New Doctrinal Work Challenges Contemporary Thinking on Urban Warfare

NEW YORK - April 13, 2026 - PRLog -- Fortis Novum Mundum today announced the publication of The Four-Floor War: A Manual for Military Operations on Urban Terrain https://www.fourflourwar.site. The work presents a comprehensive doctrinal framework for urban warfare that addresses what the author argues is a persistent gap between current military doctrine and the actual conditions of contemporary urban conflict.

The book arrives at a moment of renewed professional attention to urban warfare. The operations in Mariupol, Bakhmut, and the broader war in Ukraine have demonstrated conditions of peer urban combat that the counterinsurgency-focused literature of the past two decades did not fully anticipate. Luberisse argues that existing doctrinal frameworks, shaped by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, have not yet developed the comprehensive treatment that modern urban warfare requires.

"The city is not a surface. It is a volume," Luberisse writes in the prologue. "Combat in urban terrain does not occur across a plane. It occurs simultaneously above, within, and below the structures that define the environment, and through informational, electromagnetic, cyber, and cognitive dimensions that cannot be separated in practice."

The four-floor concept, drawing on terminology introduced by Brigadier General Julian Alford, provides the organizing framework for the book's analysis. The nineteen chapters address the physical dimensions of urban combat across surface, vertical, and subterranean layers; the non-physical fight conducted through intelligence, electromagnetic spectrum operations, cyber warfare, and information operations; the cognitive dimensions of decision-making under extreme compression; the civil-military operations that persistent civilian presence requires; and the multi-domain integration that modern urban warfare demands.

The book gives particular attention to high-intensity urban warfare against peer and near-peer adversaries, a contingency the author argues has been under-addressed in existing doctrine. The analysis extends from the historical continuity running from Stalingrad through the recent operations in Ukraine to anticipate the emerging megacity dimension and the technological developments that will shape future urban conflict.

Luberisse is the author of Asymmetric Warfare: Strategies and Tactics for the Modern Combatant https://www.amazon.com/Asymmetric-Warfare-Strategies-Tactics-Combatant/dp/B0F1457FSH, Precision Policing: How Military Doctrine Transforms Public Safety https://a.co/d/0gGADwRD, and other works on defense and security subjects. His writing has been pubished by Small Wars Journal and the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and his analysis appears regularly in defense publications.

The Four-Floor War: A Manual for Military Operations on Urban Terrain https://www.fourflourwar.site is available now in paperback and hardcover through every major booksellers. A companion tactical volume, Streets, Sewers, and Skylines: A Manual for Urban Combat Operations, is in development.

For review copies or additional information, contact Fortis Novum Mundum at contact@fortisnovummundum.com