Imagine you are walking down a dark alleyway, alone, at night. Suddenly, the menacing music starts and the fog-machine turns on. You spin around and see, coming out of the fog toward you, a ${whatever} clutching a sharp knife that’s already dripping blood from previous use.
Since you’re a strategic genius you:
- Use the battlefield geography to your advantage by running into the cloud of fog and cower behind a dumpster while calling in an air strike.
- Take the fight to the enemy by charging toward them and shooting them in the face with a death-beam from your Tactical Flashlight(tm).
- Ask them politely to stay where they are, and spend 15 years building a wall across the alley out of Freedom Bricks(r) (formerly known as “cinder block”)
[Due to budgetary constraints, “all of the above” is not a valid answer]
We trust that our point is clear; when the pace of an engagement is such that you’re in a situation some might call an “emergency” then a response that might take a decade or more is categorically off the menu of options for anyone who wishes to claim the title of “Strategic Genius.” Emergency response is an art-form with a great deal of overlap into the military arts. The entire art of war is a matter of knowing when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away, and when to run. If your enemy is in the field before you, maneuvering, you do not have time to “build a wall” – even the famous wall the Spartans built at Thermopylae was not much of a wall; what made it defensible was the Spartans atop it. Wall-building is not a tactical response to anything: fortification is a modification of the strategic landscape.
Bronze age ring fort, Killarney Ireland (mjr, 2004)
This brings us to another crucial point about wall-building, other than that it is slow. It still requires manpower. The ring-fort (illustrated) would have been pretty difficult to assault, had it been filled with angry, defensive celts with spears and swords. Once it was uninhabited, it was easy to go over or around. Similarly, when the French built the famous Maginot Line of defenses to keep the Germans out, it turned out to be too thinly manned to put up enough resistance. The mistake the French made at the Maginot line was that they forgot that walls are not a static defense in their own right; they are what you can fight an active defense from. Shortly after WWII the Maginot line was thoroughly looted and became a curiousity and pissoir for the locals. The Irish ring-fort is probably quite a bit lower than it used to be, because its rocks were used by generations of local farmers to make stone fences, houses, bridges, etc.
Unless a wall is manned, a patient person can just climb over it. Unless a wall is manned, a strategic genius with a back-hoe can make a great big hole in it. What makes a wall a strategic consideration is the Spartans on it, not its mere existence.
It’s so nice to be back home; a lot of stuff has piled up in the last two weeks that I need to get to. Instead of doing that, though, I’m heading to the shop to make some metal dust. Because life’s too short.
Wasn’t it Sun Tzu? Who said you should put a barrier between you and your opponent. Well, you could take off your coat and throw it on the ground between you and your opponent, or you could move sideways so that there is a chair between you and your opponent. etc.
Pretty sure Sun Tzu never said – “build a wall, it’s the *only* way”. And that presupposes your opponent can’t get airline tickets.
They didn’t need to build a wall at Thermopylae. They used a natural formation (the “hot gates” in Greek), which was on high ground and served as a chokepoint between the coast and the interior. That’s pretty much what they did at the (naval) battle of Artemesium, which was at the same time, since the narrow straights gave them some protection against flanking maneuvers and such. No accident that they were at the same time — it was a coordinated effort to pull together a larger-scale defense in an emergency, in which the combined land and naval forces could from a distance attempt to protect one another from being overwhelmed. (Results were mixed, but in any case, you can say it was a good sporting try.) As you suggest, in both cases, they could quickly take advantage of the geography, which they knew well, without needing to build anything. Interestingly, the Spartans rather famously didn’t build city walls around Sparta, even though they fit the stereotype of fascist xenophobes who ought to be building walls around everything.
Also, it’s a nice story and so forth, but of course they actually lost at Thermopylae. I mean, the defense did in fact fail, so if you want to count it as a classic example of something “defensible,” it would be a little odd, since it wouldn’t be because their defense was successful. Maybe it was something about the Spartans, or it was all of their body oil if I’m to take the movie seriously. But even with all that oil, they still lost.
Depends on the wall, maybe. The battle of Alesia is kind of an unusual example, but it did work for Caesar to build a second wall around it, while he was trying to besiege the interior wall.
…
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the “emergency” thing, for another set of reasons. It’s not just that the response of building a wall (expanding what we already have at the border) is a ridiculously slow way to deal with something that’s supposedly urgent. That’s not even the right way to think about it — as if he were doing a bad job of defending us from the baddies — because it’s also true that there is nothing new to report about our situation, other than the fact that Trump is currently president and wants to make his dipshit supporters happy. We’ve been allies and trade partners with Mexico, generally on very good terms, etc., since WWII … before that the history is sort of messy, but the five-word version is “we were the bad guys” (unsurprisingly). There is no enemy to speak of and no emergency, other than the one we created in November of 2016.
It was Tactical Body Oil™ of course. It really should’ve worked, as long as they followed the directions on the package. Sure, they could’ve taken advantage of their armor which was generally much better the typical Persian’s, but why do that when they just got a huge shipment of that stuff?
Oh and yes, they would obviously fly around, doing spinning roundhouse kicks and all sorts of swashbuckling maneuvers like they’re in an old pirate movie. They weren’t a small but well-armored force, staying in formation in their relatively secure location. They were fucking ninjas and just did whatever they hell they wanted. Once the fighting started, they forgot everything about their entire plan and just went into full berserker mode. Obviously.
1b: I call an airstrike on my own position and hold fast, occupying the attacker until we’re both obliterated. Works great in strategy games, but I’m sure that’s not the only place where that’s been tried.
4: Thanks to my 120k$ ASOTV Battle Visor MK XII I was able to spot the attackers from three miles away and called in a cheap, cost-effective artillery strike before I got there. I gingerly clamber over the broken remains of houses, the people who lived in them and what, possibly, used to be a hostile threat. We will never know for sure but that won’t be reflected in the reports. Once I have left the carnage behind I resume my carefree saunter home while listening to the looped lamentations of my enemies using the BV XII’s high fidelity sound system.
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This post reminded me of the ‘debate’ between Sam Harris and Bruce Schneier about airport security. One point of contention was about a generic security door. As I recall, Harris insisted that a locked door would be “secure” while Schneier pointed out repeatedly that is wasn’t, and that the first question should be why there needed to be a door in the first place.
There is no such thing as a truly passive – and hence cheap – defence. Just ask the Dutch with their dikes, which I’m sure will last forever. After all, there aren’t any clever people on the other side trying to de-engineer those. Just the implacable sea.
Still, if we wanted to put a positive spin on things we might consider The Wall (TM) this generation’s* Apollo Programme. At 6 bn$ it’s cheap for a comparable national project, but just you wait until after the budget overruns and trump** level mismanagement hit. It may just beat the Apollo price tag at a fraction of the returns. Like the space programme it’ll employ thousands of people for decades to come, has already spawned a new agency that has quickly attained world-wide reknown, and everybody will talking about it for a long time. To be fair, “Oh, wow, they’re still trying to build that wall” isn’t quite as flattering as, “Oh, wow, they’ve sent people around the moon” but at least it’s something new and original. No doubt the world will also benefit from a myriad of fence-related tech spin-offs in the years ahead.
*I’ll be honest: I have never not been unsure who that is.
**For reference, that’s two levels above ‘epic’.
The Ministry of Truth says “emergency at the border” is doublespeak and you must not concern yourself with such things. It could also be considered an “alternative fact” which, again, you must not question.
Glad you’re safely home. Enjoy the metal dust!
This is pure political theater. The main concern isn’t whether a wall will be effective at addressing an imaginary “emergency”, but whether it will be effective at getting Trump’s supporters to continue to support him.
There’s also the question of why it didn’t become an emergency until he lost control of the House of Reps. He had two whole years when he could have had pretty much whatever funding he wanted.
Fortunately, there is no historical precedent for a big-mouth populist declaring a national emergency on spurious grounds and then misusing the resultant emergency powers…
komarov@#5:
4: Thanks to my 120k$ ASOTV Battle Visor MK XII I was able to spot the attackers from three miles away and called in a cheap, cost-effective artillery strike before I got there.
(looks at you suspiciously)
I have a Kobayashi Maru scenario, and I’m wondering if you know how to beat it.
@2: The Spartans built an improvised wall at Thermopylae, I think Marcus blithely assumed we had all read our Herodotus ;)
On the other hand, Marcus flunks remembering-that-the-problem-with-the-Maginot-line-was-that-you-could-go-around-it class.
Ketil Tveiten@#10:
Marcus flunks remembering-that-the-problem-with-the-Maginot-line-was-that-you-could-go-around-it class.
I didn’t flunk that one. I was not just the pressure on the edge of Maginot: the Germans went right over it. The problem was not the Maginot line, it was the French army defending it.
You may want to read Montefiori’s Dunkirk if you want a good perspective on how horribly badly the French military was led, and responded. In many cases, French units displaced to the rear at the rumor of Germans in the vicinity. [wc] There are plenty of other books on the topic – I’ve probably read a half-dozen – but Montefiore’s is lovely and does a great job of evoking the chaos of the moment. Note that the reason the BEF had to decamp through Dunkirk was because the Germans had driven a wedge through the French, i.e.: gone over the Maginot, as well as around it. The history of that time has, until recently, been slanted toward “German brilliance” and away from “French incompetence.”
komarov@#5 writes:
Brilliant! This is without question the solution. If we can fake a moon landing, surely we can fake a wall.
I’m not sure I’m with you there, from what information I can find the Germans didn’t cross into the Maginot-infested area until after the fall of Paris, and then coming at it from behind as well; the resistance ending mostly because of the capitulation and everyone giving up, rather than weakness (although not entirely).
Though to be sure, the French army was pretty garbage at the time.
Back when I went to school, I learned about Eastern front during WWI (from the perspective of Latvian soldiers who were part of Russian army), and the incompetence of Russians seemed incredible to learn about. They even struggled to supply soldiers with adequate footwear, never mind weapons. Back then I assumed that Russians during WWI must have been outliers in how incredibly incompetent their military was. And then, as I got older and learned more about military history, I kept running into more and more stories of military incompetence. These stories popped up all over the place whenever I learned about any war. Now I have come to expect incompetence as the default state whenever I learn about some war. It’s stories of competence that seem unusual and surprising for me now.
The Spartans built an improvised wall at Thermopylae, I think Marcus blithely assumed we had all read our Herodotus ;)
Yeah, not Frank Miller. There was also some hypothesizing that the hot springs were diverted into the battlefield, which sounds … um, unlikely. Hot springs water would hardly create much of a barrier for infantry, it’d just get their feet muddy and when the time came for them to spear you, they’d be pissed off.
Frank Miller’s 300 hypothesizes that the Spartans built a large wall (including using dead bodies, which is absurd) but there’s no indication that they did anything of the sort. Spartans would not show up on a battlefield and immediately exhaust themselves hauling around lots of rocks. Of course, if they were Romans, they would have erected a log palisade fairly quickly, which they could because they were trained to do that and were damn good at it. If you think about it, though, Spartans were great at fighting in phalanxes – close formation. If you have even a small obstacle that breaks your attackers’ charge and makes them have to step over it, you’ve broken their shield-wall effortlessly. A “wall” 3 feet high would screw up a phalanx a bit – not a lot, but “a bit” might help. And, in a battle like Themopylae, “a bit” was not something the Spartans would waste.
Curt Sampson@#12:
If we can fake a moon landing, surely we can fake a wall.
Actual unretouched photo of the wall:
consciousness razor@#2:
Depends on the wall, maybe. The battle of Alesia is kind of an unusual example, but it did work for Caesar to build a second wall around it, while he was trying to besiege the interior wall.
Yes, there’s always Alesia. Caesar was a greater strategic genius than anyone. I know that because he said it in a book he wrote!
Joking aside, Caesar had the advantage that the legions traveled with quick wall-building gear and had a lot of experience throwing up really effective temporary palisades. I’m not trying to defend my main point, but I’d say that those are definitely “tactical walls” compared to the great big stone ones like the Chinese built. Of course what made the Roman palisades so deadly were the incredible hard-ass warriors behind the palisade.
[clarification: the “temporary” walls Ceasar’s troops built at Alesia are unbelievable, but knowing how Caesar fought, I believe him. Moats and mantraps? 10 foot palisades? Killing zones with planned fire-lanes? That’s Caesar’s idea of a casual wall.]
On the subject of France and the War, youtube tank guy The Chieftain has a new video talking about their tanks, but mostly about their doctrine and such; at least the first twenty minutes here are relevant to “what was the deal with the Maginot line” (He doesn’t actually get around to talking much about tanks until the half-way mark, if that’s not interesting to you): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqoPZK6gyao
Ketil Tveiten@#18:
a new video talking about their tanks
The Somua, presumably? They perform OK if you maneuver them aggressively, which the French decidedly did not. Back in high school the wargaming club did a big do-up of the Saar Offensive [wik] and it turned into a Frenchkrieg, because the other guys who were playing the French used German tactics. [Edit: most wargame designers factor French command incompetence into the game’s rules by fudging unit responsiveness or maneuver speed. Those are ways of reliably kneecapping the French, but they also point up that the problem was, really, with the French military’s command structure. If you allow the French to maneuver like they would in modern warfare, they don’t suck.]
Most people don’t know that France attacked Germany in 1939, with the aim of opening a second front to relieve pressure on Poland. Instead, it relieved them of credibility. Note, too, that the French should have realized from that experience that they had serious problems with their command structure. The Germans certainly noticed.
I’ll check out that video now.
I guess we’re it. I wonder how it’ll turn out.
Re: Marcus Ranum (#9):
Kobayashi Maru? I thought that was solved ages ago with the introduction of MAD. If you’re already lugging around tons of antimatter wherever you go it would be silly to go down with your ship and not take anyone with you.
“Either we’ll save those people or you and I will be joining them in hell!!! Ensign, close the channel … and, er, wipe the spittle off the bridge monitor…”
Besides, I always thought that scenario was more than a little contrived – duh – and unrealistic. Why the hell would you go anywhere with anything less than a fleet, or whatever the space equivalent of a carrier group is? How are other species supposed to respect you if you bring anything less than total overkill* to the table?
*My motto: ‘There’s no such thing as overkill.’
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Re: Curt Sampson (#12):
To paraphrase That Mitchell and Webb look, people are bound to ask how we built the wall. So before we can fake the wall we’ll need to build enough giant bulldozers and trucks to make the claim believable. And once we have those it’ll probably be cheaper to just build the wall rather than faking all the evidence.
I do approve of Marcus’ first draft (#16), though. It practically screams patriotism and freedom to the high heavens.
Make it so!