Plenty of people knew Harlan Ellison personally, I don’t have anything to add. Here’s one anecdote, courtesy of Cirsova. I’ll recommend some of his short stories to read in memoria, however.
Month: June 2018 Page 1 of 2
Or is it like Indians trying to form a navy with their canoes? There aren’t any significant space trade lanes to block or keep open (…someday…), but a space force could focus on establishing “space supremacy” in a manner analogous to air supremacy.
Why Separate Service Branches Exist
The army is the oldest and most basic military service (indeed, “military” used to refer only to the army). I’m not familiar with the history of navies as a distinct organization from the army, but humans have been plying the oceans since well before recorded history. It’s clear that the crew and officers of military vessels were at least somewhat distinct from soldiers even in Antiquity. What’s important is that a navy does something that doesn’t and can’t involve the army: enforcing or denying freedom of navigation. This requires establishing command of the sea.
Sometimes an army may need to move things across the water in support of their operations on land, and they might have some vessels to enable this. Likewise, navies use marines in support of their own operations. But “the navy” doesn’t invade Donovia, and “the army” doesn’t blockade ports.
Which brings us to air forces. The fundamental reason that independent air forces exist is strategic bombing. Armies and navies only operate on the two-dimensional surface of the earth or ocean. If an army wants to burn down the enemy’s capital, they have to move there, and if anyone else is in the way they have to fight them and win first. The navy has to get off their boats if they want to take anything over, especially if the objective isn’t near the coastline. With the airplane, you just fly over the enemy, drop your payload, and the target dies.
In theory, at least. Air power advocates had and continue to have a serious problem overestimating the effects of strategic bombing. That being said, it ain’t worthless, it isn’t going away, and it empirically exists outside the purview of the army and navy — that’s what the “strategic” adjective is really doing there.
In an air power-centric view, establishing air supremacy (which is air superiority, but more of it) is a derivative mission of strategic bombing. Air forces must establish some control of the air in order to attack targets on the ground and bomb the enemy into submission. Destroying enemy aircraft accomplishes very little, materially, on its own. Of course the army and navy don’t want to be attacked by enemy aircraft either, and in reality this is part of the reason you want air supremacy, not just because it enables you to conduct strategic bombing. At any rate, we can see that air supremacy is basically a “shaping” or enabling rather than decisive mission, not something that achieves strategic objectives on its own. You’ll note that “air operations in direct support of ground forces” or close air support doesn’t really fit into this picture; this is the source of endemic squabbles over whether the USAF should have any responsibility for it at all.
The air force isn’t the only novel service branch. The Soviet Union maintained a separate Air Defense Force. I’m not directly familiar with the logic for doing so, but I would guess it is because their view of air supremacy aligned with the above: it’s to enable strategic bombing and maybe protect expeditionary ground and naval forces, not to defend against enemy bombing. Russia continues to have a separate “Strategic Missile Force” service for the operation of nuclear missiles, viewing this as sufficiently different from strategic bombing by aircraft to justify a separate service.
So What
Right now, the individual services put things into space in support of their operations on the ground. Joint coordination must occur to make sure no one crashes into each other, and to mitigate the formation of information silos, but that’s about it. Claiming that this justifies a new service branch, on its own, is a bit like deciding that naval aviation or army mariners should form their own service.
The lame answer is that the Space Force just serves as a coordination center for defense-related space operations, sort of like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This might fix some hypothetical coordination problems between the uniformed services and civilian agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office, but while the current state of such coordination is far from public knowledge there aren’t any obvious signs of problems.
The most obvious role for a Space Force is “space supremacy”: deny the use of space to the enemy and enable it for the United States. Since there are no strategically significant activities in space outside of Earth’s orbit, the space force’s purview would be limited to near Earth, as a practical matter.
The space force could also supplement or supplant civilian agencies like NASA in conducting space exploration, in a Faustian bargain exchanging militarization for funding. However, while space pilots usually come from the military, the majority of work is done by civilians doing identifiably civilian jobs in science, engineering, and administration.
Notice that space supremacy doesn’t derive from the need to live or trade in space. Even space-based weapons would only be incremental upgrades from currently existing strategic bombing methods. So far norms against space weapons have held up pretty well, if only because any “improvements” over ICBMs are likely to be self-defeating for game theory reasons.
Perhaps someone in the White House or DoD thinks they can skirt the relevant norms and treaties by putting only “space-to-space” weapons in orbit — the real fear being space nukes — by avoiding nuclear or even kinetic weapons (orbiting jammers). I don’t know if anyone has ever recovered an enemy satellite from orbit for investigation — it’s possible. If so, sensitive satellites might have anti-handling devices. EOD…in space.
The need to police and control access to off-world or orbital installations, which would pretty strongly justify a space service, is completely irrelevant for the foreseeable future, as those things don’t currently exist.
Space Supremacy
So, at least for the foreseeable future, “space supremacy” is probably going to be the basic mission of the space force. Separation from the air force would be justified on the basis of differing technical requirements and — maybe — even to avoid excessive militarization by keeping the brimstone scent of strategic bombing away. What space supremacy is, is obvious by analogy to air supremacy: allow friendly use of space and deny it to the enemy. How to go about it, and then actually doing it, might be something for a new service to work on.
The Three Body Problem and John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion are both about humanity confronting imminent invasion by highly advanced aliens. However, Liu is an Atheist Chinese and Wright is a Christian American, so things don’t go quite the same way in the two stories.
I will point out one significant technical difference. The Trisolarans in 3BP will arrive from Alpha Centauri in 400 years, while the much more massive Hyades Armada spends a leisurely 10,000 years en route to Earth. Eschaton’s characters acknowledge that maintaining a single continuing civilization on this time scale is preposterous, something that 3BP’s characters don’t (think they) need to worry about.
Wright’s characters are much more proactive in attempting to control their destinies than Liu’s. Fatalism, not to say nihilism, dominates the worldview of the characters in Liu’s series. Ye Wenjie and the ETO betray humanity because she wants to see the world burn; Del Azarchel and the Hermeticists do it because they want power. Both Azarchel and Montrose refuse to give up their attempts to assert their will against the powers of the heavens.
We took a look at the comparative effects of a conventional artillery attack and a nuclear attack on Seoul. North Korea has maintained the ability to inflict tens if not hundreds of thousands of fatalities on the South using inaccurate and labor-intensive but voluminous long-range artillery fire for decades. Nuclear weapons allow North Korea to maintain the threat of a countervalue attack on Seoul, while providing more flexibility than their current deterrent forces. Also, the probable reliance of the North Koreans on chemical weapons in a shooting war means their legacy “conventional” deterrent already stands a high likelihood of provoking nuclear retaliation by South Korea’s American ally.
Even given high rates of missile interception, nuclear weapons allow the North Koreans to accomplish with a few munitions what previously took hundreds of thousands. And antimissile defenses are not perfect. Not every missile will be hit, and not every hit will actually kill the warhead. The use of decoys and saturation salvos are likely tactics that would lower the intercept rate against North Korean missiles compared to those fired from Yemen in the linked article.
The nuclear deterrent is also more flexible. Nuclear-tipped missiles can threaten not only all of South Korea — including important ports like Busan and Pohang that are out of reach of long-range artillery — but also off-peninsula support zones such as Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. (North Korean nuclear ballistic missiles are probably useless against naval targets — they aren’t accurate enough and they can’t likely get target-quality data anyways). They even open up the possibility of retaliation against the US mainland.
Ranges of North Korean missiles, 2016
Nuclear weapons can point not only to the south but to the north. The North probably doesn’t consider China a threat in the same way they do the South Koreans or the United States, but there’s intents and then there’s capabilities, and China has a lot of capability sitting on the other side of a comparatively lightly-defended border. If Kim thinks he’d ever like to do something the Chinese might not like — such as Korean reunification — he’ll probably feel a lot more comfortable being able to announce that any invasion would or could be met with nuclear retaliation.
The point is that the North’s nuclear weapons can replace their conventional deterrent while adding a lot of capabilities that howitzers and artillery rockets can’t, and it probably isn’t even costing them that much. Again, North Korea can spend ~10% of its current defense budget on its nuclear program to replace an entire artillery corps, at the absolute minimum, and may set the stage both militarily and politically within the North for an even further drawdown of the North’s bloated conventional forces, a legacy of Kim Jong-Il’s “military first” economic policy.
North Korea isn’t the only country which has ever made this calculus. The United States made a similar, deliberate choice in the 1950s to counter Soviet forces in Europe with nuclear weapons on the grounds of cost-effectiveness. Stephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution, who wrote the Atomic Audit book I cited in the last post, believes that this was ultimately false— however, he attributes this to the development of an excessive diversity of warheads and delivery systems, pork barrel politics, and mismanagement of the targeting process, NOT to the cost of nuclear weapons themselves. North Korea, even if they are totally unaware of this history, is constrained by its poverty into not investing trillions of dollars into overkill. One warhead type mounted on a few dozen missiles of various ranges — culminating in submarine-launched and intercontinental types — will suit them fine.
All of these benefits also suggest that North Korea’s nuclear weapons aren’t going away. The “international community” has already “allowed” Pakistan, Israel, India, and the People’s Republic of China to build nuclear weapons. The examples of Pakistan and Israel are particularly instructive: in both instances, a relatively small state threatened by larger neighbors (India, the Arab states) maintains a nuclear deterrent as an equalizer. In many ways this asymmetric viewpoint is a more natural use of nuclear weapons than as one more asset in the arsenal of wealthy states with large militaries.
God created the nations, but J. Robert Oppenheimer made them equal.
Sometimes the lemonade you buy at the store is pink instead of yellow, because it has a different color of dye in it.
![PinkLemonade_2LBottle_Hero[1]](https://sfoil.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/pinklemonade_2lbottle_hero1.png?resize=270%2C480)
But what if you want to drink patrician lemonade instead of mass-market swill? Red food coloring is not the answer you’re looking for.
In the last post, I looked at what sort of damage North Korea can do with its Long Range Artillery, including both conventional and chemical payloads. Now we can try to estimate what the North can accomplish with nuclear weapons. The number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery systems the North Koreans possess isn’t knowable, but using some publicly available information and making up plausible-sounding numbers can give us an idea of what they can accomplish.
Effects
Presumably the North Koreans are confident in their 15kt bomb design, which they claim will (unlike the bombs detonated in 1945) fit onto a missile. There’s no reason not to believe them; if it doesn’t, they’ll just keep conducting tests until they have something that works and is small enough. If they don’t set off another 100kt+ detonation, it’s an indicator that the 2017 test was of a missile-suitable warhead, which it probably was – -they don’t have much use for something that can’t be put on a missile.
I’m going to use Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP app to estimate the effects of a nuclear explosion, and as a comparison to the uniform population density method from the last post. He also has a “MISSILEMAP” app, but we’re not concerned with the ability to destroy a specific target; this is a countervalue attack against a densely populated area.
Playing around with the 15kt explosion on NUKEMAP, I get between 60-200k killed and 250-500k wounded depending on the nature of the district in which the bomb hits using Mr. Wellerstein’s model. In the .017人/m^2 uniform density model from the last post, and the 1200m 500 rem dose radius as a kill radius (this area also includes a shockwave >5psi), we get 76,867 fatalities. Using the 100% third-degree burns radius as the wound radius (1.9km) gives us 201,000 wounded. So, this is in the ballpark of Wellerstein’s more detailed model, on the low end. His model accounts for the possibility of casualties outside the radii noted above. Mine is much more conservative. I don’t put too much trust in the resolution of his population-density data, since the population shifts around the city substantially during the day and week. Still, we’re generally in agreement.
Commercial/Government vs Residential
When discussing the damage done by conventional munitions, I decided to reduce the “damage radius” in order to account for the protection provided by the broken, built-up urban environment. I don’t believe this to be the case with a nuclear detonation, because the large shockwave produced will tend to cause the total collapse of buildings, by applying the shockwave overpressure against a much larger area, compared to smaller conventional explosives. This isn’t an inherent characteristic of nuclear weapons, and emulating this effect with non-nuclear explosives is the point of weapons like the GBU-43 or Timothy McVeigh’s hobby project. However, none of the North Korean artillery warheads are anywhere near large enough to cause wholesale collapse of structures as in an earthquake. It is possible that the construction of larger buildings in Seoul would enable them to avoid collapse collapse by one or several nuclear blasts. If so, these are probably overestimates, but a lot of people are still going to die.
Aleppo, Syria in 2014. Despite heavy fighting, most of the buildings are basically intact.
Unfortunately, the paltry 15kt bomb is a firecracker compared to North Korea’s state of the art, for which I’ll use a conservative 100kt estimate. Depending, again, on the district hit, NUKEMAP estimates 245,000-480,000 dead and 800,000-1,200,000 wounded. Using our own model above — and 1600m/4500m kill/wound from the same source — gives us 140,000 dead and 1.1 million wounded. This is almost certainly lowballing the number of people killed, since many outside the radius would be killed by building collapse, burns, radiation, etc.
RIP Noise Basement
So, it looks like it would take 2-6x 100kt warheads or 5-15x 15kt warheads to inflict the same number of casualties as the conventional artillery barrage, while acknowledging that even one single warhead on target, especially the larger one, would do the job just fine.
Cost
We guessed in the last post that throwing 70 kilotons of high explosives at Seoul would cost about a billion dollars worth of munitions and require 50,000 people. The North Koreans’ job isn’t quite so simple as it appears above, because not every warhead can hit its target. If South Korean missile defenses can intercept 75% of incoming missiles, then the North need to launch 8 missiles to get a 90% chance of hitting. Even 50% interception rate means you need 3-4 missiles for a 90% probability of hit. Better, but do you feel lucky?
So, the North wants some combination of suppression and saturation of missile defenses in order to actually hit the target. If launching missiles in salvos reduces interception rates to 50%, and suppression of missile-defense sites (such as by maintaining a small fraction of the conventional artillery above, or by using small drones as improvised precision munitions) can get the interception rate to 33%, now we’re in business. Launch a five-missile salvo, 99% chance one goes off.
Nuclear disarmament advocate group Global Zero estimates that North Korea spends about $700 million per year on its nuclear program, compared to about $10 billion on its military overall. Estimating the marginal cost of a nuclear weapon is very difficult even in the best of circumstances. The 1998 book Atomic Audit estimates that China spent $28 billion in 1988 dollars ($58 billion in 2017) to build 450 nuclear warheads, about $120 million apiece. The comparison is apt given the similarities of a relatively poor state with modest aims. This article estimates a marginal cost of $50 million for an American ICBM. Given their possession of a workable warhead design and nuclear material, it is far from unreasonable to assume that North Korea can build and maintain 10x 100kt IRBMs and a flock of decoys for less than the billion dollar stock cost of its conventional deterrent munitions.
This also means that if nuclear forces allow the North Koreans to decrease spending on conventional forces by 10%, they’re coming out ahead. Spinning this shift as “conventional disarmament” even allows them to parlay the weapons program that in theory contributes to their pariah status into a diplomatic positive.
I read the first two books of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion). I have been roundly advised not to continue with series, and I am not, especially after reading the end of Fall. Overall these two books deserve their relatively high reputation.
Hyperion was the stronger book, I suspect because of its episodic nature. Both are around 500 pages long, but the density of the narrative in Fall is much higher since most of the space in Hyperion is taken up by the pilgrims’ loosely connected stories. Fall was good on its own (though you’re about to hear me complain about it some more), but just didn’t maintain the same high standard of quality. Any reader who likes Hyperion will find it very difficult not to pick up Fall to resolve the cliffhanger, anyway.
Recommended before reading this: If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing with Made Up Numbers
North Korea last week offered to remove long range artillery from the DMZ. But of course: they don’t need it anymore. They’ve got nuclear weapons. But what, exactly, is the logic behind replacing the conventional deterrent with a nuclear one? After all, North Korea’s current deterrent system has worked.
North Korea’s long-range artillery (LRA) has up until now served as both a deterrent and as a deep-strike capability. The North Koreans have no hope of conducting any meaningful air attacks against South Korean targets during a war, so they emplaced the LRA instead. The artillery fire would be unobserved, but on the other hand most of the likely targets are static.
LRA represents a considerable investment in manpower and maintenance for the North Koreans. Their main delivery systems, in order of increasing range and power, are the 170mm “Koksan” gun, the 240mm multiple rocket launcher (MLRS), and the 300mm MLRS. The 170mm gun can reach the northern parts of Seoul, the 240mm rockets can reach most of Seoul, and the 300mm MLRS can reach down to Daejeon, threatening major installations south of Seoul.
I want to emphasize that this is a hypothetical to create an estimate for both the countervalue damage caused by this force, and give a rough estimate of North Korean investment. Accurate numbers for the number of these systems in use are not publicly available, if at all. Estimates are generally around “several hundred” 170mm guns, around two hundred 240mm MLRS, and fewer than a hundred 300mm MLRS. We’ll assume that all artillery is organized into battalions of 12 pieces each. We’ll go with 5x 300mm battalions (60 pieces), 15x 240mm battalions (180 pieces), and 40x 170mm battalions (480 pieces).
The Power of Long Range Artillery
Now we try to figure out how much damage these pieces can do. The Koksan is similar to the American M107 175mm howitzer, which was used in Vietnam. The M107 fires a ~150lb shell, at a rate of 2/minute, for 120/hr. The shell is about 50% larger than a 100lb 155/152mm shell, so instead of a 50m casualty radius we will go with a 60m radius (inverse square law in effect). To further specify, anyone within a 20m radius would be killed, anyone from 20-60m is wounded. This is for an airburst against a person standing in the open however, not in a heavily built-up urban environment. Relying mostly on intuition, I will quarter the casualty radius to make up for the natural cover provided by the surroundings and the tendency to seek immediate cover.
Assume the 240mm rocket is similar to the Russian 220mm Uragan, with a 220-lb warhead. We’ll go with a 30m kill radius and an 70m wound radius in the open, down to 7.5/17.5 with the terrain adjustment. Each launcher carries 22 rockets, which it can fire quickly, although it then needs to reload, reposition, and retarget. Perhaps one salvo every 20 minutes, or 22×3 = 66 rounds per hour.
The 300mm rocket is probably similar to the BM-30 Smerch, with a ~500lb warhead. 40m kill radius, 80m wound radius (adjusted to 10/20m). Each launcher has eight tubes, which it can fire in about a minute, although it takes a while to reload and reposition. Again, one salvo every 20 minutes, or 8×3 = 24 rounds per hour.
This gives us 57,600 170mm rounds, 11,880 240mm rounds, and 1,440 300mm rounds per hour. However, that’s an unrealistically high estimate. Not all of the launchers work, not all of the munitions will explode…and not all of the warheads will contain high explosive.
The museum-piece Koksans might have a 50% readiness rate and a 20% dud rate. They are now firing 28,800 170mm rounds, of which 23,000 will actually explode. The newer, better-maintained MLRS might have a 70% readiness rate and a 10% dud rate, giving us about 7,500x 240mm and 900x 300mm effective rockets per hour.
In an all-out scenario, some of those munitions will be fitted with chemical warheads. I’ll look at the effects later, but if I had to guess then maybe 10-20% of warheads would be chemical. Split the difference, call it 15%, and now we have 19,550x shells, 6,375x 220mm rockets, and 765x 300mm rockets exploding.
Since we’re considering this a countervalue strike, especially given the inaccuracy of these weapons, let’s look at Seoul. Seoul has a very high population density of 17,000 people per square kilometer, or .017 people per square meter. The 300mm rockets will probably be aimed past Seoul given their range, at relatively less dense targets like airfields and headquarters. I will use the town of Osan, just south of Seoul, as an exemplar; it has 200,000 people in about a 43 square kilometer area, giving us .0046 people per square meter.
In the first hour:
| Munition | Eff. Rnds | Kill Area (m2) | Wound Area (m2) | Pop/m2 | KILL | WOUND |
| 170mm | 19584 | 78.5 | 628 | 0.017 | 26,135 | 209,079 |
| 240mm | 6361 | 176.6 | 785 | 0.017 | 16,979 | 75,464 |
| 300mm | 771 | 314 | 942 | 0.0046 | 990 | 2,970 |
Total: 44,104 killed, 287,513 wounded
The ratio between wounded and killed looks a bit high to me. Perhaps it includes relatively minor injuries that wouldn’t require immediate treatment. A major hidden assumption, also, is uniform distribution of incoming shells: no round lands in the same place, and there isn’t even any overlap between casualty radii. Also, the firing batteries never run out of ammunition.
Once the first barrage lands, anyone in the target area will take cover. I will model this as a further reduction in the casualty radii by 75%. Also, counterattacks will begin; I will assume that these will reduce the attacking LRA by 1% per hour. Summing the resulting series gets another 136,400 dead and 890,000 wounded before the LRA is silenced.
Assuming the 170mm shell is 15% high explosive filler (as is the usual 155mm shell), or 22.5lbs, the total amount of high explosive launched at Seoul is about 70 kilotons. Keep that in mind!
Total: about 1.3 million casualties (180,500 dead, 1.1 million wounded wounded)
That’s just from high explosives, though. What about the chemical weapons?
The largest chemical attack so far has been Halabja 1988 in Iraq. At the time, Halabja looks to have had 70,000 people. The attack, using a modern cocktail of lethal agents, targeted the city indiscriminately, killing around 3,500-5,000 and injuring about 7,000-10,000. Halabja had and has a lower population density than Seoul overall, although it’s difficult to determine how much because most figures for the town clearly include sparsely populated surrounding areas. Also, the high-rise residences common in Seoul would provide some protection against the heavier-than-air chemical agents.
Ignoring the confounding factors, a simple ratio means another 500k-700k dead and 1 million-1.4 million wounded. Note that this would provoke the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in retaliation. I am here using an assumption that the munitions discussed above produce a “blanket” that affects the target collectively, rather than trying to determine the effects of each given impact. I believe this to be the correct approach based on my understanding of chemical warfare. I’m not that confident in the reliability of this number, but I think it’s a good benchmark.
(It looks like the most lethal effect of the explosives might simply be to drive the population into shelters where they’re killed en masse by chemical agents sinking down. People might be safer in their high rises; some accounts from the First World War noticed a similar dilemma, with chemicals lingering in trenches.)
The above gives us a total of about a million dead and two or three million wounded, many of whom would die later given the inability to treat so many people. These three to four million casualties are probably an upper bound on what the North can achieve with its conventional deterrent. For instance, it assumes no overlap between chemical and explosive casualties, which is silly, in addition to the absurd assumption of uniform distribution of munitions and generally zero overkill. However, even this worst-case scenario wouldn’t actually annihilate Seoul, much less South Korea. 80% of the population in the target area would survive, and two-thirds would be relatively unscathed.
The Cost
We assumed above that the North Koreans maintains 60 battalions of artillery. The American units with which I am most familiar have about 500 soldiers in a howitzer battalion and 250 in a rocket battalion. However, these units are expected to operate with a great deal more independence and mobility than the North Korean units being discussed here. If there are 200 soldiers in a North Korean LRA battalion, this gives us 12,000 soldiers. These are firing units, however; the total force is probably substantially larger, maybe 50,000.
Then there are the numbers of munitions. The forces above fired over 1.4 million artillery shells, 420k 220mm rockets, and over 50k 300mm rockets. Not a single one of these was fired in support of tactical maneuver. Even assuming minimal costs of $300/shell, $1000/rocket, and $2000/rocket, this is around a billion dollars in munitions, against a GDP of under $30 billion, before even attempting to actually fight anybody. The point is, it ain’t cheap. This didn’t even attempt to include the expensive intermediate-range Scud-type missiles in the North, which are probably counterforce weapons, more or less.
Next, I’ll look at what why nuclear weapons might be an attractive replacement for all of this — which is what I originally intended to write about — in a follow-on post.
Edit: After I posted this, I found a much more detailed/competent/professional analysis of this problem by Mr. Roger Cavazos. I’m encouraged that my first-volley estimate was at least in the ballpark of his more informed method.
I finally got around to watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris. I enjoy “deliberate” movies — Barry Lyndon is one of my favorites — so I was not bothered by the slow pace, but most viewers will be. The only part of the movie I’d ever specifically heard of — a digressive scene of Tokyo traffic which length Tarkovsky may have intended solely to justify the Motherland’s expenses in sending his crew to Japan — was a little awkward but the rest of the movie was sublime. Lem’s complaints about the adaptation are unwarranted; the director simply had a different vision in a different medium. Imagine Clarke griping about Kubrick’s film (although Lem’s novel is superior to Clarke’s 2001).
On War, along with other memoirs and histories of its era, concerns itself in large part with fortresses. Large, partly self-sustaining fortified areas (food production was always impossible) continued to be important to military strategy even after cannon brought down the old castle walls.
Fortresses had several characteristics:
They controlled strategically important terrain, such as roads, mountain passes, and riverways. Typically, these features passed through the fortress.
They were large enough to house substantial bodies of troops, materiel, and supplies, well in excess of the permanent garrison.
They allowed armed forces inside to sally and return at will either en masse or in small groups.
They were sufficiently protected, both by fortification and armament, to require a concerted “main effort” to reduce. Successfully storming the fortress (in modern terms an “assault”, though “storm” is still used in German) required the most effort; an “investment” or siege to prevent sallies and eventually starve out the garrison a lesser effort. An “observation” or screen could be placed around a fortress with even less resources, although this would still allow entry and exit from the fortress more or less at will. In the 17th century, an entire field army might be required to reduce a fortress; as armies grew larger this became less the case, but fortresses remained an important feature while declining in importance compared to field fortifications through World War I.
What Happened?
There are two culprits for the decline of the fortress: mobility and firepower.
First, the increased mobility of both mechanized and air-dropped ground forces made it much more difficult for static fortifications to control terrain features. Motorized and aerial supply lines also make it much more difficult for a bypassed position to disrupt the communications of the bypassing unit.
However, the increased range, power, and precision of modern weapons clearly has the most to do with the decline of the fortress. Air-dropped munitions can easily destroy most fortifications, and modern munitions will hit whatever can be detected from outside the range of defensive armaments. The last identifiable fortresses — such as Malta — relied in the final assessment on the inaccuracy of aerial bombs to survive.
What would a Modern Fortress look like?
A modern fortress would have the characteristics described above, but I will add an important qualifier:
It should cost more to destroy than to build.
I won’t get too wrapped up in this, but: if our fortress takes a great deal of effort to create, but can easily be eliminated by a readily-available, inexpensive weapon or attack, it’s not what we’re looking for.
I’d also like to add something else in to make it more specific, based on the concept of “surfaces and gaps”. A surface is, basically, a strong point (not necessarily a physical location) and a gap is an exploitable weakness. A surface or gap does not need to always be such to everyone all the time. An air defense battery presents a “surface” to an aircraft (when it’s turned on!) but a gap to an infantry platoon.
A fortress should be “all surface” to an attacking force.
With this in mind, what are modern equivalents?
Airbases
Both the Donetsk War (Donetsk Airport) and the Syrian Civil War (Menagh, Al-Tabqa, Al-Duhur, Kuweires) have seen airports and air bases hold out against enemy attack long after surrounding territory. All of these sites had protective perimeter fortifications, and held out far longer than the surrounding territory in the face of enemy attack (in the Syrian case, for several years). Donetsk did not last as long, but was also not as extensively hardened.
Menagh Air Base — The defending SAA occupied the airbase, while attacking rebels operated in the town to the northeast.
Donetsk Airport in early 2015
One thing that all of these had in common, though, are the lack of an opposing air-to-surface threat. While the enemy was reasonably well equipped in both cases — including artillery and armor — they had no ability to attack these installations from the air. In Syria, the government was able to keep the defending forces resupplied via helicopter for several years until defeat or, in the case of Kuweires, relief.
Forward Operating Bases
Expeditionary Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) have many similarities to the airbases above. However, they are purpose-built to actively support ground tactical operations outside their perimeter, as the examples above are not. They do include both perimeter fortifications and point-defense systems to destroy incoming standoff munitions. American “air defense” at bases has mostly been focused on point defense against crude artillery. Additionally, they may deployed integrated air defense systems (IADS).
Camp Bastion in Afghanistan
Typically an IADS is conceived as protecting an area, but this needn’t be the case. The Russian military base in Syria at Khmeimim is clearly the protected objective of such a network. Unlike the typical American FOBs, the Russians clearly consider a sophisticated aerial attack a real possibility. In accordance with the “all surface” condition above, the defense system shouldn’t require any component outside of the perimeter defense, although this doesn’t preclude the positioning of air defense sensors outside the perimeter, nor the interlinking of the base with a larger network (as indeed is implied by the very term IADS).
Point defenses, however advanced, could almost certainly not prevent a hit from an ICBM or other suborbital attack, but anything short of that remains an open question. Currently, these air defense systems appear key to the creation of fortress-type installations.
I think it worth noting that any FOB worth its salt has at least limited facilities for air transport, and larger ones inevitably have full-service airstrips.
Tunnel Complexes
On organization that didn’t have the benefit of air superiority was the Viet Cong. Their most extensive tunnel complexes, I believe, meet the definition of a fortress given above. The most famous example is at Cu Chi:
The tunnels were by all accounts nowhere near as cozy as this illustration implies
This differs from a simple bunker in enabling stockpiling of supplies, providing assembly areas, etc. Being underground provides both protection and concealment. The camouflage aspect is most interesting, I think: if every everything that can be seen can be hit, and anything hit is destroyed, then you must not be seen.
Many of the tunnels — including the Cu Chi headquarters — were eventually destroyed. However, this was not done without an intense, concerted effort, and the tunnels operated for years on end.
The South China Sea Islands
The Chinese installations in the South China Sea (such as the one below in the Spratly Islands) may be the closest modern equivalent to a fortress. Like the airbases and FOBs above, they have clear fields of fire in all directions (being islands); this is a common feature except for the tunnel complexes. They’re also large enough to allow critical defense systems some room to move around on the island; only the runway itself is completely fixed. This need for some local dispersion is also common to the airbases above, and to some degree is even present in the tunnel complexes, which could dig out new tunnels or shift into new areas as needed.
Chinese installation in the Spratly Islands (Fiery Cross Reef). The runway is about two miles long.
Cities
Important towns and cities are often located on strategically significant terrain, and may constitute such terrain themselves. As a result, fortified towns and cities are nothing new. Unlike the previous examples, seamless perimeter defense appear no longer feasible. Like tunnel complexes, their defense generally allows for some limited penetration by an attacking force.
Cities are now much larger, relative to armed forces of any size, than in the historical past. This makes the defense or investment of a city a much more fluid affair than in the past, where city walls and a complete countervallation were standard features of warfare.
21st-century cities are a challenging military problem, but I believe they are better conceived as a complex sort of terrain rather than as a “fortress”, which is fundamentally a “point” position. An air-defense network could easily cover a large city, but the city itself strikes me as too permeable to enemy attack to constitute a fortress. However, the terrain of a city could be conceived as allowing for a “fortress”-like strongpoints, providing camouflage. Such strongpoints are ubiquitous in urban warfare.
The thought of a modern city truly converted into a true fortress is intriguing. The defender would have to construct a perimeter defense, and the garrison would almost certainly require the mobilization and arming of the city’s inhabitants in an organized manner. The coordination of the defense would be an incredible undertaking that would probably build on existing law-enforcement and governance structure. The mass-mobilization aspect runs against current trends towards smaller, professional regular forces; the garrison would almost certainly be outside of the “regular” armed forces structure. Vague gestures in this direction are sometimes background in science fiction, but nothing like it exists in the real world. An interesting concept.
Conclusions
The ability both to defend against aerial attack, and to enable the defender to conduct at least limited air operations, looks like a key capability for a modern fortress. Air defenses have been improving — the ability to intercept both low-flying cruise missiles and high-flying aircraft. Point defense systems might actually encourage air defense components to be placed more closely together (by reducing the threat of HARM weapons and the like), encouraging perimeter defenses. A look at the images above suggests that some level of dispersion inside the “fortress” is another key defensive capability, giving “garrisoned” artillery and air defense systems a space to move around against counterfire. Defensive dispersion and space for operating aircraft appear to be synergistic: you need a square mile or few to conceal the locations or your important defense systems, so you might as well have a runway in there.
The necessity for perimeter barriers and clear fields of direct fire (the needed range extended by modern weapons) remains. The Chinese installations in the South China Sea clearly has these concepts in mind, as do Russian-operated bases in Syria.