The thing is that the breaching techniques that modern armies use (and that we’ve seen ad nauseam on YouTube) are basically police techniques and not military tactics.
They only work in stabilization and peacekeeping missions, not in urban warfare.
You can only enter a house this way (in a line, one guy after the other) when you expect a single shooter there, or maybe a smuggler or a group of criminals with handguns.
Two guys from my squad in Kosovo defending a building against an enemy attack. (Photo: Visar Kryesziu, The Associated Press)
You have enough firepower to kill or arrest them, especially if you use the element of surprise (for example, with a dawn raid). Your only preparation is some tear gas or a stun grenade that you’ve thrown inside before you entered.
Those are police SWAT tactics. You don’t want to kill a civilian.
During a war, however, when you fight in an urban area, you won’t proceed like this. Preferably, you have some heavy artillery or some tanks at your side that take the complete building where your enemy is positioned down.
If you don’t do that, the enemy won’t even let you come near their position. You’ll be dead meat long before some of your buddies will be able to kick in the front door.
And, if for some reason you have to go into an intact building, you go through the windows, climb on the roof to get in from there, or blow a big hole in the back wall.
Preferably, you do all these things at the same time while your machine gunners are providing you with a hell of a lot of suppressive fire. In addition to this, you’ll use hand grenades, a lot of them. Still, be prepared to lose some of your buddies.
This is the difference between warfighting and peacekeeping.
I was an infantryman for almost 10 years. During that time I was trained and competed in ‘room clearance’.
As an Engineer, my TC took 2 years for us to rewrite the book on room clearances (At the time we still had bombers and would spray the walls and ceilings with unaimed fire.)
Before we went to Afghanistan we again redid ‘Street Fighting’.
Then I went on the ‘Train-the-Trainer’ course in FIBUA.
I became an explosive-Breacher Instructor in ‘OBUA’ or ‘FISH’.
All the names are the same thing. Going into somebody’s house, killing the bad guys, not killing the innocents.
Or Forting up a house so that when the bad guys try to get to you, we kill them. When they get in, we kill them.
When they realise some of them aren’t dead, we bust back in and kill them.
We spend a lot of time trying to enter, at a time and place the enemy doesn’t expect or can’t do much about.
We like to take ladders, enter from the Gable end and breach downwards. (Gable end is the part that’s not the front or back, aka the bits with less windows)
That way the enemy grenades bounce down to them. And our grenades bounce down to them.
We put frame charges on floors or walls and make a hole. It’s noisy and the guys inside won’t like it, right up until we enter and hurt them.
We avoid as much as possible the ‘Fatal Funnel’ the area near a door or window that the enemy thinks you are going to use.
The way I explain it in my novel, ‘Just like all the kids know where Santa is coming from, all the bad guys knew to shoot at the door.’
When you have to use it, you try to have cover fire, following some sort of distraction (Flash-bang) or killing explosive (Frag Grenades or exploding door.)
Your drills are well practised. You aren’t going fast, but you’re smooth. You go fast and you all pile up in the doorway. That gets you killed.
Your guns are pointed in preset areas (not where you think), you know what to look for, how to dominate the room, what to say.
You do this smooth and hard, winning the room by surprise, speed and violence of action.
