alt Hacker NewsI 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?
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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.
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
The article is more talking about landscape fortifications like trenches, ramparts, moats, and berms that slow down trucks.
I suspect people are motivated by the desire not not catch stray bullets more than dissuade a concerted attack.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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
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.