Ep 176: David Betz on Modern Fortifications
David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London and author of The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century
Aaron MacLean:
Today's episode with David Betz defies easy categorization, but it's one of my favorites of the year so far. If the conventional wisdom is true that we are back in a period where the defensive form of war has an advantage over the offense, all other things being equal, well, how does that actually work, and what are its actual consequences? Let's get into it.
Aaron MacLean:
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Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, David Betz, professor of War in the Modern World, in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Center, author of several books, most recently, the Guarded Age, Fortification in the 21st century. David, thank you so much for making the time.
David Betz:
Very welcome. I'm glad to be here again.
Aaron MacLean:
So, let's start with a very big picture question, which in a sense is what your book is about. What are we talking about when we're talking about fortification in the year 2025? I think of forts and I think of things that are old-fashioned and proved irrelevant in World War II, if not in certain respects in World War I. Forts are vulnerable to modern firepower, they can be jumped over, jumped on, gone around. But why a whole book? What's going on?
David Betz:
Well, let me explain really. Guarded Age is a book in three parts, essentially, with one central message, which does speak to your question, which is that fortification, which is an activity that not just popularly, but actually generally within the strategic studies community is usually considered to be quaintly historical, plays a role in human affairs today that is as great as any of the castellated ages of the past that you just mentioned or that you might imagine. It's in three parts because it really started off as a work of military strategy, which is my intellectual comfort zone. That's where I'm coming from.
And it kicked off when I was working specifically on the war in Afghanistan, which involved a lengthy stay there in 2009, summer of 2009, and I couldn't help but observe while I was in Afghanistan as a civilian advisor, I must point out, was the way in which the war was being fought, which was strikingly static in its nature. It was mostly being conducted from fortified outposts, many of which were based upon the fortifications of long gone empires and invading armies over the years, going back as far as Alexander the Great.
And I just thought that was important, because everybody observed it. Anybody who has been involved in any of the expeditionary campaigns of the War on Terror will be familiar with Hesco bastion. It is to contemporary conflict what the Huey helicopter was to Vietnam.
So, I thought that was important and I wanted to explain it and to say to my peers, my fellows in the strategic studies, "Hey, guys, look, this is a part of our subject area or had been going back as far as there has been the study of war, which we're missing and there's something going on that's pretty profound here."
Also, what happened was when I looked into the literature itself, I realized to my surprise that the last time that anybody had written about fortifications as a subject of military practice that not only had a past, but a future, was a hundred years ago, actually slightly over a hundred years ago. So, I wanted to explain that.
The second and third parts of the book came gradually when I got home essentially, and it occurred, I came to realize that the phenomenon which I'd been observing in the military sphere of hunkering down, of building walls, of protecting perimeters, of physically channeling flows of people and of things with physical barriers, wasn't just in this military sphere. It was everywhere.
So, the second and the third parts of the book occurred gradually to me after I had returned home and I came to realize that the phenomenon I'd been describing in the military sphere was not confined to that. That same phenomenon of hunkering down of building walls, securing perimeters, building gates, attempting to physically channel and to filter the flows of people and things was happening everywhere.
And I like to say it's a bit like in the film the Matrix, when the characters start to see the code and everything, I just started to see fortification everywhere. So, the second part of the book came essentially to be about the urban landscape. I happened to be, I work in Central London and I live in the UK obviously. And so I wanted to write about what I was seeing in my daily life, which was pretty extraordinary I thought.
And I got very interested in urban portals, notably airports, railway stations and the like, which are now intensely physically guarded and physically reinforced structures in ways I can happily describe in detail. But just to say for the point now, these are highly fortified structures like medieval barbicans just for the 21st century. And I came to find as I think people have observed pretty widely in generally life, that guardedness as I describe it, had become the default setting of urban life, had come to define the urban condition in the 21st century.
Much of this effort is designed very ingeniously, it must be said, to blend in, to not be visible. And so your observation of the quaintness or the ahistoris, an anachronistic quality of fortification that many people feel comes in fact from one of the primary design considerations of contemporary fortification, which is that they not look like fortifications while serving precisely as fortifications always have done. So, I became very interested in that, and I was surprised, I must admit, at the scale of the industry involved in this process, which by now is an industry that is worth many, many, many tens of billions of dollars annually.
It's also, I just thought, simply very interesting. A lot of this engineering effort echoes sometimes deliberately but often implicitly techniques and attitudes towards fortification that are centuries old that we can see in old architecture that is revisited and redesigned, reformulated in modern designs. And I thought that said something about the persistence of certain ideas, certain elementals of the human condition, you might say, about urbanity, and well, about civilization, quality of our civilization today. I ended up reading a lot about and engaging with architecture, which was new for me, but also as was art, as well as geography, urban studies, policing, government regulation, and a whole host of other matters that felt very connected in exciting but also complicated and sometimes rather subtle ways.
The third part of the book came to be focused primarily on what I would call, I guess what I might call corporate fortification, but to some extent it's more than that. It's private, it's familial, even individual fortification efforts. But a large part of that book ended up concentrating on data centers, specifically data centers and other infrastructure, but most importantly the underlying electronic infrastructure that makes the so-called information age work. Of course, you might have noticed that when we talk about information age security or information security, often people think of... They're thinking of this very intangibly. They're thinking about stuff on their computer or bits and bytes. But all of that rests on physical infrastructure, very expensive, very energy demanding, stuff that is now very highly protected. Probably the most protected installations now on planet earth, accepting maybe the White House, maybe NORAD headquarters or Fort Knox, are data centers with virtually no people in them at all.
So, I started to write particularly about these intensely physically guarded and highly robust structures. But I looked into other things like fortified drug houses that was very interesting tangent to follow. It's not something that occurs to people in normal life, I would say, in normal walks of life, unless you're a drug user or a narco boss, in which case it is a big deal. It's a significant fraction of your corporate income, or sorry, your corporate outlay, if I can call it that.
I looked quite a bit at preppers as well, which is another surprisingly big enterprise in fortification and one that quite interestingly is not confined to any particular class. You see preppers occurring everywhere on the economic scale from the very poor, who often live in highly guarded conditions, although in that case looking actually quite medieval often. Just walk the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, for example, and you'll see fortified compound after fortified compound, right up to the very, very rich who are investing heavily in this.
So ultimately, the conceptual framework here, and I'll just conclude a long answer to a very short question, but ultimately the conceptual framework I ended up employing was strategical. I would suggest in the sense of it being about interdependent choice, which is fundamentally what strategy is, and about having to resolve or to find the ideal balance between a number of competing desires, such as between security and mobility or guardedness and liberty or strengthening and the aesthetic quality of the environment or simply hunkering down.
Ultimately, I think it was the aesthetic dimension, the tension between aesthetics and security that I found personally most intriguing. But it must be said in this subject area, you can never get very far away from money. And so I ended up talking a lot about economics.
Aaron MacLean:
There's a lot there and I want to get to Afghanistan in a second, but first, I'd like to spend a moment on your reflection that in a less sophisticated way that I have not worked out for myself. I've also had that if you just look around you, the strategic character of the urban landscape in particular, maybe landscapes more broadly, is actually apparent if you know what to look for. You have this lovely reflection in the book and I'm probably going to mispronounce the name of the village. Is it Medmenham that...
David Betz:
Yeah, Medmenham.
Aaron MacLean:
Oh, I'm close. I was very close and ask you to speak a bit about that, but I live in the Washington, DC, area. I live in the Potomac River Valley just south of DC, which even when I start talking like that, it's a weird way to talk that drives my family crazy. There were several defensive perimeters around Washington during the Civil War and one of the forts, Fort Scott, is now a park, and if you walk around it, you can see the remnants of the defensive berms and such in the trees next to the grassy field.
But other than that, and aside from the name of the park, you have to look for it, otherwise you wouldn't really notice it was there. And it's on a spur of high ground that juts out, that narrows the plane of the river valley on the Virginia side, and it's very clear if you have military training, what the engagement area was meant to be and you can just see exactly what the point of this thing was. It's all gone today, but if you go over and you get on a boat in the Potomac, and I'm not revealing state secrets here, because anyone can see it.
There are anti-aircraft missile batteries on the shore of the Potomac because you drift up towards downtown or sail up towards downtown Washington. So just wanted to say that that passage in the book struck me as a very true one and reassured me that I wasn't a complete crazy person for sometimes focusing on the same things when I look around.
David Betz:
No, you're not at all crazy. And I think if any of your listeners have had a moment of their own like that you've described yourself of just reflecting on the environment around you and asking yourself the very good question, why is that there? Not just what is it, but sometimes what is it, but also why is it there and you can see these traces of the past.
That's what really intrigued me, and once you get into reading... The archeologists have this term stratigraphy, which is basically the way in which they look at the ground as they dig through it, they're digging down through the cultural stratigraphy of a place. And I was impressed by that idea, and I started to talk about what I called strategic stratigraphy, a way in which the landscape... You can see that the landscape and the physical structures in a place have been shaped by strategic choice.
And oddly enough, that passage you mentioned about Medmenham, this idea crystallized for me. Medmenham for your listeners, undoubtedly very, very few will have heard of it, it's a tiny little village located about 25 miles from the center of London. It's picture-postcard, bucolic English countryside village essentially. It's about as quiet as you can get. It's right on the banks of the Thames in between the river and where the Thames Valley climbs up into the Chilterns Hills. So, it's really naturally gorgeous and peaceful place.
I used to go there to walk my dog. I also used to go there because one of the great British strategists, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, I knew he had lived there and was ultimately buried there, so I thought one day I'd go and see his grave, which is in a churchyard at the crossroads, across the street from it is a pub, it's about, let's call it 600, 700 years old, and diagonally across the street from that is the site of an Iron Age hill fort that dates back something around 3000 years but was in active use up until about the time of the Roman invasion or perhaps shortly before.
Just standing in that one place on the coincidentally located grave of this British strategist, you're looking at a pub which was the site of an English Civil War battle, which is actually not recorded to history, but we know occurred because when they renovated the pub, they dug out a number of civil war-era cannonballs. So, they know there was some kind of skirmish there. What happened or what was it about, they didn't know.
The Iron Age hill fort, that's probably to my mind, the hill fort is the foundational strategic moment in human civilization. It's the first thing that human beings do when they settle down to practice agriculture is they find some high place or some protectable place in their local environment, and they dig a ditch around it to try and protect themselves and their livestock and their tools from the more powerful, more numerous, probably more vigorous nomads who are still living around them.
And then thirdly, even the church itself, the church itself was, oddly enough, it was nearly bombed out during the Second World War, probably because a German bomber had been aiming at an installation that was actually more than a mile away, which was an RAF base where the photographic interpretation and some other command facilities were located. Anyway, they missed it by a mile, so the bomb landed just opposite the church and blew out the windows, which is why they had to be... You can see a few places.
Anyway, I could go on. The point here is that certainly in England and in most places, from the sounds of it Washington, and I'm going to guess practically every place where human beings have been on our planet, if you are equipped with the knowledge to observe what you're seeing, there's a huge amount of story there and much of it relates to conflict. Our landscape is deliberately shaped by strategic matters.
And finally, just to conclude the point and the whole premise of that vignette really was this didn't stop happening. It didn't stop happening in the 20th century, it's still happening today. It's not really happening very much in Medmenham right now, it must be said, but there are other places where it's happening very, very intensely, and we shouldn't think otherwise.
Aaron MacLean:
You speak about your experiences in Afghanistan and I was very amused that you opened the book with this anecdote about KAF, Kandahar Airfield, where I spent my last day in Afghanistan, around the same time, actually, within a year of your anecdote. I was an infantry officer, and I'd been with my unit in a pretty rough area of Helmand province for a whole deployment, and then we were leaving, and Kandahar, as you can imagine, you got to see a bit of the rest of the place.
Kandahar seemed like civilization compared to where we had been, paved streets and good food and milkshakes, as you point out. And I remember standing in line for chow the one night we were there and it was me, another lieutenant and our company first sergeant, I want to say, and the siren goes off and all the airmen, it was mostly airmen who were also in the line, go diving into gutters and stuff. The other two Marines and I sort of look at each other with bemused smirks on our faces like, "Oh a siren, what does that have to do?"
We've just been through a lot. What are we going to... And as we're smirking at one another and wordlessly making fun of everyone around us, kaboom, this 107 hits, I mean really like a hundred meters away, uncomfortably close, uncomfortably close to have not taken any precautionary measures, and that led to a social question after what do you do now? It's gone off. Do you still take cover? In the end, we just cut the line.
To your comment on the static nature of the war, the Marines, I think on several occasions throughout our time in Helmand had this experience where our culture was this sort of maneuverist culture, where at least implicitly if not seriously, but as a kind of question of attitude, the defense has looked down upon. I mean we study it, we do it, you can't not do it, and at a serious level you reflect that there's really no difference between defense and offense.
One goes on offense in order to achieve things that are ultimately going to be static in some ways. One goes static to prepare to go on offense, it's fluid, but nevertheless, culturally Marines, if you ask any Marine, the correct answer is you'd rather attack than defend. And yet, we'd get to areas where the successful operational concept was quite clearly static or one that involved a lot of static positions. And it was hard for Marines sometimes to accept that.
In the Sangin area, this wasn't my unit, it was a famous case of the Brits having been in that area and having built a bunch of outposts, very small like squad level outposts almost in some cases I think. Marines come in, the first Marine battalion to come into the area and say, "That's not how we're going to operate. We're going to go out and brawl. We'll go out and find these guys."
And they pull all these outposts out, and what they realize pretty quickly is if you don't have 24/7 observation on a spot, an intersection, whatever, well, then the bad guys can do what they want there and that includes plant bombs, plant IEDs, which was really the main threat. And I experienced something similar down in my area, in Marjah, where that same insight, if you don't have 24/7 observation, you're just giving the bad guys a lot of space to play with.
And I would notice the Afghan soldiers who we would work with, they did not want to go out and do big patrols and searches and mobile operations. They wanted to stay on post, which again are attitudinal... We were of prejudiced against that or looked down our nose at that.
That seems lazy, but the truth is if you pushed on the open door of what they wanted to do and help them organize a whole series of posts all over the place and demanded that they do a good job at that as opposed to trying to force them into doing things that they actually didn't really want to do and were particularly suited to, you could achieve progress towards security, local progress towards security. And this was certainly, I can't speak for the entire Marine Corps obviously, but speaking for myself as a young officer at the time, this was a strange lesson that I learned on the spot that I had not really learned in training.
David Betz:
I could go on a lot about the forts in Afghanistan, believe you me, but really my favorite one is one that you might recognize. I did talk about it in the book, but you might recognize because it was a US Marine outpost. It was located, it was about, let's say, about five kilometers outside of the Maiwand district area. Maiwand, which is located, it's in Kandahar province, but it's right on the border right where borders with Helmand province.
And the Afghan National Highway One, which is effectively the nation's big highway, which does a circular route around the country, runs through Maiwand district center and alongside this Marine outpost. And I came across this, because as I said, as a civilian, I don't have any proper war stories, but as a civilian, it was one of the few days where we were led out into the wild in Afghanistan. Now admittedly, we're very heavily protected bodyguards, like armored guys all over the place.
But I really wanted to go to Maiwand because I wanted to visit the battlefield of the battle of Maiwand, which occurred during the second Anglo-Afghan war not too far from there. They wouldn't let me do that because the truth of the matter was that they had no confidence in their ability to secure a soft-bodied person like me outside of the urban center or outside of an armored vehicle. Anyway, that's tangential to the story.
There's this outpost, it's located on an outcropping right next to the highway, maybe let's call it a hundred meters in height, probably not quite that high. And to look at it from a distance, it didn't look like much except it stuck out, because it was otherwise in a flat plane with the mountains behind. And you could see there was pile of Hesco bastion and looking ramshackle and then a big antenna sticking out of the top of it with Stars and Stripes and what looked like a "don't tread on me" banner or something like that, flying from it.
And there was probably maybe a squad or a platoon of Marines up there. I was intrigued by that and looked at it through the binos of the officer who was with me, and you could see even at a distance that it was built on the foundations of something else. So, I looked into it. It turns out that this is an Alexandrian fortress.
It was a fortress built by Alexander the Great when his army marched through Afghanistan on its way to India. Highway one, which is essentially a branch of the old Silk Road, ran right there, and he had located a detachment, let's call it a platoon, of his Greek army, and hey, I do like the Marines, but do the Marines have much to brag about against the army of Alexander the Great? I mean these guys marched for 4,000 miles to get there. These were pretty hardcore guys.
What were they doing? They were stuck up on the top of that outcrop doing exactly what those US Marines were doing 2,500 years later, which was observing what went along that highway, flying the flag up their high and I think the antenna, they were probably repeating, radio transmissions, from along that route. I liked how circular it was. I liked how in essence what has changed there?
Those were probably 25-year-old... Who knows? They were young soldiers. They probably didn't like being stuck up on that rock. They might've thought, gee, we should be down in India with Alexander right now, kicking ass, taking names, but here we are stuck up on this rock, but this is a vital military function. If you don't have security on your supply route, well, you're toast.
When you look into it, many of the outposts which NATO utilized in Afghanistan were outposts that the Soviets had used, before that the British had used, before that the Mongols had used, so far and so forth. There's a certain logic to where these things go and it's apparent... This isn't peculiar to Afghanistan. This is apparent in any place in the world where you look at how armies have attempted to conduct pacification campaigns, which is a lesson you can apply to the US landscape.
Just take out a map of the continental United States and circle with a marker every town that starts with the word fort and ask yourself why is that there? How did it get there? What was it for? The logic strategically and operationally is not dissimilar. Actually, it's fundamentally the same.
Aaron MacLean:
But let's linger on what's changed, which a lot of your book does. You ask about this outpost at Maiwand. Well, what's really different here? And I think you make a very strong case that at some core logical level the answer is not much, but of course we know that in other ways a lot has changed. The need for you make the case you just did on the show you do in your book that the need for security and thus for the physical elements of security are as old as politics itself, literally as old as cities.
But technology has made some leaps and bounds since Jericho. I was just in Israel late last year studying what had happened on the 7th and the failure of the defensive complex down there around Gaza and then also studying the Israeli success and overcoming the Hezbollah defensive complex in southern Lebanon. There are ways in which, I mean, there was a quite literal fence between Gaza and Israel.
There was something similar to a wall, but there was a conceptual way, and this is a point you make in the book where the whole complex was a kind of wall, but just a much more highly functional wall than anyone could have built 50 or a hundred years earlier. Of course, it still failed. It was still overcome as a consequence of very old strategic tricks and strategic failures on one side and the other.
I want to narrow this down so that we can tackle it in a few minutes as opposed to a few days, what are the most important technological issues to focus on in the evolution of fortification, the evolution of this physical manifestation for the need for security in the defense here in the 21st century?
David Betz:
That's a good question, and so part of the answer you've already observed when you talked about the balance between security and movement, you have to have a base from which to operate and it's all well and good to say, "Well, we're going to be very active and mobile and move around and so on and so forth."
But you still need a place to sleep. You still need a place to eat, to resupply, to locate certain military functions that don't really work very well if you're in the back of a truck or riding pinion on a motorcycle or hanging from a helicopter skid, or all the kind of Rambo stuff that people want to imagine themselves doing. So there always is this, it's not a tension, it's a partnership between fortification and maneuver. You need a base from which to maneuver, and that's always been the case.
So a medieval castle, for example, if you think of a medieval castle as essentially a patrol base. It's a base of operation for a relatively small force to patrol from and go back, so it can conduct the affairs that it needs to do that are low security for it in a safe place, but it can exert presence in a mobile way out to essentially a day's march and back. That all hasn't changed very much.
What I think has, certain obvious things have changed, is you have firstly the advent of air power, which isn't new. I mean we're talking, depending how you think of it, you're talking a thing that is a couple of centuries old, let's just say a hundred years, that the sky has been immediately relevant and ultimately have become the Sine qua non of the Western way of war, so that's a big issue.
Then more recently, the way in which the skies have become kind of, what's the word I might use? Democratized in the way in which low cost commercial drones and jerry-rigged drones have made the airspace a great utility even for actually for rather low grade actors, who can use it for command and control and reconnaissance purposes and to some degree for attack and what now we see to be very significant, very significant ways. So from a fortification perspective, that's I think a key development there is the very much greater need for top cover.
Now, this is not a new development. That's why fortification went underground a hundred years ago, largely through the influence of heavy artillery, but air power really reinforced that. That is still the case. If you're building these things nowadays, top cover certainly concealment and ideally protective cover is very, very important.
Now, if you accept that, then there's a pretty tremendous need for digging potential. You need to be able to dig super fast and super well, and I think the armies which are most serious about war fighting today have had in very intense efforts in increasing their military engineering capabilities, specifically their digging and their earth moving capabilities, which is why the IDF, for example, moves at the speed of D9 bulldozer.
That's the mainline merc of a main battle tank probably drive at 50 miles an hour or more, but that's not the speed of movement. Speed of movement is of a bulldozer and that's because of what I've just described. Russia and Ukraine, Russia particularly has extremely outsized... Always had an outsize engineering military engineering capability, which it has subsequently substantially enhanced.
Ukraine has tried to keep up with this, but its resources are less, and it must be said that the West does very little to offer. The West is, relatively speaking, very anemic in engineering capability for reasons probably that we don't need to go into specifically for the moment. But empirically it is the case that it is relatively speaking, relatively anemic in engineering.
So, that is the state of play at the moment is you need to be able to dig very rapidly and you need to almost always have top cover. Where I think the future is going pretty close and we can already see this actually, if you hang around military engineering types or go to specifically to trade shows where people are trying to sell things to the military engineers, you can see all kinds of developments in prefabricated installations, so prefab fortifications where essentially you can direct almost instant fortresses.
Usually these are some that you fold up essentially that are kind of Ikea, big Ikea constructions, big others that are a bit more like Lego preformed concrete, but also preformed installations that are preformed from other materials, particularly materials that are designed to be light, so you don't overburden your logistical system. And intriguingly out on the cutting edge of this are people saying, look, people who are looking at essentially 3D printing of fortresses in place, either underground or sometimes within on the inside of existing structures.
And in this case, essentially what they're using is a fluid pumpable polymerized concrete. It's not just normal concrete, but it's concrete that has... Let's just call it a plastic in it. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it means that you can squirt this stuff like out of a toothpaste tube and build structures according to what the terrain or your specific needs require in place. And then with the idea being one that this means that you end up building structures that are better designed for what they're supposed to do in a specific place.
It's a bit like building a beehive, to be honest, if you think about it that way. It's rather organic. It also means that logistically instead of shipping in big blocks or preform that may or may not be appropriate or you're shipping in a bunch of different items. Essentially what you're sending in is a handful of machines for squirting this stuff, the guys who know how to operate it, and the precursors which would fit in basically...
Actually, much of it you can make in place. You can simply, you've got certain precursors, add water, squirt it out, make fortifications. That's where I think things are... Well, I can't say that as far as I know there's no army in the world that has adopted this yet, but I can tell you that there are a bunch of engineering firms, often with lengthy experience in the civil sector, which are now looking at what's happening in Israel and in Ukraine primarily with a view to developing innovations like this.
Because they can read the tea leaves, they can read what the, or they think they can read where the military engineering needs are going, and I find that intriguing. I think they're onto something.
Aaron MacLean:
The theme of our conversation the last time, about a year ago, was the potency of the defense and of the physical manifestations of the defense that are really our subject of conversation today as a part of the whole. We were talking about the failure of the 2023 Ukraine counteroffensive and the success of the Russian defense, which has a huge physical component or a static component, I guess, probably more precise to say.
I'll say though, when I was in Israel and I want to solicit your response to this, I came away with the following slightly contrarian view, contrarian to what I take to be this emerging view, which you're a strong voice for, which is in the 21st century, the defense is very potent. You make other arguments as well.
I mean, there's a political dimension to everything you say, which if you think history ended, just look around. The fortifications indicate that it hasn't, but you're just sticking strictly to military practice for a second. I was struck that the story of the war in and around Israel since October the 7th has among its major inflection points, two big failures of the defense. The first on the 7th itself, which I would chalk up to very old-fashioned human failures and on the Israeli side and then the success of stratagems and strategic deception on the Hamas side.
And then of course the enormous Israeli success, at least operationally, strategically TBD think there's a strong case that there's strategic success too in the north against Hezbollah into the teeth of a long prepared defensive complex. And in both cases I left with the following thought that, yes, point taken, the defense very potent in the 21st century.
In a certain respect, it is fair to say, these are not your words, but you encounter people saying this kind of thing a lot. We're a bit like World War I with drones now. The tech superimposed, the new elements superimposed on traditional elements of static defense can make it very, very difficult to move around the battlefield and survive.
Fine, but you can still do it. It can still be done. The offense is not dead, and that makes me worry as an American, because we're a status quo power in a lot of regions that matter and are quite tense, not at least the Western Pacific. And if I'm the Chinese, I'm looking at what the Israelis just did with Hezbollah and studying it as a way to think about how do you overcome this American, your term for fortified strategic complexes in places like the Philippines, Japan, the Western Pacific broadly.
How do you, not to get too maneuverist on you for a second, but how do you get inside the decision loop of the Americans and create enough ambiguity and confusion that you have some space to move pretty quickly and achieve some things? It strikes me as still possible, despite everything that you you've been writing about or you wrote about in Ukraine and Engelsberg for the last time we talked and the potency of the stuff that you're discussing in your book here.
David Betz:
I guess, look, I would say that I wouldn't argue, or I might say, but I wouldn't insist on the point that defense is unusually relatively powerful than offense at the moment. In fact, I do believe that is probably the case, but I'm sufficiently well-trained as a military historian to understand that that is not going to remain the case. I mean, nothing...
The pendulum will move the offense-defense balance is always on the swing, and that's because as human beings, we're just very creative and ingenious. We encounter problems and unless we choose surrender, then usually we're quit creative at coming up with ways of dealing with. So, I think it's... The way I would characterize it or the way I would prefer to characterize it is not in terms of offense and defense, and therefore, that we need to focus more on defense and less on offense.
But in terms of siege and siegecraft, siege and siegecraft. In the sense that, my argument is that these fortified places have already become rather the very central to contemporary operations in a way that's surprising. If you were to take all of your ideas about what war should be from the curriculum of the staff colleges, the major staff colleges of the world, which have a very maneuverist movement orientation, to one where, so that's much more central, and what we need to figure out is how to do both.
You need to be able to, you absolutely, I mean, Americans, British, the major professional armed forces of the world that consider themselves to be doing proper high intensity war fighting, have to learn how to build rapidly and well and to utilize as part of their overall combined arms framework fortifications in a way that they haven't done or haven't thought about doing so seriously for quite some time. They also, on the other hand, have to think about how these are penetrated, so it's related and simultaneously you have to do both.
Now with the case of the Israelis you mentioned, I think that is a very intriguing one. I actually don't deal with that in the book, because the events described occurred shortly after I'd written it, but I would say a couple of things. Firstly starting with Hamas's breach of the Israeli defenses around Gaza to start with in October of 23, that I would say, look, the point is that a wall that is unguarded is pretty pointless.
I mean, and in that case, I think that really the problem for the Israelis is they let their guard down. I mean, they weren't watching or to the extent they ought to have, they weren't prepared to the extent that they ought to have been. Yeah, the fences that were there, actually the weapons were there. But the people who ought to have been there were not, and the whole... I think it's pretty apparent, and I think the Israelis will admit to this, that the failing was of their imagination of that.
That said, what is it the Israelis have concluded from this? Is it that, well, fortifications are no use? That is absolutely not the case. I know that for a fact. What they've concluded is what they built was not good enough and really they cannot afford to repeat the intelligence and command failures, which occurred prior to the attack.
The attack then on Hamas in Gaza, which of course has been fortifying itself there for 20 years, really, one has to remember, think of the density of the bombing that has occurred in Gaza. I cannot think of a aerial bombardment campaign in modern military history that was of that scale and density and intensity, except maybe the Linebacker Campaigns. Otherwise, there's nothing close.
All of the bombs dropped on ISIS over the counter-ISIS campaigns would constitute a fraction of what the Israelis put into Gaza in a shorter period of time, in a much more concentrated space. Who knows the fate of Hamas? There's definite, but I'm bound to suggest that they're still around. And if you compare the relative levels of effort, it's hard to argue, "Well, defensive fortifications here are not performing the business."
I wouldn't want to be on the end of a nine-month-long linebacker density aerial bombardment campaign in a target zone that's 10 kilometers long by two kilometers wide, and if I were and anyone was alive afterwards, I think I would count my bunkers as a pretty good success. With Hezbollah, that's, I think also a good example, and I think that the Israelis must have studied their siege craft pretty well. They've certainly been preparing from an intelligence perspective for that engagement with Hezbollah since, again, for coming on to 20 years.
So since the 2006 war, I think they had a sense of what Hezbollah's tactical and operational conduct looked like, and they've clearly put a great deal of effort into intelligence preparation, figuring out what was there, and some of the technologies applied, one can only guess that in fact. They're not exactly talking about how they some of this, but clearly they have applied some technologies for sensing and mapping and probably other aspects of intelligence gathering that are pretty impressive.
This has been twinned though to precision bombing campaign that really, is of a scale of expenditure of precision weapons that almost no country on earth can afford. Certainly Israel can not afford on its own. The only country that can afford it, and probably I'm going to guess is starting to look at its arsenal and thinking, "This is getting a bit low," is the United States, which is why it's...
So in short, that's a long answer, but maybe it serves to illustrate my earlier point about how with these questions, you never get too far from the money, from the economics of it. It's not strictly speaking just about the exchange of physical force. It's a relative estimation of the costs involved. We can't get too far from that.
Aaron MacLean:
Thinking in terms of siege craft is a really interesting way, and I don't habitually conceptualize things in this way, and it's a really interesting point. If I think back to my Thucydides, or to Homer for that matter, I mean the Trojan War is perhaps the err [inaudible 00:48:16] example of a successful siege in the end.
So often, it's intrigue that carries the day. There's some way in which someone on the inside is turned to open a gate or there's trickery, and you could characterize both Hamas's success in the south and Israel's relative success in the north as functions of intrigue, understanding how the other guy's system works, and finding ways into that system and avoiding what would otherwise be a bloody and difficult and potentially unsuccessful effort to just drive right through the defensive complex.
David Betz:
I mean, if you were a medieval king or even an early modern king, like you think of early modern France in the era of Vauban when a great famous French military engineer who built these very extensive and wonderful star fortresses all around the perimeter of France, what they're doing with this is no one understood better than Vauban that a fortress, he was primarily a fortress breaker more so than he was a fortress maker. He's remembered popularly as a fortress maker, but all of his major military operations were sieges, and he knew very well that any fort can be defeated. It's a matter of time and expense.
An advantage, I would try to suggest, I guess, in thinking in terms of siege and siegecraft is that you're thinking, and you will have to be thinking more broadly in terms of the full economic cost of whatever it is you are doing in a place. So, if you were a medieval king and you say, "Well, I need to defend my territory against what I fear is an aggressive neighbor," you might have a choice. "Well, do I raise an army of a thousand more knights, or do I build 10 castles along the valleys leading from my enemy's territory to my own?"
That's essentially an economic calculation, which is correct or incorrect, based upon that king's staff estimate of the potential of 10 castles relative to 1000 knights. As often as not in that particular period of history, the castle turned out to be economically more viable, and therefore strategically more of greater utility, and that's why we have certainly the landscape of Western Europe and much else of the world littered with these old fortifications. But the logic of it is clear, and I think the logic of it is still apparent today. We should be thinking this way.
Aaron MacLean:
David Betz, author of The Guarded Age, Fortification in the 21st century, whenever I read what you write or have these conversations with you, I always learn something. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
David Betz:
Oh, that's super. Thank you for saying that. I'm glad to be here.
Aaron MacLean:
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