You're listening to the Urban Warfare Project podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point.

I'm John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at MWI, and host of this podcast.

Today's guest on the podcast is Dr. Anthony King.

He is the professor of war studies at the University of Warwick,

and author of numerous books to include the combat soldier,

infantry tactics and cohesion in the 20th and 21st centuries,

Command, the 21st Century General, and numerous others. But today we'll be discussing this latest book, Urban Warfare in the 21st Century. Tony, welcome to the show.

Well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here, so delighted to participate.

Thank you. Thanks, Tony. I'll try not to hold down my excitement for this talk because I haven't read a book so

applicable to the podcast or so applicable to my work as yours. And I give it full credit, full

endorsement. It's amazing. People need to read it. You can get it on Amazon. I'm really excited to

discuss it. So I thought before we

start talking about the book, maybe you could give us some very basic background to who you are

and how you came to study urban warfare. Yeah, well, I mean, thanks. I must say thanks very much.

It's slightly humbling to be interviewed by a combat veteran of urban warfare and you actually thought the book was

useful. I mean, I'm really pleased and honoured and humbled by that. I mean, in terms of the

origins, I mean, there's a couple of stories that I could say. I mean, the immediate origin

was quite specific in that, as you mentioned, I'd done a book in 2013, The Combat Soldier,

and that had looked at the evolution of the infantry platoon, really, from the First World War

to the 21st century, to 2010, so from the First World War to Iraq and Afghanistan.

And as part of that book, what I'd explored, and it was totally new to me, but what I'd explored and what I'd seen through the research is that Western forces led by the US, followed by the UK and France in particular, were becoming increasingly interested in urban warfare, and particularly urban tactics.

And so I was able to have a very interesting time plotting essentially

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