I don't think I saw any concrete structures when I was in Afghanistan. We used Hesco bastion for everything. I think even the furthest-back hospital was just sheet steel siding construction, surrounded by Hesco.
Hesco is another very interesting material. Cheap, extremely light and easy to deploy, until filled, which can be done by anyone with an entrenching tool (small infantry shovel/spade that everyone carries) if required, and then basically indestructible.
How many of those concrete walls can a helicopter carry? One? It's going to take a long time to build any wall or structure. Or do you send an armoured cement mixer and create on-site? That's not realistic in a place like Afghanistan.
I'm not an engineer but I would also guess that Hesco survives better - a box of stones can lift up and crash back down with an explosion where if concrete cracks it's permanently broken.
> I don't think I saw any concrete structures when I was in Afghanistan.
Seriously? You never saw the giant prefab concrete walls around Bagram and Phoenix, and Eggers? Where were you in Afghanistan?
I have been to just about every significant ISAF base (while it was still called ISAF, not RS) and US DoD base in the country, and can assure you that giant prefab concrete walls lifted into place with cranes are everywhere.
A FOB somewhere near Lashkargah. I never went to Bagram, Phoenix or Eggers. I spent a few days in Bastion, which, as the name suggests, was also constructed from Hesco bastion.
Woah! To clarify, when digging up filler for the Hescos, PMN was present in the area the filler was taken from and thus made their way into the Hescos?
I was/(am?) a bomb tech, I didn't dig up a damn thing, we were too highly valued of an asset..And only having a small handful of us to support an entire theater of war makes us exceedingly rare.
Got called out on quite a few. One in particular was a dude out at a COP in the middle of no where Farah, taking a piss next to a Hesco, looked up and saw a mine poking out of the barrier. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. It's not surprising.
Yes this was not uncommon, all kinds of shit was put into hescos. Unless an area was specifically swept for mines (time consuming, expensive and labor intensive) it was usually randomly selected topsoil.
Helmand province FOBs (at least when I was there) were Hesco barriers, artificial dirt berms 8+ meters high and trenches. Some FOBs repurposed pre-built infrastructure and reinforced it with Hesco barriers, but there was very little concrete. I'm sure it looks a bit different these days, but we did not have concrete in most AOs.
Yup. For small units on the move (or operating all stealthy-like), you can airdrop a few C-containers (FOB-in-a-box) right at (or behind!) the front line and be up and ready to go in not-that-many hours.
I'm going to guess you weren't there, because the concept of "air dropping" a 20 or 40 ft container is pretty silly... Such a thing almost never happens.
FOBs are established by cargo that arrives by truck. The only FOBs I ever heard of being established by air cargo (Chinook, and in very mountainous regions of Kunar and Nooristan mostly) were not exactly what you would call a FOB in the context of Afghanistan, but were much smaller sites on hilltops that would be designated COPs (combat outpost) or firebases.
I was not there. I helped design power generation and radio-telecom systems & packaging for them. Now, it's not two C-containers on skids, to be sure! :-)
They were support for very (very) small sites. They were called FOBs by the airborne guys, but I don't know much about military terminology, and can't vouch for the correctness of the use of that term in this case.
EDIT: This doesn't look like what we worked on, but I just found this:
Our FOB was initially air-dropped into place (we had lots of spent one-use parachutes to show for it). I wasn't there then so I don't know how big the kit was, but yeah they weren't ISO containers obviously.
Consider the terrain - an FOB in rural Afghanistan is going to have access to a lot of dirt/sand/etc to fill the Hescos, while simultaneously not having restrictions on wall depth due to existing infrastructure.
In a dense urban environment there isn't likely to be thousands of cubic feet of readily available fill material, and a 3-5 foot thick Hesco is going to be much more difficult to emplace than a 12" thick concrete barrier.
Hescos are different object for a different purpose. They are meant to stop inbound fire, not inbound people. Climbing over them is trivial, at least in comparison to a 3m tall concrete wall. Hescos are therefore useful only where they can be monitored. They are great for bases, but if you want to stop people from entering or exiting something as large as a city then you want something you don't have to patrol 24/7.
There is another upside to the Hescos. They are much more difficult to undermine (literally). They are relatively soft and will likely collapse any hole under them. Concrete structures don't slump and so can be undermined.
Because hescos do not need logistical support 2 people can deploy one and fill it with sand and gravel even by hand if needed.
Hescos are also better since they don't cause ricochets and they don't shatter on impact creating shrapnel.
From my experience when concrete walls are used for fortifications the SOP was to cover them with a sheet of Kevlar like fabric between two layers of metal webbing (concrete bolt/nail gun was used to secure the webbing to the barrier) to protect personnel from secondary impact risks.
If that wasn't available then you usually had a layer of either sand bags or a spaced secondary wooden or sheet metal wall with sand filling the gap between it and the concrete.
When bullets are flying at you you want to be behind a barrier but not near a bare concrete wall.
Sounds like you found a better war than I did, or at least a fancier one. Bare concrete was definitely the norm for our concrete fortifications.
You need to remember that the concern is less about bullets and more about mortars/rockets/VBEDs, which I can assure you, both types of barriers did a reasonably decent job of stopping.
Hescos seem like a better deal in terms of material moved vs material acquired on site. But they also seem like they would have to be wider to be stable, what that your experience? Pictures seem to have them as 3x - 5x the thickness of a concrete barrier of similar height.
Yeah they are considerably thicker, not really for stability but to be effective at stopping large penetrating and explosive projectiles and even acting as tank traps.
They are also slower to deploy, tho if you do it properly you dig both the obstacle outer ditch (which makes the effective height of barrier too high to scale) and trenches as you fill them since the ground needs to come from somewhere.
That said to deploy concrete barriers you need a crane, when push comes to shove a squad with shovels can fill a hesco.
Some concrete barriers can also be higher than hescos, tho you can stack hescos without much trouble.
Overall if you are building an FOB all you need is a few flatbed trucks and a bobcat (small earth mover) to pretty quickly deploy hescos, concrete barriers need heavy trucks (which also means proper roads, you won't be driving a truck filled with concrete barriers over soft terrain) and you actually need engineers (as in the military definition, not academically educated ones) to deploy them.
In an urban environment concrete can make more sense tho, you can't dig ditched to increase the height, can't dig up the ground randomly, and since concrete barriers are thinner they are more easily deployed in urban environments and it's not like you have issues with logistics.
Although it wouldn't surprise me if the pentagon somehow managed to airlift these barriers from the US to Iraq to be deployed in Baghdad instead of just contracting the local concrete factories.
> Although it wouldn't surprise me if the pentagon somehow managed to airlift these barriers from the US to Iraq to be deployed in Baghdad instead of just contracting the local concrete factories.
What, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless gallons of fuel to transport big concrete blocks across the world? Our DoD? Surely you jest. 8)
Well that's a cool thing, but no never seen that being used tbh, while it's fast, it also means you need some extra things, which also means planning ;)
That's a pretty great way to deploy empty barriers, but what I'd love to see is a machine to fill them even a quarter as fast as they can deploy them haha
would be interesting to develop a gluing agent to convert local gravel into a concrete like material that could be formed like Hescos but in thinner, taller L shapes for the purpose of erecting barriers as in the article.
Cement plus sand, this is what most walls in the middle east are made of they are very soft tho, you can crumble them with your fingers if you get past the outer layer of plaster.
The upside is that they don't ricochet as much if at all, the downside is that bullets leave pretty large impact craters and if the wall isn't thick enough simply pass through like it wasn't there.
But the problem remains if it's hard bullets will ricochet and it will splinter into shrapnel, if it's soft it's not an effective barrier and the wear on it is very high.
Hescos or any other similar fortification are simple and effective, there is a reason why we still use sandbags and planks of wood with sand in between them, sand is a great bullet trap and you can shoot at hescos and sandbags all day long and you won't really do much damage. there needs to be a pretty big hole for the sand to sip out since it's kept in place by the pressure and compression.
Hescos also have a lower surface area to weight ratio. They are therefore much less likely to be moved by nearby explosions. And their softer insides make total failure, shattering, almost impossible.
On that note, i recall reading about a British project to produce quick rise shelters. They were basically a inflatable tent with cement impregnated outer canvas.
Roll out, inflate, soak in water, and wait for it to harden before releasing the pressure.
And such a gluing agent would be cement. Concrete is really nothing more than cement mixed with sand or gravel. The farm i grew up on had a barn where the foundation was nothing more than cement and small rocks from the land. It was built up like a layer cake. One spread of cement, then a layer of rock, repeated until desired height.
> A Concrete Canvas shelter would cost 15,000 to 20,000 pounds, in the U.K., for a one-off ($23,000 to $30,000), but the price steps down if you are buying volumes.
My guess is that they're not interested in dealing with small-volume customers, and so for large volumes the prices descend to a much saner price. "Look at how much your government/military/refuge 'saves' when you buy 1000 of these!"...
Cement + sand is very different from cement + gravel + sand, and even then, the result varies widely depending on what kinds of gravel and sand you mix with the cement.
The title states "modern" battlefield, which I believe they are equating to a more urban enviornment -- than a outpost in Afghanistan. The use of concrete walls to segregate a city into sections is the main benefit. This article is rather anecdotal and appears to just be the opinion of the author.
Traditionally with nation state opponents urban warfare is either a siege or blowing up everything in sight.
With this lower intensity warfare, the army needs to reduce complexity by scoping their problems.
This isn't new. That Boer war reference left out a few details... the British couldn't defeat mobile cavalry with pack howitzers, so they built fences, pillboxes and watchtowers across the countryside to restrict movement. Then they evacuated towns and villages to concentration camps and starved the non combatants until the soldiers surrendered.
It's a pretty common theme used in the Indian wars and vietnam by Americans, Germans in Angola and Europe, French in Algeria, etc as well.
> Existing structures [abandoned buildings] surrounded by walled compounds of some type were selected because there was little in the environment to use for protection—such as dirt to fill sandbags, earthworks, and existing obstacles.
I'd imagine you'd have a hard time using Hesco barriers in an urban environment. One, they're too big. Two, you'd have a hard time finding loose fill. And three, they're slower to deploy.
Reminds me of reinforced earth which I learned about from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0olpSN6_TCc (which is also from the pretty great Practical Engineering channel).
They mention the reason for not using Hescoes in passing in the article. In the cities there wasn't an easy source of dirt to fill them so it would have required trucking in a lot of the dirt to fill them.
It is interesting to read that so little has changed since the days of Caesar. Reading his Gallic War you'd think the war was won by digging ditches and building walls. For instance, search for "fortification" on this page:
That isn't very surprising you win a war by controlling territory which is why boots on the ground are always needed to win an actual war, to control a territory you need fortifications.
A properly fortified base can take pretty much any conventional artillery fire for weeks without taking any real damage and unless there is an all out assault you can hold out as long as you have food and water, ammo might not even be that important as long as the enemy doesn't know that and or is incapable of scaling the fortifications.
Even when we'll be fighting on Mars and the jovian moons you'll still will have grunts digging trenches unless for some reason the war is going to transform to purely strategic weapons in which case it's usually the side that either has more or strikes first who would win.
Not necessarily. I imagine the wars of the future will largely be automated and wars will be won or lost almost purely on logistics and manufacturing supply chain management. Do you need walls when you have a drone above doing surveillance and an army of quadrocopters or other robotic flying machines that are doing 24/7 patrols along the perimeter and can arrive within 30 seconds?
Wars are already won or lost on logistics. That's why, in WW2, the allies ran a near-continous near-sucicide air bombing campaign against German industrial capacity (and to their eternal shame, civilians, too). That is why the Atlantic was so important, if the Germans could have choked off the supply chain from the US, they would have won the war more or less overnight. The ability to run the air bridge to Berlin after the war was also a logistical feat.
But at the end of the day, the only purpose of the logistics are to support the fight to control the territory you need to win.
A classic battle example was the Pusan perimeter from the Korean War, the NK had a staggering numerical advantage and pushed the US into the peninsula, the one with a perfectly operating seaport, which we flooded with people, supplies, material, but the NK didn't have air superiority so the US mauled the NK logistics system, and a few weeks/months later the NK had to walk home with no ammo or food.
Of course there are limits to that strategy as the Chinese proved that if you're willing to lose 20 to 1 ratio you can simply deploy millions of infantry and ignore logistics, admittedly most of them will die, and regardless of logistic support next thing you know we're back south at the original DMZ.
The situation in Khe Sanh was similar, OK you're outnumbered 10 to 1 and surrounded, that's sustainable for months as long as the airdrops keep coming in. Of course Dien Bien Phu was an example where the airdrops didn't come in and the French were wiped out. After the war Gen. Westmorland was savaged in the press, Trump style, for making fun of Gen Giap for being the worlds most predictable one trick pony, but now that the politics and tempers have cooled its "OK" to admit the general only had one strategy that he used basically every time. Of course, in the end, it eventually worked, so losing 90%+ of your battles is OK if the enemy eventually goes home in defeat.
Speaking of the air bridge, one thing I loved about living in Berlin was the fact that its tumultuous history was so visible. One of my friends lived in the Bergmannkiez, which is right between the 'Platz der Luftbrücke' (place of the air bridge) and Tempelhof airport (now an unconventional and wonderful park).
Visitors often commented how different this area felt from its surroundings (and perhaps even from much of the city), and apparently the reason is that this area was generally spared bombings.
>Do you need walls when you have a drone above doing surveillance and an army of quadrocopters or other robotic flying machines that are doing 24/7 patrols
Do you really think this is a stable strategy? Drones are probably cheaper to shoot down than they are to build. At least the quadcopters. Imagine a few very fast automated shotgun turrets with birdshot.
Even if war is automated, the same basic strategies apply. The fortifications will just be built and manned by robots instead of humans.
"Imagine a few very fast automated shotgun turrets with birdshot."
Mounted on a smaller, lighter, much shorter range defensive quadcopter. Don't even need the fancy weapons, just collide with the larger, long range, very expensive attacking quadcopter.
Nothing is ever really new, and a lot of the "drones will solve everything" talk sounds exactly like "missiles will eliminate guns in military aircraft" from the 50s/early 60s. That didn't turn out very well, and if you ignore the details that don't matter, drones are tactically merely very slow, short range, traditionally cheaper, missiles. Yeah yeah the electronic speed controllers are infinitely interesting to a EE but to a grunt a drone weapon system is tactically a lame cheap missile. So your attack helicopter of the future will have drone wingmen, but it'll also have guns. Or some infantry platoons might carry a couple anti-armor drone weapons instead of a couple AT-4 or LAW rockets, but they'll still dig trenches and carry some kind of M16 variant.
Drones of the US Military type fly very high and are thus quite difficult to shoot down, especially if they have anti-missile missiles (I doubt any currently do as they are only used in battlefields where the enemy doesn't have good missiles).
Quadrocopters could certainly be shot down by robots, but probably not by humans once they get fast enough at flipping themselves around and making evasive maneuvers.
Anti missile defense other than jamming and decoys do not exist for airborne platforms.
US drones operate in an uncontested environment let them try fly over Russian or Chinese airspace, the soviet shot down a bloody U2 thy can hit a globalhawk or a reaper.
HARM is typically used to engage a SAM site's radar, not the SAMs themselves. Intercepting a missile is a bit harder than nailing a stationary emitter. Plus, many SAMs use IR sensors, so if you don't detect the launch signature, it's hard to take defensive actions. DIRCM, laser based dazzlers etc can help, but not if you don't detect the launch.
Fortifications are still needed and are cheap then instead of human grunts you'll have t-1000's digging trenches.
A drone or a soldier it doesn't matter a sandbag that stops a bullet is still cheaper and faster to make than training or building a new combatant.
All modern wars are in effect industrial wars at least when both sides are even remotely equal in military power, the US simply out produced both Germany and Japan to win the war.
If you are fighting a war then it's always better to reduce force depletion than to increase manufacturing if nothing else than it's cheaper, faster and leaves you with more options for the long run.
With regards to space, I think your second scenario there is more likely. Dropping things from space is pretty easy, and most anything like that is going to qualify as a strategic weapon.
Bunker busters are not really conventional artillery even if they are not nuclear.
These are also not missiles, but very very heavy bombs.
And you can also reinforce against them, just usually not at the FOB level, but considering the cost of every one of those bombs they aren't really going to be used to blow up a pillbox on a hill.
A fortified base will also not protect you from strategic bombardment on a massive scale, but that doesn't mean they are useless even against nations with modern standing armies, it's not like they are going to attack every outpost and base with everything they got, that would be pointless.
Force depletion can happen rapidly without any casualties, if you are going to use the bombs you would want to use to take out strategic command and control centers, factories, and natural resource reserves to blow up a couple of of dirt boxes you ain't going to be winning that war.
On the other hand pretty much the most basic field fortification will be enough to nullify virtually all field artillery which is exactly what it's likely to encounter - self propelled howitzers, mortars, and multi-role ground attack missiles.
I'll respectfully beg to differ. At the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan (at the time I was a US Army UAV "drone" pilot in training), for the first 48 hours, a Tomahawk cruise missile was fired, on average, every 12 seconds. They were firing at all kinds of things up to an including caves! I think that would qualify as firing everything you've got at little outposts.
I think ultimately it depends on the situation and the resolve of the aggressor to take you out. After 9/11, the US went balls to the walls with conventional military.
That's because the US conducts modern wars like it has an unlimited supply of everything, mostly because it doesn't need to worry about the economics of the otherside.
This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents.
The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose.
When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination.
The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in.
If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)).
Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender.
If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.
I was also thinking about Caesar when reading the article especially the Battle of Alesia - his greatest battle. He sieged and surrounded Vercingotrix by a wall, Vercingotrix called for reinforcements so Caesar built an outer wall to protect himself from them. Then they both attacked him and even though he was surrounded and outnumbered 4:1 he somehow managed to win!
A while ago I read an article that explained and visualized the Battle of Alesia and it was one of the best things I'd read in a long time. I wish I could find it, but this article does a decent job:
That is definitely an even better example. :-) I do like that you can see it even with Ctrl+F though. And I think that he uses Galba very skillfully as a foil to his own command.
I was also reminded of the Romans as related on the History Channel show "Engineering an Empire". They talked a lot about how the Romans used concrete for various purposes including aqueducts, etc. Iirc, they mentioned that they'd built a building with a vaulted concrete dome that we weren't able to reproduce, even after the re-discovery of cement, until we had computers.
A lot of simple tactics are overlooked by a society raised in decadent comfort compared to the Romans, or any other agricultural-era empire. Our overwhelming force and technology has come at a cost to our creativity.
If you look at most battles throughout history, there is a single, simple tactic that almost always assured victory: rolling logs downhill at your enemy.
But because we have so much whiz-bang tech doing our fighting for us we've delegated our thinking as well.
A marine I know of often complained that the most effective tactic the Iraqi insurgents utilized again and again was to set up a missile or RPG pointed generally in the direction of a military base and fire it off long after they've left the area. Even if the rocket doesn't get anywhere close to do any damage, everybody has to stop what they're doing and go on the defensive, and even when they've located the source of the attack, nobody's there.
A stupid rocket that doesn't damage anything can bleed the U.S. Military of millions of dollars at a time.
My son was based in Mosul. He reported the same tactic. A timer on the rocket; set it and leave. Most detonated against the fence or fell outside the fence. Occasionally one would fall in the compound, once during morning muster. It detonated against the wall of the building in front of everybody. To their surprise not a scratch on anybody.
It erodes your mental health, never knowing when a random explosion might happen. Damaging in its way just like a bullet.
It's also interesting to see how the article fails to mention a more recent, infamous example of the deployment of concrete to control an urban environment: the Berlin Wall.
> Each type was named for a state, denoting their relative sizes and weights. There were small barriers like the Jersey...
The Jersey barrier isn't so named because of its size. It was developed as a barrier by the NJ highway dept [1]. The newer barriers used for the military are just given other state names to follow along with the original. It just happens to be smaller because of its original civilian purpose.
One mission in my service was going to Korea and blowing up concrete walls. Back in 2008 the Korean government acquired new concrete barrier designs meant to re-enforce strategic locations.
Wanting to see real life usage of these barriers, a contingency of Marine combat engineers working with the ROK Marines got tasked to breaching them.
From that I learned two interesting things of note. Concrete serves two means: it's actual use as a barrier and the other being a manifestation.
In combat zones, Hesco containers prevail. Rapid deployment and durability makes them a much better fit. But imposing concrete blocks represent the continuity of the state.
Heavier and harder, with more logistics required, building out concrete walls is meant as a way for the state to declare they are here to stay, not retreat. So actually it's wielding a supply chain effectively that is the most effective weapon on the battlefield.
That said though, we made short work of the concrete.
I reckon concrete is necessary, but how much does it harm the economy? I can't recall a barrier in history that didn't prevent food from reaching to the right people and triggering bribes. But the main driver in peace is to get paid/production jobs for everyone, and the main specificity of a city is that it's good for tertiary jobs, but it requires constant provisioning from agriculture and industry, which both happen outside towns and require intensive movement of goods.
In a nutshell: Don't concrete walls prevent recovery? Don't they split the population, creating even more groups with differences? Should we plan for them to be "reconfigured" in the following years, when the conflict improves?
Side question: Sorry I didn't follow, why was USA in Irak again? Did it start with the famous WMD accusation at the UN conference then the intervention got bogged into a long unpeaceful situation, am I recollecting events in the correct order?
"Of the twenty-five people who signed the PNAC's founding statement of principles, ten went on to serve in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz."
Yeah, I was really concerned about these effects as well. How can you expect the citizenry to transition from a wartime mentality when their neighborhoods look like a war zone?
The discussion of Hesco vs concrete barriers is an interesting one, and I think a lot of the other comments handle it well.
The thing I was wondering while reading the article is what will they do after the fighting is done?
Will the barriers and walls be left in place or dismantled?
Is it easier to take down or move concrete vs Hesco?
I suspect lots of them will remain until they fall apart, especially in situations like lining highways. I bet that the walls in the city, and the enclaves formed by them, will be affecting the culture off the city years after the conflict is done.
> Will the barriers and walls be left in place or dismantled?
I was looking at satellite images of the area my FOB was at in Fallujah - no sign of our presence. We had double stacked hesco all over the place, as well as Texas and Jersey barriers on the road.
> Is it easier to take down or move concrete vs Hesco?
Easier to take down hesco (boltcutter and a knife), impossible to move. Concrete is easy to move with common construction equipment, I'm sure the people of Fallujah found a new use for the barriers pretty quickly.
Many in the military are thinking about future warfare in complex urban terrain, to include operations in megacities with populations over 10 million.
For what plausible reason would you invade and occupy a city with a population of over 10 million? Here is a list of cities with a population of 10 million or more, please tell me for what good reason any one of them should they be invaded:
Tokyo, Shanghai, Jakarta, Karachi, Seoul, New York City, Mumbai, Manila, Mexico City, Delhi, Beijing, São Paulo, Lagos, Wuhan, Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Cairo, Los Angeles, Chengdu, Dhaka, Moscow, Tianjin, Bangkok, Istanbul, Kolkata, Rio de Janeiro, London, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Kinshasa, Paris, Shenzhen, Harbin, Rhine-Ruhr, Lahore
Maybe invest as much time and money thinking about peace as you do on war and you might not need to bankrupt your country to fight another one. The US's military industrial complex is the ultimate case of when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Tokyo, Seoul, Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe would very much be on the front-lines of a war involving North Korea, which is way too distressingly possible (NK's rulers aren't exactly known for their rationality in foreign policy).
Pakistan and India have gone to war no fewer than 4 times since their independence not 7 decades ago. It was considered basically a miracle that the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai didn't spark a war, and the tensions between the two countries remain the most likely potential nuclear war. That gets you Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi (Kolkata is on the wrong side of the country).
Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran could become war zones in a future Middle Eastern conflict, although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does seem to have declined in importance to the Arab region as a whole. The risk of a World War III involving China or Russia is probably understated--especially given Putin's responses to the increasing failure of the Russian economy since the 2008 financial crisis.
It is also worth pointing out that many of the megacities that people are concerned about don't exist yet--the number of megacities is expected to grow, predominantly in Africa, a region not known for stability of governments. You might say that solid middle-class countries would help to stabilize the governments, but the Syrian and Libyan civil wars really ought to be clear signs of the fallacy of that belief.
In many respects, though, the main point of a military is not to fight wars--it's to figure out how to, and be prepared to, fight the next war. Acting as if wars won't happen won't guarantee you peace--indeed, WWII, the bloodiest war in history, was so bloody precisely because its principal actors refused to believe that is was going to happen.
> You might say that solid middle-class countries would help to stabilize the governments, but the Syrian and Libyan civil wars really ought to be clear signs of the fallacy of that belief.
Neither the Libyan nor Syrian civil war was caused by a failure of the middle class or institutions. In both cases the wars were fomented by external state actors who sought geopolitical advantages at the expense of these nations.
In any case your sample size of 2 is insufficient to prove anything
If a war broke out in Tehran no prizes for guessing which nation would start it.
We haven't had a great-power conflict in the last 70 years. That doesn't mean we will never again have one.
Historically, wars have happened because the balance of powers of nations becomes ambiguous. Thanks to natural human over-confidence, each believes they could win it, and so they go to war even though in reality everyone loses. The U.S. has been the undisputed global power since WW2, but there's a ticking demographics time-bomb that's pretty apparent in your list of cities.
You wouldn't invade and occupy a city of over 10 million. An insurgency would threaten the city and the region and you would be invited in to help control it.
Imagine 1% of that 10 million joined an insurgency. That is 100,000 people. I think this is a distinct enough possibility for a military to prepare for. In fact, the US already works on both ends. Supporting insurgencies in Libya and Syria while helping fight them in Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. These aren't mega cities but the possibility still remains.
For what plausible reason would you invade and occupy a city with a population of over 10 million?
Surely this is a failure of imagination, rather than a complete impossibility?
In the last few years we have seen:
The US Airforce providing aircover for Iranian militias.[1]
Turkey shoot down a Russian fighter/bomber over Syria[2] and then become close (?) allies[3]
The Philippines win a ruling against Chinese actions in the South China sea[4], then decide to ally with China and accept Chinese ambitions in the South China sea[5], and then return to their original position (maybe?)[6]
The world's most populous Islamic nation has a Christian governor of its capital city[7].
The UK voted to exit the EU, but no one is quite sure how it will happen
And Donald Trump won the US election.
So yeah.. I have no idea why the US would want to invade and occupy a 10M+ population city. But it is entirely possible something like that could happen.
Well, it seems somewhat shortsighted to imagine that just because it would be categorically awful to fight another conventional war in densely populated urban centers, that it will never happen again or that it isn't something you should think about and prepare for.
I agree that the MIC is a toxic influence on policy, but lets not let that blind ourselves to conducting healthy analysis on what warfare might look like in the future.
Rio de Janeiro is a war zone. Drug traffickers control large parts of the city and thousands are killed every year. They use military police units to bring law and order. Similar situation for Karachi.
I'm sure they have scenarios where an armed sectarian revolt in 2040 Los Angeles-San Diego needs to be suppressed by force. The region is potentially vulnerable and critical for food security.
The US obviously isn't going to be fighting in Japan (past experiences notwithstanding), Russia (ditto), China, or South Korea; but what about the Islamic megacities, especially the Pakistani ones?
And, for that matter, what about NYC and LA? Another round of civil war in the US is unlikely but not impossible, and the military wouldn't want to be caught on the hop.
> what about the Islamic megacities, especially the Pakistani ones?
Pakistan has nukes. Please don't invade countries with nukes. And if there's one thing that Syria has taught us, or at least should have: urban fighting ultimately destroys cities leaving a near-empty ruinous shell and creates huge numbers of refugees which are both an economic burden and political dynamite that sees ultra right-wing leaders and policies voted in.
A city is a city because it's where a vast amount of people live. You're bringing deadly conflict to people's doorsteps and creating tomorrow's terrorist. This is fundamental, not something that can be solved with technology or hip new ways of thinking.
Imagine we decide to become closer allies with India then Pakistan, and something like Mumbai happens, only worse. India gets very, very pissed off, and decides that they've had enough.
Straight-up invasion isn't the only option. Either of those countries could erupt in civil war. Most of the time in Iraq wasn't about invading and subjugating it, but protecting the embattled government from groups like the Sadrists. The kind of scenario could happen many places, and the us could be involved.
Aside from outright civil war, there's also national guard involvement similar to the Rodney King riots where at least there were defined combatants, sort of, and going further there was Katrina vs New Orleans where crazy rando undefined combatants were shooting at fire trucks and ambulances.
I get your point but it's not unfeasible to think that a western nation may be involved in a conflict that requires operating in one of these megacities - particularly some of the Asian and African cities near existing conflict zones.
Note that these barriers are much less obtrusive than even a jersey barrier, this is something with which NYPD has plenty of experience in a very different light than the article
Don't be ridiculous. Any New Yorker knows that "Mexico" doesn't start until you get above 96th St on the west side, or past about Lorimer Street on the L (and they've been pushing that back, it might be about Graham Ave by now).
There were lots of those in place during the recent UN General Assembly
In the UK we've been using them for a long time to provide protection for people working on motorways i.e. separate traffic from lanes where work is going on
It's not really surprising. The Roman armies made surprisingly extensive fortifications when they stopped for the night and won battles they might have lost as a result.
"The more you sweat today, the less you bleed tomorrow."
So I've been wondering: was it usually the soldiers themselves who did all the fortification work, or did the Roman armies have 'grunt workers' and engineers that they took with them on their conquests?
In Iraq I was really surprised by how quickly these barriers showed up and how easy it was to build fortifications. I always wondered where they were made, the quality of the concrete and the cost. It seemed there was an endless supply. On the night before the first election alone we basically put jersey barriers up on every major street in the city. Nuts. I always imagined some factory in the desert near an aggregate source where they just poured these things as fast as possible.
Funny how he mentions other wars and successful application of this strategy but forgets to mention walling of Jewish population in occupied Polish cities during WWII. Very successful in limiting activity of terrorists and insurgents from what I've heard.
In France most of the people have always seen the Israeli concrete barrier as pretty outrageous. The least I can say after reading this article is that I'll need to carefully reconsider the facts with this new lighting in mind.
The reason that the barrier is outrageous is not that it's made out of concrete; it's because of its location. It criss-crosses into the West Bank [1].
Np. That was just the first thing I found on Google; b'tselem does not have a neutral point of view. But the fact is that the wall is being built mostly on the West Bank side of the pre-1967 borders.
I don't criticize them for it, but protecting vehicles from IEDs and walling off sections of the city is still war activities, not nation building. Crucial stuff, no doubt, but I'm sure the people actually trying to build a nation would rather spend those resources on other stuff if there wasn't insurgency activity.
Upscale neighborhoods in my neck of the woods clamor for very tall walls near high traffic roads to block out the sound (and the occasional runaway vehicle). They become a nice canvas for tasteful artwork, or if that's too contentious can have vines grown on them.
For some reason I've become obsessed with our nations decision to elect Donald Trump as president. For that reason my mind drew a connection with US Iraq concrete walls and barriers and all the historic walls humankind has built, and plans to build.
Walls and barriers can offer protection from the "others" but I feel more often then not, they are used to separate territory and control movement. That separation and control comes at a cost. One such cost, is freedom of place.
Firstly, concrete isn't a weapon, it is a defensive utility, not an offensive one (weapon).
Correcting that, the best defense is people. More specifically, "civilians".
You can now easily defend yourself if you surround yourself with civilians like ISIS has done. Without civilians, no-doubt the US will "precision bomb" your entire stronghold to dust.
That's the whole reason the US spend trillions of $ on precision weaponry and surveillance now. The US is trying to develop weapon systems that, even when defending oneself with civilians, when you walk outside your civilian-filled afghan hut alone to go to the outhouse, a tiny precision bullet from the sky assassinates you in an instant. They are getting there, and it's ever closer to fruition, regardless of how disturbing it all is.
EDIT: I mean, why do you think they are pouring money into drones that can stay in the air for ages, path-changing (steerable) "smart" bullets, face recog AI, flight stablisation, etc.. It's ALL an effort to create the aforementioned precision assassination system.
> You can now easily defend yourself if you surround yourself with civilians like ISIS has done
That is a very dubious assertion. If the stakes are high enough, a sufficiently equipped aggressor will attack a city despite the civilian population within. Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Falluja,
My many years of reading comics made me hope this was because The Hulk kept picking up large concrete structures and swatting tanks like flies with them.
This is an extremely interesting, non-silicon valley related article, and the comments and really informative as well. One of the best examples of why Hacker News is so great!
Amazing that we can send our soldiers, equipment, and supplies half way around the world to build structures but it takes an act of congress to fix our dilapidated infrastructure at home.
why don't we drop a grid (across the whole of syria) of concrete covered sniper turrets they'll only have to be small and can just be remotely operated.
my concept is a pyramid shape with the top hat being able to raise so that measuring equipment can have a scan of the horizon, if something is a target then a large cannon comes out of the top too. and if someone tries to blow it up then it's covered by meters of concrete to absorb all damage. and if enemies come to attack it then HQ is notified. it can also send drones to inspect papers and personnel.
I don't think a concrete submarine would work very well. :)
More seriously, I have no idea. Submarines normally involve an advertisement for the advertising company somewhere in the latter part of the article; no company = no giveaway ad. But knowing Trump and his way with memes, I wouldn't be surprised if the author just had walls on the brain, without having to be paid for it...
If we're going to play this semantics game, then the most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is food. Without food, your people can't do any of the other things they're there to do. Take away concrete, and your military can still do plenty of stuff. Take away food and your military ceases to exist.
I'm guessing the parent's point was that calling a concrete defence barrier a 'weapon' is a bit weird. In the same way that a steel helmet is not really a weapon, neither is a concrete shield.
> the most effective weapon on the modern battlefield is food.
Experts do say that logistics is one of the most important factors in warfare. An army marches on its stomach, Napoleon reputedly said.
Imagine feeding 20,000 people on the march: That's 40-60,000 meals per day, who knows how much water, plus waste - all shipped through war zones. And that ignores other supplies: Fuel, bullets, parts, medicine, etc.
Not only for now. Even if we build drones, people need to design then, write the software and fly them. We not have AIs we can control like an RTC game.
And that's the problem. Men and women keeping ... fighting .. for causes that aren't there. American soldiers are duped into thinking they're fighting for some noble cause when they're just the strong arm of a corrupt system that continues to blaze on with wars no matter who is elected.
Conniving people to fight is the only way to wage war. It's also how we make money. It's also how we make slaves.
One of the ways they did what you describe is by placing these concrete walls around troubled enclaves. They weren't restricting food but munitions had to now be taken through checkpoints.
i have no military experience but i'm guessing this is actually one of the easiest things to strategically deploy. a day's worth of ammo for a platoon probably weighs a few hundred pounds. a day's worth of food is probably like 10 pounds.
But:
1. in most wars the soldiers are actually fighting a very small proportion of the time. They are eating, drinking and creating waste every day.
2. Those dehydrated rations will need to be rehydrated. So you need to supply in the region of 3 litres of clean (soldiers are not as effective if they are sick) water each day (more in hot climates).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion
Hesco is another very interesting material. Cheap, extremely light and easy to deploy, until filled, which can be done by anyone with an entrenching tool (small infantry shovel/spade that everyone carries) if required, and then basically indestructible.
How many of those concrete walls can a helicopter carry? One? It's going to take a long time to build any wall or structure. Or do you send an armoured cement mixer and create on-site? That's not realistic in a place like Afghanistan.
I'm not an engineer but I would also guess that Hesco survives better - a box of stones can lift up and crash back down with an explosion where if concrete cracks it's permanently broken.