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Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

economist.com

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Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#61

Post by digitaltrees »

59percentmore wrote: post #58
dist-epoch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You might have missed the point.

You don’t get battery charges when there isn’t a functioning state with courts, police and prisons.

City fortifications are an indication that the functional unit of society has compressed to city scale.

It can collapse further to single buildings — castles and further to nomadic warring tribes.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#62

Post by int_19h »

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…

For a long time, basically since WW2, the assumption was that fortifications are at best a delaying measure, and worst case, the attacker can go around them (mobile warfare, blitzkrieg and all that).

In the past decade, however, the changes in battlefield tech resulted in a situation where fortifications can be genuinely impregnable.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#63

Post by int_19h »

iammjm wrote: post #48

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 ove…

But that is precisely because there are drones. Drones are what allows both sides to see so deep into the battlefield that it's basically impossible to make a surprise attack now. Your advance units start getting hammered as soon as they move into the "dead zone" (within range of drones from the contact line), and so is the logistics.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#64

Post by int_19h »

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?

On the contrary, a fleet of cheap drones is what renders walls (and more broadly barricades) useful again. They don't have to stop the advance - they just have to slow it down so that the advancing units can get hammered by drones and by drone-guided artillery. Drones also make it nigh impossible to do any kind of surprise attack, which in turn means that fortifications can be made where they are actually needed, and not like e.g. the infamous Maginot line.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#65

Post by jjk166 »

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?

That was always a bit of a myth. Walls are not meant to stop things from getting destroyed, they are to prevent easy entry. Even in antiquity the ability to lob something over a wall existed, but if you were in range to do so, the defenders on the walls were in range to lob things at you, structures within the walls could be hardened to resist damage from things lobbed at them, and ultimately lobbing things over walls simply didn't win conflicts. Even the strategic bombing of WW2 wasn't sufficient to bring any side to its knees - only boots on the ground or the imminent threat thereof actually got the job done.

Further, the disappearance of walls does not coincide well with developments in weapons technology. Walls adapted to the introduction of gunpowder and explosives, with fortresses being key parts of strategy well into the 20th century. Even medieval fortifications with minimal upgrades still proved reasonably effective in modern conflicts. Walls are very good for their intended purpose.

The disappearance of city walls was not due to technological but rather social progress. The early modern period saw the development of strong central states able to field large armies. These states did not want a lot of fortified cities that could close themselves off easily from either a foreign invader or from their own government. Instead the national army would defend cities as needed, operating from fortresses in strategic locations and setting up temporary fortifications as needed. Cities were redesigned to make it easy to march an army into them. At the same time, population growth and changing economic systems meant cities rapidly grew, far outstripping the limited space available within medieval walls. Again, detached networks of mutually-supporting forts were simply more economical than contiguous walls. Finally, the changing world meant that you were simply no longer worried about wandering war bands pillaging settlements. Most of what walls were needed for could be done more economically with fences and legal markers.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#66

Post by AngryData »

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?

Walls have pretty much always been a delay tactic in order to give time to muster and organize men and a response or to call for allies and wait until your backup arrive. The spread of gunpowder severely reduced the amount of time you can delay an attacking force, but there still is some delay, and they speed that allies and military forces can deploy is much faster now too.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#67

Post by Spooky23 »

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?

Artillery and air power killed fortresses. De-industrialization and technology pretty much killed artillery And sustained air power engagements seem to be difficult for the same reasons.

Drones democratize airpower but have significant limits.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#68

Post by kergonath »

int_19h wrote: post #64
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?

On the contrary, a fleet of cheap drones is what renders walls (and more broadly barricades) useful again. They don't have to stop the advance - they just have to slow it down so that the advancing units can get hammered by drones and by drone-guided artillery. Drones also make it nigh impossible to do any kind of surprise attack, which in turn means that fortifications can be made where they are actually needed, and…

The Maginot line gets ridiculed often enough, but it did its job: it forced the Germans to find another way. It’s too bad the Ardennes were much more porous than expected and the fortifications did not extend all the way to Dukirk, but without fortifications at all it’s pretty much certain that the Wehrmacht should have gone straight through the plains of Lorraine and Champagne.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#69

Post by kergonath »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #6
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?

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...

Besieging a city is difficult and expensive. And it fixes a significant attacking army that has to monitor the whole city’s surroundings. They do fall every now and then, but the whole point is that it takes a disproportionate amount of power to do it.

Re: Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

#70

Post by paulryanrogers »

everybodyknows wrote: post #54
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.

The liberating value of unfenced lawns and yards?

If so I'd say it's great for playing as a kid. Kind of annoying for maintaining pets.

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