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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

#51

Post by Amezarak »

lostlogin wrote: post #42
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…

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.

I don't know how to make it any clearer that my comment was a response to:

> Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think.

Not an invitation for discussion on the vagaries on the larger strategy and outcomes of the Iranian war: specifically a comment that this statement is clearly wrong; Iranian missile attacks performed worse than historically would have been expected due to US anti-missile defense tech and drone attacks performed markedly worse than "experts" have been anticipating for years. The "conventional Internet wisdom" was totally wrong and appears to perhaps be immune to actual events, since we continue to see comments like "drone and missile attacks changed the game".

You can argue about the larger strategy all you want but technical reality we saw is that the US military outperformed expectations when it came to missile and drone attacks: far from "changing the game", they showed that long-range attacks are less effective than at any time since the early development of missile technology. The fact the Iranians were unable to do anything about ships a few dozen miles off their coast is absolutely bananas and perhaps historically unprecedented for a military of that size and capability.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#52

Post by youainti »

reillyse wrote: post #7
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?

But they also protect you from more low level lawlessness and if the law situation inside and outside the wall are the same (because of stronger states) they stop being worth maintaining. Think in the US, the cops wouldn’t survive against a couple of machine guns and a drone strike, but they are still useful for security purposes.

Walls also keep out grazing animals with suicide vests, which is something a friend who served in Afganistan said he saw once.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#54

Post by everybodyknows »

diego_moita wrote: post #34

In many of Latin America big towns and most of border towns, most middle-class houses are tiny versions of fortresses. It is a sign of police incompetence, government collapse and the fact that those places are ruled by gangsters.

The great revelation of Google Street View for me has been that such is more or less the world norm. Neighborhoods of entirely unbarred windows and unfenced lots are scarce on any continent.

The tragedy is that so few, at least here in the US, see the liberating value in them.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#55

Post by digitaltrees »

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…

A government fortification protects against military attack.

A city fortification protects against basic lawlessness in the absence of a government protective order. It’s a sign of personal level violence

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#56

Post by jltsiren »

Amezarak wrote: post #47
jltsiren wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The strategic level is the level that matters.

In a video game, military forces fight other military forces and the stronger side wins. In the real world, a military force may choose to fight enemy forces, if it believes that's the best way to advance its goals. But if the enemy is clearly stronger, fighting it directly is probably counterproductive, and it may be more useful to hit softer targets instead.

US forces suffered limited casualties, but that wasn't particularly relevant. Iran realized quickly enough that engaging US forces directly wasn't an efficient way to use its resources. It targeted infrastructure such as oil refineries in Gulf States allied with the US and caused serious enough damage to steer the course of the war.

I think the war revealed two deficiencies in US forces. First, the US did not have sufficient offensive capabilities to prevent Iranian counterattacks. Iranian drones and missiles were cheap and plentiful, while the US used expensive platforms designed for hitting high-value targets. And second, the forces available to defend allied civilian infrastructure were insufficient. The US only had limited forces in the region, and force composition focused heavily on offense.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#57

Post by everybodyknows »

ufocia wrote: post #20

"Newly walled towns are a sign of shrivelling state authority" was my thought when I saw the walled off Capitol. It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."

> shrivelling state authority

Sure, but state authority alone is no substitute for cultural norms.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#58

Post by 59percentmore »

dist-epoch wrote: post #23
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?

Depends on who you want to protect against. For example if you want to protect against hordes of teenagers stealing everything from an Apple store, you just need a button to deploy barbed wire at all entrances and exits, and then a few guards with rubber batons beat the shit out of everyone. When the state is weak, communities take the law into their own hands, which is why we see this medieval-style fortifications a…

Actually, the best way that doesn't get you bogged down in battery charges (for beating a teenager) or manslaughter charges (oops, your barbed wire caused a fatal infection) is social services that help fight poverty and teenage vagrancy (and possibly an accessible iPhone model that takes the edge off of the iPhone jones/envy that your iPhone marketers purposely built).

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#60

Post by alephnerd »

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…

I'm not a fan of the geographic argument as it removes agency from state and non-state actors who are backing various groups partaking in the Sahel insurgency.

The most obvious ones are the France/US-Russia, the UAE-Turkiye, and UAE-KSA rivalries, but even those is being exploited by Morocco and Algeria in the Sahel due to their existential rivalry.

Morocco and Algeria view each other as existential threats, and the Sahel will never become peaceful until that rivalry is resolved. Instead, it is becoming worse - Morocco is now transferring military IP and technology from the US, Israel, India, and the UAE while Algeria from Turkiye, China, Pakistan, and Russia.

The geographic argument also ignores the ethnic tensions that have always existed in the Sahel. Vast swathes of Maghrebis, Baggaras, Amazigh, and Tuaregs continue to down on Sub-Saharan Africans, and they tend to be the leadership in JNIM, AQIM, ISSP, ISWAP, and other Islamist groups in the Sahel. Their leaders remember how they and not Africans were the rulers of slave states in the Sahel before the French came.

And those who don't subscribe to ethnic chauvanism subscribe to religious chauvanism, hence why leadership of formerly secular insurgent groups like the Polisario Front and MPLA became hardened Islamists who are trying to enforce Sharia in states where the religious demography is not uniform.

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