The Mini-Manual for the Urban Defender
TL;DR — Written in the opening weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, for civilians defending a city.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.
Version 4, 3 April 2022, by John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute — a combat veteran and the field’s most-cited scholar.
Written and revised in real time as Russian forces moved on Ukrainian cities: what a city’s terrain offers a defender, how buildings and streets change the fight, what civilians can and cannot do.
An unusual document — serious academic expertise compressed into an urgent practical manual, published free, for people who needed it that week. Translated into several languages within days.
Where this came from
76 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.