Three block war
The Three Block War is a military theory in which military units carry out three operations with different requirement profiles. The three-block-war scenario differs from asymmetrical conflicts by definition in terms of time (a few hours), spatial (e.g. several blocks of houses in a city) and the three different tasks under the same command.
The term and basic concept were developed by Charles C. Krulak in the 1990s and revised by Rick Hillier after the turn of the millennium . The basic concern is that a given military unit in a limited combat area should be able to carry out operations with three different requirements at short notice:
- Humanitarian action ,
- peacekeeping stabilization measures ,
- medium combat use.
The concept is controversial in the US Army insofar as some say that an operation must be clearly structured with only one task, while others want to include reconstruction tasks as a fourth aspect under the same command or concept. It was also controversial in the Canadian army and was ultimately rejected in order to incorporate further requirements such as multinationality into newer concepts. Accordingly, the concept today is more descriptive than strategic .
This modern conflict scenario has implications for the development of weapons technology (as it is not a classic front-line war ) and military training (as decisions in the chain of command are shifted downwards due to the tight time frame).
literature
- CC Krulak: The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Tree Block War , in: Marines Magazine , January 1999.
- A. Walter Dorn and Michael Varey: The Rise and Demise of the “Three Block War” , in: Canadian Military Journal , Vol. 10, No. 1, 2007.
- Matt Zeigler: Three Block War: US Marines in Iraq. iUniverse, 2004.