The Battlefield.
“The future of warfare lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, industrial parks, and the sprawl of houses, shacks, and shelters that form the broken cities of our world. We will fight elsewhere, but not so often, rarely as reluctantly, and never so brutally.”
— Ralph Peters
The future that Ralph Peters speaks of in the above quote is also our present. Over the years the lines between the military battlefield and civilian urban cities have become blurred, at best. More and more, Service Members find themselves as sort of an international police force. As more powerful and destructive weapons find their way into the hands of American national terrorists, domestic special teams are finding themselves thrust into war-type situations.
For this reason many professional warriors acknowledge the dual nature of the word “battlefield.” Since the war terrain is no longer primarily a long-range open space, but instead a close quarters urban theater, today both America’s international and domestic warriors find their operational environments to be very similar. Therefore, this similarity in battle-space produces a similarity in needs of personal combat equipment, tactics, etc.
