School of War - Ep 176: David Betz on Modern Fortification

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London and author of The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century, joins the show to discuss how fortification is alive, well, and everywhere.  ▪️ Times      •      01:22 Introduction     •      01:53 A default condition     •     13:20 Why is that there?      •      22:13 Alexandrian foundations      •      28:50 Security and mobility         •      39:53 The pendulum swings     •      48:54 Intrigue   Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today's episode with David Betz defies easy categorization, but it's one of my favorites of the year so far. If the conventional wisdom is true that we are back in a period where the defensive form of war has an advantage over the offense, all other things being equal, well, how does that actually work? And what are its actual consequences? Let's get into it. It is the recipe for war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinity. experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in France.

We'll fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds, and in the streets, which will never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Center, author of several books most recently, The Guarded Age, Fortification in the 21st Century. David, thank you so much for making the time. Good. Very welcome. I'm glad to be here again. So let's start with a very big picture question, which in a sense is what your book is about. What are we talking about when we're talking about fortification in the year 2025. I think of forts and I think of things that are old

fashion and proved irrelevant in World War II, if not in certain respects, in World War I. Forts are vulnerable to modern firepower. They can be jumped over, jumped on, gone around. But why a whole book? What's going on? Well, let me explain, really. Guarded Age is a book in three parts, essentially, with one central message, which is, which does speak to your question, which is that fortification, which is an activity that not just popularly, but actually generally within the strategic studies community is usually considered to be kind of quaintly historical, plays a role in human affairs today that is as great as any of the castellated ages of the past that you just mentioned or that you might imagine. It's in three parts because

it really started off as a work of military strategy, which is my intellectual comfort zone. That's where I'm coming from. And it kicked off when I was working specifically on the war in Afghanistan, which involved a lengthy stay there in 2009, summer of 2009. And I couldn't help but observe while I was in Afghanistan, as a civilian advisor, I must point out, was the way in which the war was being fought, which was strikingly static. in its nature was mostly being conducted from fortified outposts, many of which were based upon the fortifications of long-gone empires and invading armies over the years going back as far as

Alexander the Great. And I just thought that was important, like, no, because everybody observed it, everybody, anybody who has been involved in the war on terror, in any of the expeditionary campaigns of the war on terror, will be familiar with Hesco Bastion. It is to, contemporary conflict, what the Huey helicopter was to Vietnam. I thought it was, so I thought that was important, and I wanted to explain it, and to say to my peers, my fellows in the strategic studies, hey, guys, look, this is a part of our subject area or had been going back as far as there has been the study of war, which we're missing. And there's something going on that's pretty profound here. Also, what happened was when I looked into the literature itself, I realized, to my surprise, that the last time that anybody had written about fortifications as a subject of military practice that not only had a past but a future was 100 years ago, actually slightly over 100 years ago.

So I wanted to explain that. The second and third parts of the book came gradually when I got home, essentially, and it occurred. I came to realize that the phenomenon, which I'd been observing in the military sphere, of hunkering down, building walls, of protecting perimeters, of physically channeling flows of people and of things with physical barriers, wasn't just in this military sphere. It was everywhere. So the second and the third parts of the book occurred gradually to me after I had returned home. And I came to realize that the phenomenon I'd been describing in the military sphere was not, was not confined to that.

That same phenomenon of hunkering down, of building walls, securing perimeters, building gates, attempting to physically channel and to filter the flows of people and things was happening everywhere. And I like to say it was a bit like in the Matrix, in the film The Matrix, when the characters start to see the code and everything. I just started to see fortification everywhere. So the second part of the book came essentially to be about the urban landscape. You know, I happen to be, I work in central London. I live in the UK, obviously. And so I wanted to write about what I was seeing in my daily life, which was pretty extraordinary. I thought, and I got very interested in urban portals, notably airports, railway stations, and the like,

which are now intensely physically guarded and physically reinforced structures in ways I can happily describe in detail, but just to say for the point, now these are highly fortified structures like medieval barbecans just for the 21st century. And I came to find, as I think people have observed pretty widely and generally life that guardedness, as I describe it, had become the default setting of urban life, had come to define the urban condition in the 21st century. Much of this effort is designed very ingeniously, it must be said, to blend in, to not be visible. And so your observation of the quaintness or the ahistoristic quality of fortification that many people feel comes in fact from the way from one of the primary design considerations of contemporary fortification, which is that they not look like fortifications while serving precisely as fortifications always have done. So I became very interested in that.

And I was surprised, I must admit, at the school. scale of the industry involved in this process, which by now is an industry that is worth many, many, many tens of billions of dollars annually. It's also, I just thought simply very interesting. A lot of this engineering effort echoes sometimes deliberately, but often implicitly, techniques and attitudes towards fortification that are centuries old, that we can see in old architecture that is revisited and redesigned, reformulated in modern designs. And I thought that said something about the persistence of certain ideas, certain elementals of the human condition, you might say, about urbanity and, well, about civilization, the quality of our civilization today.

I ended up reading a lot about and engaging with architecture, which was new for me, but also, as was art as well as geography, urban studies, policing, government regulation, and a whole host of other matters that felt very connected in exciting but also complicated and sometimes rather subtle ways. The third part of the book came to be focused primarily on what I would call, I guess what I might call corporate fortification. But to some extent, it's more than that. It's private. It's private. It's familial, even individual fortification efforts. But a large part of that book ended up concentrating on data centers, specifically data centers and other infrastructure, but most importantly, the underlying electronic

infrastructure that makes the so-called information age work. Of course, you might have noticed that when we talk about information age security or information security. Often people think of, you know, they're thinking of this very intangibly. They're thinking about stuff on their computer or bits and bytes. But all of that is physically, you know, all of that rests on physical infrastructure,

very expensive, very energy demanding, stuff that is now very highly protected. Probably the most protected installations now on planet Earth, accepting maybe the White House, maybe NORAD headquarters or Fort Knox, are data centers with virtually no people in them at all. So I've been writing, I started to write particularly about these intensely physically guarded and highly robust structures.

But I looked into other things like fortified drug houses. That was a very interesting tangent to follow. It's not something that occurs to people in normal life, I would say, in normal walks of life, unless you're a drug user or a narco boss, in which case is it a big deal. it's a significant fraction of your corporate income, or sorry, your corporate outlay, if I can call it that. I looked quite a bit at preppers as well, which is another surprisingly big enterprise in fortification, and one that quite interestingly is not confined to any particular class. You see preppers occurring everywhere on the economic scale from the very poor,

who often live in highly guarded conditions, although in that case looking actually quite medieval often, just walk the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, for example, and you'll see fortified compound after fortified compound, right up to the very, very rich, who are investing heavily in this. So ultimately, the conceptual framework here, and I'll just conclude a long answer to a very short question, but ultimately the conceptual framework I ended up employing was strategical, I would suggest, in the sense of it being about interdependent choice, which is fundamentally what strategy is, and about having to resolve or to find the ideal balance between a number of competing desires, such as between security and mobility, or guardedness and liberty, or strengthening,

and the aesthetic quality of the environment, or simply hunkering down. Ultimately, I think it was the aesthetic dimension, the tension between aesthetics and security that I found personally most intriguing. But it must be said in this subject area, you can never get very far away from money. And so I ended up talking a lot about economics. There's a lot there. And I want to get to Afghanistan in a second. But first, I'd like to spend a moment on your reflection.

that in a less sophisticated way that I have not worked out for myself, I've also had that if you just look around you, the strategic character of the urban landscape in particular, maybe landscapes more broadly, is actually kind of apparent, if you know what to look for. You have this lovely reflection in the book, and I'm probably going to mispronounce the name of the village. Is it Medmanham? Is that? Yeah, Medmanham. Oh, I'm close. I was very close. And I'm asking you to speak a bit about that. But, you know, I live in the Washington, D.C. area. I live in the Potomac River Valley, just south of D.C., which even when I start talking like that, it's sort of a weird way, weird way to talk that drives my family crazy. There was a defensive perimeter. There were several

defensive perimeters around Washington during the Civil War. And one of the forts, Fort Scott is now a park. And you can, if you walk around it, you can see the remnants of the defensive berms and such, kind of in the trees next to the grassy, you know, field. But other than that, you would, and aside from the name of the park, you know, you have to look for it. Otherwise, you wouldn't really notice it was there. And it's on a spur of high ground that juts out that narrows the plain of the river valley on the Virginia side. And it's very clear, you know, if you have military training, what the engagement area was meant to be, and you can just sort of see exactly what the point of this thing was. It's all gone today.

But, you know, if you go over and you get on a boat in the Potomac, and I'm not revealing state secrets here because anyone can see it, there are anti-aircraft missile batteries on the shore of the Potomac because you drift up towards downtown or sail up towards downtown Washington. So it's just, I just wanted to say that, you know, that passage in the book struck me as a very true one and reassured me that I wasn't a complete crazy person for sometimes focusing on the same things when I look around. No, I, you're not at all. You're not at all crazy. And I think if any of your listeners have had a moment of their own like that, you've described yourself of just reflecting on the environment around you and asking yourself the very good question, like, why is it? that there? Not just what is it, but sometimes what is it? But also, why is it there? You can kind of see these traces of the past. That's what really intrigued me. And once you kind of get into reading the archaeologists have this term stratigraphy, which is basically the way in which they

look at the ground as they dig through it. They're digging down through the cultural stratigraphy of a place. And I was impressed by that idea, and I started to talk about what I called strategic stratigraphy, a way in which the landscape, you can see that the landscape and the physical structures in a place have been shaped by strategic choice. And oddly enough, that that passage you mentioned about Medmanham, this idea kind of crystallized for me. Medmanham, for your listeners, undoubtedly very, very few will have heard of it. It's a tiny little village located about 25 miles from the center of London, London. It's picture postcard bucolic English countryside village essentially. It's about as quiet as you can get.

It's right on the banks or it's right on the banks of the Thames and in between the river and where the Thames Valley climbs up into the children hills. So it's really naturally gorgeous and peaceful place. I used to go there to walk my dog. I also used to go there because one of the great British strategist, Sir Basil, Little Heart, I knew he had to live there and was ultimately buried there. So I thought one day I'd, you know, go and see his grave, which is in a churchyard at the crossroads. Across the street from it is a pub.

It's about, let's call it 600, 700 years old. And diagonally across the street from that is the site of an Iron Age hill fork. that dates back something around 3,000 years, but was in active use up until about the time of the Roman invasion or perhaps shortly before. Just standing in that one place on the grave of the coincidentally located grave of this British strategist, you're looking at a pub which was the site of an English Civil War battle, which is actually not recorded to history, but we know occurred because when, When they renovated the pub, they dug out a number of Civil War era cannonballs. So they know there was some kind of skirmish there. What happened or what was it about? They didn't know.

The Iron Age Hill Fort, that's probably, to my mind, the hill fort is the foundational kind of strategic moment in human civilization. It's the first thing that human beings do when they settle down to practice agriculture. is they find some high place or some protectable place in their local environment and they dig a ditch around it to try and protect themselves and their livestock and their tools from the more powerful, more numerous, probably more vigorous nomads who are still living around them. And then thirdly, even the church itself, the church itself was, oddly enough, it was nearly bombed out during the Second World War, probably because a German bomber had been aiming at an installation that was actually more than a mile away, which was an RIF base where the photographic interpretation and some other command facilities were located. Anyway, they missed it by a mile, so the bomb landed just opposite the church and blew out the windows, which is why they had to be expected. You can see a few places. Anyway, I could go on. The point here is that certainly in England, and in most places, from the sounds of it, Washington, and I'm going to guess practically every place where human beings have been on our planet, if you are equipped with the knowledge to observe what you're seeing, there's a huge amount of.

of story there, and much of it relates to conflict. Our landscape is, our landscape is, is deliberately shaped by strategic matters. And finally, just to conclude the point, and the whole premise of that vignette really was, this didn't stop happening. It didn't stop happening in the 20th century. It's still happening today. It's not really happening very much in Medmanam right now. It must be said. but there are other places where it's happening very, very intensely, and we shouldn't, we shouldn't, we shouldn't think otherwise. You speak about your experiences in Afghanistan, and I was very amused that, you know, you opened the book with this anecdote about CAF, Calf, Candaher Airfield, where I spent my last day in Afghanistan, around the same time, actually, within a year of your anecdote. I had been, I was an infantry officer, and I'd been with my unit in a pretty rough area of Hellman Province for a whole deployment, and then we were leaving. And, you know, Kandahar, as you can imagine, you got to see.

see a bit of the rest of the place. Kandahar seemed like civilization compared to where we had been, you know, paved streets and good food and milkshakes, as you point out. And I remember standing in line for Chow that the one night we were there. And it was me, another lieutenant in our company first sergeant, I want to say. And the siren goes off. And all the airmen, it was mostly airmen who were also in the line, go diving into gutters and stuff.

And me and the other two Marines and I sort of look at each other with bemused smirks on her face is like, oh, a siren, you know, what does that have to do? We've just, we've just been through a lot. Like, we're, what are we going to? And he sort of ads were kind of smirking at one another and, and, you know, wordlessly making fun of everyone around us. Caboom, this 107 hits. I mean, really, I mean, like 100 meters away. Uncomfortably close. Uncomfortably close to have not taken any, you know, precautionary measures. And that led to sort of a social question after, what do you do now? You know, it's gone off. Do you still take cover? You know, in the end, we just cut the line. But, uh, uh,

I wanted to your comment on the static nature of the war, you know, the Marines, I think on several occasions throughout our time in Helmand had this experience where, you know, our culture was this sort of maneuverist culture where at least implicitly, if not seriously, but as a kind of question of attitude, the defense has sort of looked down upon. I mean, we study it, we do it. You can't not, you can't not do it. And at a serious level, you sort of reflect there's really no difference between defense and offense. You know, when goes on offense in order to achieve things that are ultimately going to be static in some ways,

one goes static to prepare to go on offense, it's, you know, it's fluid. But nevertheless, culturally, Marines would, if you ask any Marine, the correct answer is you'd rather attack the defend. And yet, you know, we'd get to areas where the successful operational concept was quite clearly static, a one that involved a lot of static positions. And it was hard for Marines sometimes to accept that. You know, in the Sengen area, this wasn't my,

unit. There's a famous case of the Brits having been in that area and having built a bunch of outposts, small, very small, like, you know, squad level outposts almost in some cases, I think. Marines come in, the first Marine battalion to come into the area and sort of say, oh, that's not how we're going to operate. We're going to go out and brawl and go out and find these guys. And they pull all these outposts out. And what they realize pretty quickly is if you don't have 24-7 observation on a spot, you know, an intersection, whatever, well, then the bad guys can do what they want there. And that includes plant bombs, plant IEDs, which was the the main, really the main threat. And, you know, I experienced something similar down in my area

in Marja where that same insight, if you don't have 24-7 observation, you're just giving the bad guys a lot of space to play with. And I would notice the Afghan soldiers who we would work with, what they wanted to, they did not want to go out and do big patrols and searches and sort of mobile operations. They wanted to stand post, which again, our sort of attitudinal, we were sort of prejudiced against that or sort of looked down our nose at that. Like that seems sort of lazy. But the truth is, if you let them, if you kind of pushed on the open door of what they wanted to do and help them organize a whole series of posts all over the place and sort of demanded that they do a good job at that, as opposed to trying to force them into doing things that they actually didn't really want to do and were particularly suited to. You could achieve progress towards security, local progress towards security. And this was, you know, certainly I can't speak for the entire Marine Corps, obviously, but speaking for myself as a young officer at the time, this was a strange.

lesson that I learned on the spot that I had not really learned in training. I could go on a lot about forts in Afghanistan, believe you, me. But really my favorite one is one that you might recognize. I did talk about it in the book, but you might recognize because it was a U.S. Marine outpost. It was located, it was about, let's say about five kilometers outside of the Miwand district area. Maywan, which is located, it's in Kandahar province, but it's right on the border with, right where it borders with Helmand province. And the Afghan National Highway 1, which is

effectively the nation's big highway, which does a circular route around the country, runs through Maiwan District Center and alongside this marine outpost. And I came across this because, you know, as I said, as a civilian, I don't have any proper war stories, but as a civilian, it was one of the few days where we were led out kind of into the wild in Afghanistan. Now, admittedly, we're very heavily protected bodyguard, like armored guys all over the place. But I really wanted to go to my wand because I wanted to visit the battlefield of the battle of my wand, which occurred during the second Anglo-Aftan War, not too far from there. They wouldn't let me do that because the truth of the matter was that they had no confidence in

their ability to secure a soft-bodied person like me outside of the urban center or outside of an armored vehicle. Anyway, the story, that's kind of tangential to the story. There's this outpost. It's located on an outcropping right next to the highway, maybe, let's call it 100 meters in height, probably not quite that high. And to look at it from a distance, it didn't look like much, except it kind of stuck out because it was otherwise in a flat plain with the mountains behind. And you could see there was kind of pile of Hesco Bastion and looking kind of ramshackle and then a big antenna sticking out of the top of it with stars and stripes and what looked like a don't tread on me banner or something like that flying from it.

And there was probably maybe a squad or a platoon of Marines up there. I was intrigued by that and looked at it through the binos of the officer who was with me. And you could see even at a distance that it was built on the foundations of something else. So I looked into it. It turns out that this is an Alexandrian fortress. It was a fortress built by Alexander the Great when his army marched through Afghanistan on its way to India. Highway 1, which is essentially a branch of the old Silk Road, ran right there, and he had located a detachment, let's call it a platoon of his, Alexander, of his Greek army.

And hey, like I do like the Marines, but do the Marines have, you know, much to brag about against the Army of Alexander the Great? I mean, these guys marched for 4,000 miles to get there. These were pretty hardcore guys. what were they doing? They were stuck up on the top of that outcrop doing exactly what those U.S. Marines were doing 2,500 years later, which was observing what went along that highway, flying the flag up there high, and I think the antenna, they were probably repeating transmissions, radio transmissions from along that route. I liked how circular it was. I liked how, in essence, what has changed there? Those were probably 25-year-old, you know, who knows? Many of they were

young soldiers. They probably didn't like being stuck up on that rock. They might have thought, gee, you know, like we should be down in India with Alexander right now kicking ass, taking names. But here we are stuck up on this rock. But this is a vital military function. If you don't have security on your supply route, well, you know, you're kind of toast. So many, many When you look into it, many of the outposts, which NATO utilized in Afghanistan, were outposts that the Soviets had used. Before that, the British had used, before that the Mongols had used, Bior.R. and so far and so forth, there's a certain logic to where these things go. And it's apparent, this isn't peculiar to Afghanistan. This is apparent in any place in the world where you look at how armies have attempted to conduct pacification.

campaigns, which is a lesson you can apply to the U.S. landscape. Just take out a map of the U.S. of the continental United States and circle with a marker every town that starts with the word fort and ask yourself, why is that there? How did it get there? What was it for? The logic is, the logic strategically and operationally is not dissimilar. Actually, it's fun. Well, but let's linger on what's changed, which a lot of your book does. You ask about this outpost at my wand, well, what's really different here? And I think you make a very strong case that at some core logical level, the answer is not much. But of course, we know that in other ways, a lot has changed. You know, the need for you make the case. You just did on the show, you do in your

book, that the need for security and thus for the physical elements of security are as old as politics itself, literally, like as old as cities. But technology has made some leaps and bounds since, you know, Jericho. I was just in Israel late last year studying what had happened on the seventh and the failure of the defensive complex down there around Gaza. And then also studying the Israeli success in overcoming the Hezbollah defensive complex in southern Lebanon. There are ways in which, I mean, there was a quite literal fence between Gaza and Israel. There was something similar to a wall, but there was a conceptual way, and this is a point you make in the book, where the whole complex was a kind of wall, just a much more highly functional wall than anyone could have built 50

or 100 years earlier. Of course, it still failed. It was still overcome as a consequence of very old strategic tricks and strategic failures on one side and the other. How has this, what are the most, I want to sort of narrow this down as we can tackle it in a few minutes as opposed to a few days. What are the most important technological issues to focus on in the evolution of fortification, evolution of this physical manifestation for the need for security in the defense here in the 21st century.

That's a good question. And so, and part of the answer you've already, you've already observed when you talked, you talked about the balance between security and movement, right? You have to have a base from which, from which to operate. And it's all well and good to say, right, well, we're going to be very, we're going to be very active and mobile and move around and so on and so forth. We still need a place to sleep. You still need a place to eat, to resupply, to locate certain military functions that don't really work very well if you're in the back of a truck or riding pinion on a motorcycle or hanging from a helicopter skid or all the kind of Rambo stuff that people want to imagine themselves doing. So there is always, there is this, it's not a tension. It's a tension. It's

partnership between fortification and maneuver. You know, you need a base from which to maneuver. And that's how we, you know, that's always been the case. So a medieval castle, for example, if you think of the medieval castle is essentially a patrol base. It's a base of operation for a relatively small force to patrol from and go back. So it can conduct the affairs that it needs to do that are low security for it in a safe place, but it can exert presence in a, in a mobile way, out to essentially a day's march and back. That all hasn't changed very much. What I think has, you know, certain obvious things have changed is you have firstly the advent of air power, which isn't new. I mean, we're talking, depending how you think of it, you're talking a century

that is a couple of centuries old, let's just say a hundred years, that the sky has been immediately, immediately relevant and ultimately have become kind of the sine qua non of the Western way of war. So that's a big issue. Then more recently, the way in which the skies have become kind of, what's the word I might use, democratized in the sense of the, in the way in which low cost commercial drones and jury rigged, drones have made the airspace a great utility even for actually for rather low grade actors who can use it for command and control and reconnaissance purposes and to some degree for attack and what what now we see to be very significant very significant ways.

So from a fortification perspective, that's I think a key development there is the need for is the very much greater need for top cover. Now, this is not a new development. That's why fortification went underground 100 years ago, largely through the influence of heavy artillery, but, you know, air power really reinforced that. That is still the case. If you're building these things nowadays, top cover, certainly concealment, and ideally protective cover is very, very important. Now, if you accept that, then there's a pretty tremendous need for digging potential. You need to be able to dig super fast and super well. And I think the armies which are most serious about war fighting today have had in very intense efforts in increasing their military engineering capabilities.

Specifically, they're digging and their earth-moving capabilities, which is why the IDF, for example, moves at the speed of a D9 bulldozer. That's, you know, the main line merc of the main battle tank probably drive at 50 miles an hour or more, but that's not the speed of, that's not the speed of movement. Speed of movement is of a bulldozer. And that's because of what I just described. Russia and Ukraine, Russia particularly has a extremely outside, always had an outsized military engineering capability, which it has subsequently,

substantially enhanced. Ukraine has tried to keep up with this, but its resources are less, and it must be said that the West has very little to offer. The West is very anemic in, relatively speaking, very anemic in engineering capability for reasons probably that we don't need to go into specifically for the moment, but empirically it is the case that it is relatively speaking, relatively anemic in engineering. Where I think that, but here I think So that is the kind of state of play at the moment is you need to be able to dig very rapidly and you need to almost always have top cover. Where I think the future is going pretty close.

And we can already see this actually. If you hang around military engineering types or go to specifically to trade shows where people are trying to sell things to the military engineers, you can see all kinds of developments in prefabricated installations. of prefab fortifications where essentially you can direct almost instant fortresses. Usually these are some that you fold up essentially that are like kind of IKEA, big IKEA constructions, big others that are a bit more like, you know, Lego, preformed concrete, but also preformed installations that are preformed from other materials, particularly materials that are designed

to be light so you don't overburden your logistical system. And intriguingly, kind of out on the cutting edge of this are people saying, look, people who are looking at essentially 3D printing of fortresses in place, either underground or sometimes within on the inside of existing structures. And in this case, essentially what they're using is a fluid, pumpable, polymerized concrete. It's not just normal concrete, but it's concrete that has a, let's just call it a plastic in. It's a bit more complicated than that. But it means that you can squirt this stuff like out of a toothpaste tube and build structures according to what the terrain or your specific needs require in place. And then with the idea being one that this means that you end up building structures that are better designed for what they're.

supposed to do in a specific place. It's a bit like building a beehive, to be honest, if you think about it that way, it's rather organic. It also means that logistically, instead of shipping in, you know, big blocks or, you know, preform that you're not, that are, may or may not be appropriate, or you're shipping in a bunch of different items. Essentially, what you're sending in is a handful of machines for squirting this stuff, the guys who know how to operate it, and the precursors, which would fit in basically a kind of, actually much of it you can make in place. You can simply, you've got certain precursors, add water, squirted out, make fortifications. That's where I think things are, well, I can't say that as far as I know,

there's no army in the world that has adopted this yet, but I can tell you that there are a bunch of engineering firms, often with lengthy experience in the civil sector, which are now looking at what's happening in, in Israel and in Ukraine primarily with a view to developing innovations like this because they can read the tea leaves. They can read what the or they think they can read where the military engineering needs are going. And I find that intriguing. I think they're on to something.

The theme of our conversation the last time about a year ago was the potency of the defense and of the physical manifestations of the defense that are really our subject of conversation. today as a part of the whole. Yeah. We were talking about the failure of the 2023 Ukraine counteroffensive and the success of the Russian defense, which has a huge, you know, physical component or a static component, I guess, probably more precise to say. I will say, though, when I was in Israel, and I want to solicit your response to this, I kind of came away with the following slightly contrarian view, contrarian to what I take

to be this emerging view, which you're a strong voice for, which is the, you know, in the 21st century, the defense is very potent. You make other arguments as well. I mean, there's sort of a political dimension to everything you say, which you know, if you think history ended, just look around. If the fortification sort of indicate that it hasn't, but just strictly speaking, you're just sticking strictly to military practice for a second. You know, I was struck that the story of the war in and around Israel

since October the 7th has, among its major inflection points, two big failures of the defense, the first on the 7th itself. which I would chalk up to very old-fashioned human failures and strategic six on the Israeli side and then the success of sort of stratagems and strategic deception on the Hamas side. And then, of course, the enormous Israeli success, at least operationally, sort of strategically TBD, I think there's a strong case that there's strategic success too in the north against Hezbollah into the teeth of, you know, a long prepared defensive complex. And in both cases, so I left with the,

following thought that yes, point taken, the defense, very potent in the 21st century. In a certain respect, it is fair to say, these are not your words, but you encounter people saying this kind of thing a lot. We're a bit like World War I with drones now, you know, that the tech superimposed, the new elements superimposed on traditional elements of static defense can make it very, very difficult to move around the battlefield and survive. Fine. But you can still do it.

It can still be done. The offense is not dead. And that makes me worry as an American because we, you know, we're a status quo power in a lot of regions that matter and are quite tense, not at least the Western Pacific. And if I'm the Chinese, I'm looking at what the Israelis just did with Hezbollah and studying it as a way to think about how do you overcome this American, you know, your term for sort of fortified strategic complexes in places like, you know, the Philippines, Japan, the Western Pacific broadly. You know, how do you, how do you, not to get too maneuverist on you for a second, but how do you get inside the decision loop of the Americans and create enough ambiguity and confusion that you have some space to move pretty quickly and achieve some things? It strikes me as still possible despite everything that you've been writing about, you wrote about in Ukraine and Engelsberg for the last time we talked and the potency of the stuff that you're discussing in your book here. I guess, look, I would say that I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, aren't. argue, or I might say, but I wouldn't insist on the point that defenses is unusually

relatively powerful than offense at the moment. In fact, I do believe that is probably the case, but I don't, you know, I'm sufficiently well trained as a military historian to understand that that is not going to remain the case. I mean, nothing. The pendulum will move. The offense, defense, balance is his call always is always on on on on the swing and that's because as human beings we're just very creative and ingenious we encounter problems and unless we choose surrender then usually we're we're quite creative at coming up with ways of dealing with so i think it's where the way i would characterize it if i or the way i would prefer to characterize it is not in terms of offense and defense and that they're there

for that we need to focus more on defense and less on offense, but in terms of siege and siege craft, siege and siege craft, in the sense that it is, we need to, that my argument is that these fortified places are becoming, have already become, rather, the very central to contemporary operations in a way that's kind of surprising if you were to take all of your ideas about what war should be from the curriculum of the staff colleges, the major staff colleges of the world, which have a very maneuverous movement orientation. So one where, so that's much more central. And what we need to figure out is how to do both. You need to be able to, you absolutely, you, I mean, Americans, British, like,

the major professional armed forces of the world that consider themselves to be, you know, doing proper high-intensity war fighting, have to have to learn how to build and utilize, build rapidly and well and to utilize as part of their overall combined arms framework, fortifications in a way that they haven't done or haven't thought about doing so seriously for quite some time. They also, on the other hand, have to think about how these are penetrated. So it's related and simultaneously. You have to do both. Now, with the case of the Israelis, you mentioned, I think that is a very intriguing one.

I actually don't deal with that in the book because the events described occurred shortly after I'd written it. But I would say a couple of things. firstly with the starting with Hamas's breach of the Israeli defenses around Gaza to start with in October of 23 that I would say the point is that you know a wall that is in is unguarded is you know pretty pointless I mean it's just you know it's it that's and in that case I think that really the the the problem for the Israelis is they let their guard down. I mean, they weren't, they weren't watching and to the extent they ought to have.

They weren't prepared to the extent that they ought, that they ought to have been. Yeah, the fences were there. Actually, the weapons were there. But the people, the people who were who ought to have been there were not. And the whole kind of, I think it's pretty apparent. And I think the Israelis will admit to this that that the failed, the failing was of their imagination of that. That said, what is it the Israelis have concluded from this? Is it that, well, fortifications are no use? That is absolutely not the case. I know that for a fact. What they've concluded is what they built was not good enough. And really, they cannot afford to repeat the intelligence and command failures, which occurred prior to the

attack. The attack then on Hamas in in Gaza, which of course has been fortifying itself there for 20 years, really. One has to remember, like think of the density of the bombing that is occurred in in Gaza. I cannot think of a of a aerial bombment campaign in modern military history that was of that scale and density and intensity, except maybe the linebacker campaigns. Otherwise, there's nothing close. You know, all of the, all of the bombs dropped on ISIS over the counter ISIS campaigns would constitute a fraction of what the Israelis put into Gaza in a shorter period of time in a much more concentrated, concentrated space.

who knows the fate of Hamas? There's definite, but I'm bound to suggest that they're still, they're still around. And if you compare that level of that level of effort, then looking at the, compare the relative levels of effort, it's kind of hard to argue, well, you know, defensive fortifications here are not performing the business. I wouldn't want to be on the, on the end of a nine-month-long linebacker density aerial bombardment. campaign in a target zone that's 10 kilometers long by two kilometers wide. And if I were and anyone was alive afterwards, I think I would count my bunkers as a pretty good success. Okay, with Hezbollah, that's, I think, also a good example. And I think that the Israelis must

have studied their siegecraft pretty well. They've certainly been preparing from an intelligence perspective for that engagement with Hezbollah since, again, for coming on to 20 years, right? So since the 2006 war, I think they kind of had a sense of what what Hezbollah's kind of tactical and operational conduct looked like. And they've clearly put a great deal of effort into intelligence preparation, figuring out what was there. and some of the technologies applied are, one can only guess at. In fact, they're not exactly talking about how they, some of this,

but clearly they have applied some technologies for sensing and mapping and probably other aspects of intelligence gathering that are pretty impressive. This has been twinned, though, to precision bombing campaign that, you know, really, this is, it is, is of a scale of expenditure of precision weapons that almost no country on earth can afford. Certainly Israel cannot afford, you know, on its own. The only country that can kind of afford it, and probably I'm going to guess, is starting to look at its arsenal and thinking this is getting a bit low,

is the United States, which is why it's, you know, so in short, That's kind of a long answer, but maybe it serves to illustrate my earlier point about how with these questions, you never get too far from the money, from the economics of it. It's not strictly speaking. It's not strictly speaking just about the exchange of physical force. It's a relative estimate estimation of the costs involved. We can't get too far from that. Yeah. Thinking in terms of siegecraft is a really interesting way of, and I, you know, I don't habitually conceptualize things in this way, and it's a really interesting point. If I think back to my Thucydides, or to Homer, for that matter, I mean, the Trojan War is perhaps the,

the Urr example of a successful siege in the end. So often it's intrigue. It's intrigue that carries the day. There's some way in which someone on the inside is turned to open a gate, you know, or what, there's, there's trickery. And you could characterize both Hamas's success in the South and Israel's relative success in the North as functions of intrigue, of understanding how the other guy's system works and finding someone, finding ways into that system

and overcoming what would otherwise, avoiding what would otherwise be a bloody and difficult and potentially unsuccessful effort to just drive right through the defensive complex. You mean, if you were a medieval king or even an early modern king. You think of early modern France in the era of Vobin when the great famous French military engineer

who built these very extensive and wonderful star fortresses all around the perimeter of France. What they're doing with this is they understand no one understood better than Vobin that a fortress, he was primarily a fortress breaker, more so than he was a fortress maker. I mean, he's remembered popularly as a fortress maker, but all of his major military operations were sieges.

And he knew very well that any fort can be defeated. It's a matter of time and expense. And so when you're, if you're thinking, an advantage, I would try to suggest, I guess, in thinking in terms of siege and siege craft is that you're thinking in in in probably you will have to be thinking more broadly in terms of the full economic cost of whatever it is you are you are you are doing in a place you know so you know if you were a medieval king and you're and you say well I want to defend my I need to defend my territory against what I fear is an aggressive neighbor you might

have a choice well do I raise do I raise an army? of a thousand more knights, or do I build 10 castles along the valleys leading from my enemy's territory to my own? That's essentially an economic calculation, which is correct or incorrect based upon that king's staff estimate of the potential of 10 castles relative to 1,000 nights. As often as not in that particular period of history, the castle turned out to be economically more viable and therefore strategically more of greater utility. And that's why we have certainly the landscape of Western Europe, not much else and much else of the world, littered with these old fortifications. But the logic of it is clear. And I think the logic of it is

still apparent today. We should be thinking. We should be thinking this way. David Betts, author of The Guarded Age, Fortification in the 21st Century. Whenever I read what you write or have these conversations with you, I always learn something. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Well, that's super, thank you for saying that. I'm glad to be here. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.