Each year in December, the Urban Warfare Project Podcast closes with its annual Christmas wish list episode, a candid conversation among leading urban warfare scholars about what modern militaries urgently need but too often fail to deliver. In the 2025 edition, John Spencer is joined once again by Stuart Lyle of the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and Major Jayson Geroux of the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre to assess the state of urban warfare after another year defined by fighting in cities from Ukraine to Gaza. Drawing on decades of combined research, doctrine development, and battlefield analysis, they argue that urban warfare is no longer a future challenge but the dominant form of modern conflict, one that Western militaries still approach with outdated assumptions, fragmented training, and insufficient institutional commitment.
This year’s wish list moves beyond abstractions to confront specific gaps with strategic consequences: the absence of sustained senior leader ownership of urban warfare, the failure to mandate drones at the lowest tactical levels, the need for real cities rather than sanitized training sites to educate planners, the mismatch between military equipment design and urban reality, and the imperative of incorporating artificial intelligence into real-time urban mapping and targeting. As in past editions, the discussion is intentionally provocative, grounded in history, and focused on practical change rather than slogans. The result is not a seasonal novelty, but a sober assessment of what militaries knew they needed before the next urban war, and what they may again wish they had acted on sooner.
You can listen to the episode below or find it on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn, or your favorite podcast app. Be sure to subscribe, and if you’re enjoying the Urban Warfare Project Podcast, please take a minute and leave the podcast a review or give it a rating!
Image credit: Spc. Jadyn Merritt, US Army