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Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

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Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#41

Post by inglor_cz »

adrian_b wrote: post #27
0xcafefood wrote: post #4

I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls. Walls can protect you from men with swords, but not from heavy artillery or bombers. Today, wouldn't a fleet of cheap drones render a wall moot?

Yes, but while the moat surrounding the US embassy in London will not deter drones, it will prevent any car from reaching the proximity of the building. A car can carry a much higher explosive load than even a lot of cheap drones. Moreover, in London a car will become suspicious only when it is already close to the embassy, and there is little time available to react, but drones should be detected much earlier.

"drones should be detected much earlier"

Not if you follow in the steps of Ukrainian "Operation Spider Web", which concealed the explosive drones into a double roof of a truck and when the truck got into the proximity of the target, the roof opened and everything flew out at once.

Granted, in the case of an embassy in London, you probably couldn't get a semi there, maximally a modest truck, but that should be enough for some damage.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#42

Post by lostlogin »

Amezarak wrote: post #30
dukeofdoom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think. Obliterating US bases in the region, and used precise targeting (for example, hit actual correct hotel floor number hundreds of miles away where commanders where stationed with cheap drones ~$30k). So the only real protection now seems to be distance, and not being a target worth the missile. Individual motorbikes in Ukraine conflict,…

How many US ships did the Iranians hit? Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more…

The key point in the whole saga is that overwhelming US strength has failed.

The Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#43

Post by aaron695 »

defrost wrote: post #3

For anyone with an interest this article is cut down and pared slice of a portion of the work of Dr. Olivier Walther and Dr. Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida. A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands... and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in A…

[dead]

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#44

Post by jltsiren »

Amezarak wrote: post #30
dukeofdoom wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think. Obliterating US bases in the region, and used precise targeting (for example, hit actual correct hotel floor number hundreds of miles away where commanders where stationed with cheap drones ~$30k). So the only real protection now seems to be distance, and not being a target worth the missile. Individual motorbikes in Ukraine conflict,…

How many US ships did the Iranians hit? Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more…

That's video game thinking. The effectiveness of a military force is not based on its ability to fight enemy forces, but on its ability to achieve its goals and prevent the enemy from achieving theirs.

US military could strike enemy targets and defend itself in the Iran war, just like in other wars in the past decades. But this time, its ability to defend its bases and the countries hosting those bases was clearly insufficient. Due to this deficiency, Iran managed to achieve not only its primary goal (to survive) but also a secondary goal (to make other countries in the region question whether US military presence is an asset or a liability).

Cheap drones and missiles create an asymmetry between offense and defense. A small offensive force can strike anywhere it wants, but the other side needs sufficient defenses at every target worth striking. The US had sufficient offensive forces, but it lacked the several times larger defensive forces needed to protect the region from Iranian counterattacks. Its regional allies might have had those, if the US had told them in advance and given them time to mobilize.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#45

Post by acdha »

Amezarak wrote: post #40
michaelt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many US warships did the Iranians need to hit? Turns out, none. Plenty of stationary targets, like US-owned data centres in US-aligned countries. Plenty of huge, slow-moving, undefended tankers.

1. We’re not arguing about the strategic outcome of the war, which different people interpret in totally opposite ways based on their party affiliation. 2. The USN fired thousands of missiles at the Iranians so obviously they were highly motivated to retaliate. They tried and failed to do anything about it. Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what th…

> Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about.

The U.S. lost billions of dollars in expensive military hardware, proved incapable of defending Gulf allies, and had to abandon all of the stated goals for starting the war—note Trump’s eagerness to sign a treaty so bad even Congressional Republicans were willing to publicly criticize it—despite a massive disparity in the size of their respective military budgets. It’s hard to see that as the game not changing in key ways.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#46

Post by bob1029 »

stymaar wrote: post #31

Fortifications never went anywhere. Just in this century, the US used fortified camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so did the French in Sahel. And the Ukrainians fortified Dombas and effectively prevented the Russians to take it quickly. Then the Russians fortified the Zaporizhzhia frontline (the Surovikin line) which stopped the Ukrainian counter offensive in 2023. And talking about Africa in particular, the border…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_bollard

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#47

Post by Amezarak »

jltsiren wrote: post #44
Amezarak wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many US ships did the Iranians hit? Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more…

That's video game thinking. The effectiveness of a military force is not based on its ability to fight enemy forces, but on its ability to achieve its goals and prevent the enemy from achieving theirs. US military could strike enemy targets and defend itself in the Iran war, just like in other wars in the past decades. But this time, its ability to defend its bases and the countries hosting those bases was clearly in…

US forces performed better than people have been saying they would for decades against drones and anti-ship missile, and their defense tech performed better than what we’ve seen in prior wars with similar matchups.

You and the other commenters keep focusing on overall strategy about eg the strait but the argument was about drones and missile attacks changing the game. Rather than changing the game, they were shown to be less effective than in past conflicts. The real video game thinking here is the bizarre idea that the US and was totally invincible and untouchable until this showed otherwise. They took shockingly few losses.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#48

Post by iammjm »

It's not just Africa. Take a look at the Ukrainian battlefield and you will see a similar trend: kilometers of trenches with some concrete bunkers here and there; even longer anti-tank ditches; along them dragon's teeth-type anti-tank obstacles; along them several rows of concertina razor wire; plus anti-drone netting along logistical routes. then there's vehicles with layers of cages, spikes and metal plates all over them to protect against drones, to the point where they look like medieval rams. with all the high tech precision weapons and satellites and drones, people sometimes forget that wars are about dealing and withstanding kinetic force.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#49

Post by blacksmith_tb »

defrost wrote: post #3

For anyone with an interest this article is cut down and pared slice of a portion of the work of Dr. Olivier Walther and Dr. Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida. A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands... and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in A…

That background is useful, though it seems more like "how" than "why" - my instinct is James C. Scott-style rebellious hinterlands[1] but I haven't gotten a sense if the bandits are the product of social dislocations, or just opportunists. My naive assumption would be all of the above, some conflicts along the edges of Sahel being ideological or about lack of resources or political participation, and others being just smash-and-grab (not that they're mutually exclusive).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#50

Post by MaxPock »

yorwba wrote: post #13
cineticdaffodil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walls can not protect you from dhijadists either, the mortars take out the city- and besieging starves it out. In sudan- a "walled and ditched" city recently fell to the djandjhawid.. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/commentary/fall-el-fa...

Of course no fortification can withstand overwhelming force indefinitely, but el-Fasher held out 1.5 years while completely surrounded, which isn't too shabby. (Here's a map from a year prior: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/5/52/... It's the small pink blob of army-controlled territory labeled "Al-Fashir" within the gray mass of the RSF.) And the RSF are a formerly government-affiliated civil…

Kuweires airbase in Syria never fell to isis and held for over two years.
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