, pre-assigned call signs, and message runners if needed. ATP 6-02.53 provides the framework; however, units often do not train for it until it has already failed. Train Soldiers to navigate with and without JBC-P.

Build the comms plan around loss of comms, not ideal conditions. A LOGPAC that cannot execute without a working net was never truly planned for the urban fight.

#6 — Train Sustainment Leaders for the Urban Fight

SPOs, BSB Commanders, and S4s cannot plan urban LSCO while treating the city as someone else’s problem. Sustainment planning that assumes a clean MSR three klicks into a contested megacity is already out of step with the operational environment.

Units need to train sustainment leaders to think and plan with the same terrain fidelity as maneuver elements. That means true urban overlays, blocked MSRs, terrain that breaks routes instead of enabling them, and sustainment decision points tied to every phase line, not just the next logistics release point.

Whether it is Warfighter exercises, combat training center rotations, or intermediate-level education (ILE), the Army needs to inject urban-terrain realism into sustainment planning. Doctrinal spacing assumptions, predictable routes, and clean timelines do not survive contact with dense urban environments. If sustainers are not working through how to sustain on the move in degraded conditions, they are not planning for the fight they will actually face.

What might need to happen is that SPO shops start to seriously consider pushing sustainment regardless of what the last LOGSTAT said. RSRs and CSRs are available and are imposed on maneuver formations as constraints. However, what if it was not just a constraint for the maneuver unit but a promise from the sustainers at certain points? A battalion has been in heavy contact for the last 12 hours; it’s unknown what they had on hand 24 hours ago. Let’s work with our maneuver peers on the BDE staff and push something. Known things from CL III, 5.56, 7.62 linked, CL VIII, or even javelins, if there is a known armor threat, could enable a battalion to fight off culmination or become incapable of completing their missions.

#7 — Reimagine Sustainment Training for Real Loss

It is time to stop running sustainment as a clean overlay and start training it like the fight it is. That means no more tabletop resupply lanes where every LOGPAC arrives on time and every CASEVAC route is clear (common WarFighter experience). Start forcing the questions that no one wants to answer: What if a LOGPAC is fully destroyed? What if the CTCP is overrun? What if the BSA is gone, completely wiped, and battalions are still in contact?

Units need to inject loss, degradation, and disruption into all sustainment training. What if your LOGPAC must go dismounted? What if the aid station is destroyed by indirect fires or drones? What if comms drop and your distribution platoon has to operate on preplanned triggers alone? You are expecting to receive the full allocation of CL V based on Annex F established CSR, yet the unit only receives 50%. What does that do to the formation’s ability to carry out the next day’s combat operations?

These are not edge cases; in urban LSCO, losing a BSB is a planning contingency, not a worst-case outlier. Units that have not trained to operate through that level of degradation will be improvising under fire, with no margin for error.