Sixty hours.
That’s how long ten members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group effectively kept the Indian city of Mumbai under siege after they beached their boats on the evening of November 26, 2008 and began conducting a series of attacks. A combination of factors contributed to prolong the attacks. The terrorists were better armed and equipped than Indian security forces that initially responded. Constant communication via satellite telephones with handlers in Pakistan who were monitoring live Indian news coverage informed the attackers’ decisions. And interagency gaps among Indian security forces delayed responses and rendered them uncoordinated.
At the end of the ordeal, 174 people had been killed by the attackers and hundreds more wounded. Nine of the terrorists were also killed, and one captured. But how the attack occurred—what happened during those two and a half days when ten individuals paralyzed a city for two and a half days—holds important lessons on cities’ security in an increasingly urbanized world.
The sixteenth installment in MWI’s Urban Warfare Project Case Study Series explores the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. It identifies the attacks’ tactical, operational, and strategic lessons—from the need for a unified and resilient command structure in urban areas to the imperative of understanding all dimensions of a city’s terrain. You can read it here, and be sure to follow the Urban Warfare Project for future case studies and continuing exploration of the challenges faced by military forces operating in cities.
Liam Collins, PhD is the director of Madison Policy Forum and a distinguished military fellow with the Middle East Institute. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America, with multiple combat operations in Fallujah in 2004. He is coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare and author of Leadership & Innovation During Crisis: Lessons from the Iraq War.
Major Jayson Geroux is an infantry officer with The Royal Canadian Regiment and is currently with the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. He has been a fervent student of and has been involved in urban operations training for over two decades. He is an equally passionate military historian and has participated in, planned, executed, and intensively instructed on urban operations and urban warfare history for the past twelve years. He has served thirty years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included operational tours to the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Afghanistan.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.