Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

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• Hacker News
• Awesome
  by michaelfm1211
• Is there anyway to actually read the article without paying?
  by anotheraccount9
• 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.
  by iammjm
• 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.
  by int_19h
• Coincidentally, this morning I happened to be in a hotel room where there was a TV-set showing some random TV channel, and there was a documentary showing that medieval-style fortifications have come back in the form of the new building of the US embassy in London, which is surrounded by a moat, presumably for fear of terrorists.
  by adrian_b
• The seat of the German parliament will be secured by a trench too (view the article for an image)

  https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/mitte/article228419835/Sch...

  by stephbook
• The UK built [1] castles in Afghanistan recently too.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

  by rjsw
• More of a Roman fort I'd say.
  by pigpop
• https://archive.is/wuHji
  by fsagx
• 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.

  by diego_moita
• 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.

  by everybodyknows
• "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."

  by ufocia
• > shrivelling state authority

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

  by everybodyknows
• 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?
  by 0xcafefood
• 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.

  by Spooky23
• 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...
  by cineticdaffodil
• It depends on who the offensive party is. Obviously it's not going to protect you from someone with air or artillery support. It still does wonders against roving militias of insurgents...
  by delfinom
• I suspect people are motivated by the desire not not catch stray bullets more than dissuade a concerted attack.
  by CuriouslyC
• 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.
  by AngryData
• 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.
  by int_19h
• 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, vs any sort of troop concentration or high value vehicles like tanks, worth targeting how things are evolving
  by dukeofdoom
• > I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls.

  Yes, but people will also say that "Security through obscurity is not security" and then in the same breath sneer derisively at how leaving ssh on port 22 is just amateur hour stuff.

  by ErroneousBosh
• 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 appear again.

  by dist-epoch
• Not everyone has bombers. There are other examples of relatively recent use of forts. This apparently withstood an army with artillery but lacking bombers for 50 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_Fort
  by graemep
• The article is more talking about landscape fortifications like trenches, ramparts, moats, and berms that slow down trucks.
  by jubilanti
• 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.

  by jjk166
• 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.

  by adrian_b
• ISIS-style soldiers usually have light-weaponry because they need to be mobile. Having heavy artillery or bombers will make them an easy target for an organized army which they are very not equipped to fight. Their advantage is in there ability to hit in random unprotected areas with little damage but to do it constantly and unpredictably.
  by csomar
• 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.

  by reillyse
• ACOUP, which is shared on HN regularly, has a series on fortifications too: https://acoup.blog/2021/12/31/collections-fortification-part...
  by red_admiral