{"id":12273,"date":"2012-08-13T14:43:13","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T14:43:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=12273"},"modified":"2012-08-14T04:53:42","modified_gmt":"2012-08-14T04:53:42","slug":"rethinking-fortification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=12273","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Fortification"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Robb<\/strong> <\/a>now has a Facebook<\/strong> page for Global Guerrillas<\/strong><\/a>, where he posts quick snippets of big ideas. It seems to be a replacement for his old, informal, personal blog which served a similar purpose some years back. In any event, John had a spectacular picture of Mexico City<\/strong> and an intriguingly dystopian caption<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Mexico City.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Future of warfare. Megacities + millions of drones.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I wandered into a Mexican shantytown once, back in the 1990’s . Not sure I would care to repeat the experience at the present time.<\/p>\n

Robb’s facebook post started me thinking. If drones of all sizes and functions become ubiquitous someday, it creates a great incentive for the powerful, at least to safeguard their privacy, to apply human ingenuity toward concealment, countermeasures and postmodern “citadels”.<\/p>\n

All the moreso, if “megacities’ are all girdled in vast seas of slums. Imagine the LA or London riots with 20 times the underclass population. The bloody experience of the New York City Draft Riots <\/a>during the Civil War taught the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age to support the building of public and private armories <\/a>to defend the gentle classes from the great uprising that never came.<\/p>\n

Fortification is something of a lost art, but it was up until recent history, a critical military capability. After castles went into a temporary decline with the advent of cannons blasting apart their high walls, post-renaissance architects redesigned European fortifications to endure the new bronze siege guns and defense again triumphed over offense. Military engineers like Vauban<\/a><\/strong> were more valuable than field marshals and kings staked their strategies on the strength of chains of fortifications and arsenals. \u00a0Obsolete by the time of the Napoleonic wars, massive fortresses nonetheless enjoyed a long twilight march to military irrelevance, ending in WWII with the\u00a0ignominious capture of Belgium’s mighty Eben-Emael<\/a><\/strong> fortress by 75 lightly armed Germans and the utter uselessness of the extremely expensive Maginot Line<\/a><\/strong> during the Battle of France.<\/p>\n

Fortification began to receive renewed interest as governments sought defensive measures<\/a> to allow their leadership to survive a nuclear attack<\/a>, such as the Cold War era secret bunkers for USG officials at Greenbrier <\/a>or Raven Rock<\/a>\u00a0or efforts by rogue dictatorships to build facilities carved deep into a mountain to protect their leadership or nuclear weapons<\/a> programs from American attack<\/a>. The ancient arms race of defense and offense continues with the designers of “bunker-busters”<\/a> as a peripheral military activity.<\/p>\n

Governments and occasionally corporations and superwealthy individuals will continue to build and tweak these doomsday bunkers but as strategic investments they do not offer very good ROI. For one thing, if your national leadership is cornered fifty stories underground, it will be little comfort to you and your fellow citizens as the nuclear bombs are exploding; the game is pretty much over at that point. Secondly, the ultimate risk they are hedging against is far more remote and the benefits infinitesimal\u00a0compared to what rethinking fortification as a concept would do to minimize more mundane and probable risks faced by the rest of us.<\/p>\n

A great fortress conjures the idea of impregnability and, ironically, usually achieves eternal fame for falling or being breached – the walls of Constantinople<\/a><\/strong>, \u00a0the Great Wall of China<\/a><\/strong>, Masada<\/a>, Alamut<\/a><\/strong>, Murud-Janjira<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and the aforementioned Maginot Line. “Impregnability” is a misnomer, what a good fortification really does is raise operational costs for adversaries<\/strong><\/em>, hopefully high enough to discourage them from making the effort to attack in the first place. Raising costs for those who bear us ill-will by adaptation and a priori<\/em> design should be our paradigm.<\/p>\n

What are the primary risks we will face in coming years as individuals and societies? Erosion of privacy<\/strong> and the security<\/strong> of our persons, property and data at the hands of criminals, avaricious elites, government and private surveillance and bouts of civil disorder, all in a number of forms. For example<\/p>\n