Shusha, the Battle that Won a War

Modern War Institute

John Amble

Government, News

4.7 • 798 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Observers watched the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War closely, searching for indicators of the character of warfare on tomorrow's battlefields. The lessons extracted have covered advanced technology and unmanned platforms, proxy dynamics, the ongoing relevance of armor, and more. But some of the most important lessons have received much less attention. They center around the increasingly unavoidable importance of combat in cities and are drawn principally from the battle for the city of Shusha—a fight that arguably decided the outcome of the war. Listen as John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at MWI, explains why.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's an absence of casualty figures on the price Azerbaijan paid in order to take the city.
0:10.0	Once the defenders really realize that they have been cut off completely and they're going to have to fight,
0:16.0	the defenders can't even use some of their artillery and rocket capabilities because the enemy
0:22.0	is so close now at this point.
0:25.5	Welcome back to the Modern War Institute podcast.
0:28.5	I'm John Amble editorial director at MWI, and for this episode, I'm joined by John Spencer.
0:33.7	His voice will be a familiar one to many of our listeners.
0:36.0	He is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at MWI and the host of our Urban Warfare Project podcast.
0:42.9	He joined me to talk about the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War.
0:47.3	Now, that was a short conflict, only two months long, but it generated a great deal of attention from observers and scholars looking to it for lessons about contemporary conflict and the future battlefield.
0:58.0	There have been no shortage of those lessons that have been identified and some pretty important projections about the future of warfare based on that conflict.
1:06.0	Everything from the importance of unmanned platforms like drones to the ongoing relevance of tanks
1:11.6	on the battlefield. John looked at something a little bit different, specifically the Battle of
1:16.6	Shusha, as he argued in his article and he explains in detail in this podcast, in many ways
1:21.6	it was a decisive battle in the war. He describes the battle and shares some of the lessons from it in the
1:28.4	conversation you're about to hear. Before we get to it, a couple quick notes. First, if you
1:32.9	weren't yet subscribed to the MWF podcast, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. And
1:37.2	if you have a second, please leave a rating or give it a review, which really does help us
1:41.6	reach new listeners. And second, as always, what you hear in
1:44.8	this episode are the views of the participants, and don't represent those of West Point,
1:48.6	the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government. All right, here's my conversation with
1:53.1	John Spencer. John, thanks so much for joining this episode of the MWI podcast.
	...

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