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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came to symbolize the dawn of a new era of openness and connectivity. Yet today, the world is ever more divided, demarcated, and – quite literally – fortified. We are living in a guarded age.
Why and how has this happened? Where will it take us? In this book, David J. Betz explores the expansion of fortified physical infrastructure at every level of the global political economy. In cities, where security is increasingly ‘designed in’ to public buildings and spaces as they are reshaped to mitigate mass terror attacks. Within corporations, who are burying their electronic assets in deep underground caverns and behind the leaded walls of ex-nuclear war bunkers against a range of threats and feared contingencies. In many urban areas, where the default condition of civil life is to be walled, gated, watched, and guarded. Year after year, hundreds of miles of linear obstacles – walls, ditches, and watchtowers – are added to national borders. Practically everywhere you look there are signs of innovative fortification, often designed to be overlooked. The Guarded Age reveals the barriers which most have observed but few – until reading this book – have truly seen.
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Seitenzahl: 459
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
The Poo Pond, Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, 30 August 2010
Guarded Age Warfare
The Language of Architecture
The Battle of King’s College London, 30 June 2015
The New Normal
A Notion of Death and Destruction
Plan of the Book
Methods and Sources
Notes
1 The Rise of the Walls
The Fall of the Wall
The Future that Failed
Strategic Stratigraphy
Notes
2 Civilization, War, and Guardedness
Guarded Age Warfare
Fortification in Modern Warfare
Culture and Strategic Choice
Notes
3 Contemporary Military Fortification
Why Fortify?
Fortified Strategic Complexes
Hesco Empire
Great Walls
Grand Strategic Fortifications
Notes
4 Storming the City
Fortification of Early Cities
The Gunpowder Revolution
Death from Above
The City Itself as Fortress
The City Today and Tomorrow
Notes
5 Securing the City
Security and Mobility
The Fortress on the Strand
Panoptic Fortification
Secured by Design
Notes
6 Hiding in Plain Sight
Citadels
Barbicans
Invisible Fortresses
Notes
7 Luxury Forts to Data Bunkers
Bastles
Strongholds
Notes
Conclusion
The Windsor Castle Pub, Windsor, November 2022
Notes
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1
Sadr City
Figure 3.2
The fort at Menaka
Figure 3.3
Hesco barrier
Figure 3.4
ANP headquarters
Figure 3.5
Qalat’s tea house
Figure 3.6
The West Bank ‘separation fence’
Figure 3.7
Saudi Arabia’s high-tech fence
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
The Fortress on the Strand
Figure 5.2
City of London’s ‘Ring of Steel’
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
The American embassy in Beirut
Figure 6.2
The American embassy in London
Figure 6.3
The Kabul Airport evacuation
Figure 6.4
JFK Airport
Figure 6.5
Armoured security hut, Islamabad Airport
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Enclosed neighbourhoods in Johannesburg
Figure 7.2
Steyn City
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
For my parents, Anne and Arnold Betz
The Guarded Age
Fortification in the Twenty-First Century
David J. Betz
polity
Copyright © David J. Betz 2024
The right of David J. Betz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4406-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932510
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
In about 1980 an uncle gave me a copy of Castles: A History and Guide by R. Allen Brown, a Professor of Mediaeval History at King’s College London where, as it happens, I am now Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies. Half of the book is a gazetteer of castles throughout Europe and the Middle East. It is sitting on the desk in front of me now and I am proud to say that I have tick marks next to nearly all of them, recording my visits over the years. In other words, the genesis of this book is what I felt was a minor indulgence that has extended into adulthood: I really like castles. In fact, I am into fortifications of all kinds. If there is a trace of a hill fort nearby, let alone a proper fortress, or a derelict bunker, then I am impelled to go look at it. Few things please me more than coming across a machine gun pillbox or a spigot mortar position. No abandoned coastal artillery battery is safe from my interest. I am grateful to my family for forgiving a hundred interrupted road trips and family holidays.
I did not think to apply this interest to my active research until comparatively recently. The fact is that contemporary strategic studies, which is broadly speaking my professional field, is not very interested in fortification. The subject is generally treated as historical in nature and even rather retrograde. Modern warfare is supposed to be about manoeuvring not static positions; and firepower, it has long been supposed, is far too accurate for fixed fortifications to be of much utility. A few years ago, for reasons explained herein, I began to doubt these assumptions. It seemed increasingly obvious that fortification strategies were rather central to the efforts of states to secure themselves as well as to advance their interests externally.
As I investigated these developments with the intent of correcting a misapprehension in the relatively narrow field of strategic studies, or military affairs, I came to see that the pattern of ‘hunkering down’, of fortifying, was widely manifest throughout society in realms far beyond the strictly military, notably in the rapidly shifting urban landscape.
As a castle-obsessed kid growing up in Canada where fortifications were rare, I developed a mental habit of imagining them. Many an otherwise intolerably boring school day was made agreeable by quietly daydreaming about how, if I was to defend this school (or whatever building I happened to be stuck in) against an attack, I would do it. What walls would have to be reinforced? How to deal with the windows? What sort of gate? How about a moat? What I normally sketched out was some vaguely mediaeval mutation of a twentieth-century building but with a portcullis and machicolation, a battered plinth, and arrow loops and the like.
It was a surprise, then, not entirely pleasant, to learn while researching this book that there is now a large, rapidly growing, and very creative industry employing many thousands of people who are in the business of building a huge variety of fortified architecture. The result does not look mediaeval, nor is there any reason it should. It is not just that the construction materials and techniques available to designers today are very different, it is also that the character of the physical threat against which these fortifications are meant to defend is also very different. Our ‘castles’ do not look a lot like their distant ancestors but there is no doubt that ours is a highly castellated age. Essentially, the object of this book is to explain how that happened. How has fortification come to be such a big part of what is supposed to be an information age defined by openness and fluidity?
If that intrigues you, then this book is for you. If you are just interested in castles, then this book is also one you will find worthwhile. We are going to talk about some things that you have possibly already observed happening in the world around you; we will learn why they are happening in the way that they are, and make some educated guesses about where things are headed in future. By the end you will not only know your bastions from your barbicans but also, more importantly, how and why that knowledge is important and useful right now.
There are many people to whom I am indebted for helping with this project, but particularly my wife, Taisha, and children, Charlie and Lily, for putting up with the protracted distraction and grumpy introversion that comes with researching and writing a book. I am very grateful also to my sister, Catherine Betz, for her massive effort in editing a rather sprawling text into what I hope is now a lean and mean one. All fault of course is my own.
Introduction
The Poo Pond, Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, 30 August 2010
Two thousand years from now what will archaeologists make of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? What will they find perplexing as they attempt to reassemble the history of our time from whatever fragments they find in the dust? I found myself asking these questions one evening in late August 2010, as I was jogging around the NATO base at Kandahar airfield in southern Afghanistan.
At that time the base was about the size of a provincial town with a daytime population of about 25,000 people, falling to just over half of that at night when the locally engaged Afghan workers returned to their homes outside. It was big enough to host a range of amenities, including a notorious boardwalk with fast food restaurants and shops selling cheap carpets, T-shirts, knock-off ‘antiquities’, and other warthemed souvenirs.1
In hindsight, the outside jog was ill-advised, and I should have stuck to the treadmill in the excellent base gym: it was hot and constantly dusty (evening ‘cool’ is a relative concept in south Asia in summer), in the dim light there was constant risk of being squished by gigantic military vehicles, and my meandering route took me past the notorious Kandahar Poo Pond. If the boardwalk was the ‘heart’ of the base, as one reporter described it, then the Poo Pond was, well, you can guess. The technical term is ‘sewage treatment lagoon’. Anyway, as I circled the open-air pool of human excrement, cordoned off by a rope with signs declaring ‘Biohazard: Do not Enter!’ (as if that was on my mind), my thoughts were philosophical.
It had been a strange day. Earlier, returning from lunch to our office in a shipping container, my colleagues and I had brought back strawberry milkshakes, one of the several dessert items available in the cafeteria that day. The plan for the afternoon was to have a meeting with a couple of staff officers from the headquarters of Regional Command South (RCS), based at Kandahar, but shortly after the meeting started the alarm siren warning of a Taliban rocket attack blared out. This happened often and fruitlessly enough to be more annoying than frightening as the rockets were badly aimed and usually failed to explode. Nonetheless they could be dangerous if you were unlucky enough to be near where one came down.
We were taught that when the siren went off, we were to immediately seek shelter – if outside, in one of the many small concrete shelters scattered around the base, or if inside then under a desk or table, ideally with one’s helmet and flak jacket on. So it was that I, a grown man, found myself hiding beneath a desk with several other grown men sipping milkshakes and chit-chatting while waiting for the loudspeakers to sound out that the attack was over and we might return to normal. That is my war story.
As it happened, one of the things we were discussing that day was a recently published United States Congressional Research Service report entitled ‘Warlord, Inc.’, which had concluded that a main source of Taliban funding was protection money paid to it by logistics subcontractors to lay off attacks on NATO supply routes.2
Guarded Age Warfare
The reason I was there in the first place was that I’d been invited as a civilian academic by the RCS headquarters, then under British command, because my research at the time centred on ‘information age’ conflict, specifically on the problems of fighting a worldwide ‘war of ideas’, as the ‘Global War on Terror’ was then widely conceived. My brief was to help the military get its collective head around how to fight and win such a war. In other words, I was dealing with all manner of intangible aspects of war, the ever-shifting perception of the whys and wherefores of the conflict in the minds of a range of interested onlookers.
Everyone was looking for a ‘strategic narrative’ of the conflict to unite all the messages to various audiences, from the domestic populations of the intervening countries to the populations of other countries in the region (and the Islamic world more generally), as well as the Afghans themselves. In search of this narrative, I was given access to a range of interlocutors starting with government and military officials in London, then NATO headquarters staff in Kabul, commanders, planners, and information operations specialists at the regional command level, all the way down to a handful of those in direct contact with Afghans in little bases and outposts.
By the time I was circling the Poo Pond on my run I had come firmly to the point of view that said strategic narrative was rather like the mythical El Dorado, the lost city of gold that had once obsessed the conquistadors. It did not exist. I had been studying war and warfare and contemporary strategy for many years and had developed a reputation as a specialist in an aspect of it that many people thought very important. Ultimately, though, I really had no good answer to the question that had been posed to me.
In truth, I had flown halfway around the planet to a country wracked by three decades of war to drink the world’s most expensive milkshake. Then I went home, wrote up my notes and published an article as a good academic ought. The gist of that article was that the war had been lost already, which I put down to a failure to communicate a convincing narrative to Afghans as well as to the home populations of the intervening countries. It was an argument that stayed resolutely in the realm of strategic communications.3
The fact was, though, that practically every minute I was in Afghanistan was spent inside a highly fortified military installation – a castle in effect, sometimes more of a ‘marching camp’ – that was almost always (though I did not realize it at the time) built on the ruins of earlier fortresses going back through time: NATO castles jury-rigged around Soviet constructions resting on British Empire foundations built in some places out of stones carved by armies as far back as those of Alexander the Great.
Occasionally we flew by plane or helicopter from base to base, as though we were island hopping in some archipelago. A couple of times we moved a short distance by road but always in an armoured vehicle with plenty of guards. In short, I had not really been in Afghanistan in any meaningful sense; I had been in a series of army-guarded places that could have been in any hot and dusty place. Moreover, what was true of me as a civilian academic was also true of nine tenths of everyone serving there in uniform.
I had an inkling that this was a very important problem for our strategic communications efforts, but beyond the well-worn argument about the credibility-killing, trust-eroding ‘say-do’ gap I was not able to be more precise.4 This book is partly an attempt to correct that failing. A very big problem with our communications was the giant gap between what we said in words and what we demonstrated with our actions and, specifically what interests me, with the obvious matter of the kinds of things we built.
This book also argues that the issue is much greater than Afghanistan or strategic communications. It is all encompassing – a fact that made writing it hard as there is a lot to work through. The one big message of this book it is that even now in the supposed information age, physical stuff still matters – a lot.
The Language of Architecture
To me, this seems at first glance to be a bit of a paradox – certainly I found it contrary to expectation. After all, the words ‘information age’ have connotations of intangibility and fluidity that seem incongruous when placed alongside ‘fortification’, which is practically an epitome of tangibility. If you ask a normal person to ‘picture a fortress’ they tend to imagine a historical artefact, a ruined castle perhaps, or maybe a fantastical confection like those in a Disney theme park. What they would not imagine is a piece of currently relevant military architecture that is the backdrop to their daily lives.
As for fluidity, when it came to warfare what I expected to see – something agile, something moving – turned out to be the complete opposite. Although I was sceptical of the idea, the decades of talk about an information-technology-driven ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) supposedly enabling relatively small, light, fast-moving armies to fight more decisively and quickly, must have rubbed off on me. The war in Afghanistan had instead an extremely static and highly positional character that both surprised and interested me. I did not expect to come away from the experience with such a strong belief in the critical importance of military engineering right now.
This book is not about the Afghanistan war, however. There is a huge literature on the subject, and I have little to add to it that I have not already said elsewhere. It is, rather, a book about the relationship of fortified architecture, global society, and war more generally. It touches upon a very wide range of issues, notably the perception of risk and the danger that our fearful responses to it are causing more harm to society than good. That said, I have one more relevant Afghanistan-specific comment.
When it came down to it, NATO’s ‘body language’ in Afghanistan was very different from the official rhetoric about the war. It is scarcely credible to say to people ‘we are here for the long run, everyone who cooperates will be protected in a prosperous new Afghanistan’, from the inside of a gigantic but also ramshackle fortress which you rarely leave, and where you have been living in tents beside a lake of sewage for twenty years. The contradiction was supremely obvious to Afghans. What is astonishing is that it was not obvious to NATO.
Ultimately, I think that the world has been propelled by events into a state of profound guardedness, as seen in the proliferation of fortification strategies employed not just by armies but by governments, civil groups, corporations, and individuals. The situation is frequently at odds with liberty. The book attempts to explain how and why it has occurred by letting the structures speak for themselves.
In my opinion, buildings have a kind of ‘language’, they say interesting and important things about the preoccupations and ideals of their builders. The ‘dialect’ of the language of buildings that interests me, to continue the metaphor, is that of fortifications. What I am saying is that I have taught myself to speak ‘Fortress-ese’ and I am going to use that skill to translate what the contemporary built environment says about you and your society, what has happened to it, and where it might be going. It just so happens that Afghanistan is the place where I first realized I needed to learn this language.
It is also a practical place to start the story. Afghanistan has seen a lot of war – not just in recent times, having been at war continuously since the late 1970s. For all recorded history it has betimes found itself the hinge of imperial ambitions of one sort or another, whether Persian, Greek, Mongol, British, Soviet, or American. Since it is also extremely arid and underdeveloped, the layers upon layers of its fortifications – its ‘strategic stratigraphy’ as I shall discuss further on – are very visible.
The book, however, is not only concerned with military fortification. It is not even primarily concerned with that. Quite soon after I began to study the matter closely, I started to see fortresses everywhere. I developed the opinion that placing contemporary fortification within the strict category ‘military’ was an act of intellectual compression akin to squeezing a giant into a dwarf’s jacket. You may regard the rest of what follows as a defence of that belief. It turned out there is more that is interesting and important about fortification going on outside of the military sphere than within it.
To illustrate, I shall indulge in one more personal ‘war story’ which helps to explain the form, trajectory, and selection of cases you will encounter in the overall argument of the book.
The Battle of King’s College London, 30 June 2015
It was about midday, sunny and hot, when through the open window of my office I heard the gunfire start. First there was a slow and steady ‘pop-pop-pop’ and then a second or two later came an almost continuous crackling of rapid bursts that carried on and on. I was at first confused at what I was hearing because it was so incongruous. After all, I was sitting in my comfy office in the King’s Building of King’s College London where the War Studies Department is located. It’s not completely unusual to hear vaguely military sounds here in the city. The distinctive double-rotor sound of RAF Chinooks coming out of their base in Odiham, Hampshire, practising urban flying in the helicopter airspace corridor over the Thames, is typical. The sound of close-quarter combat, though, is unexpected. Britain was not at war – not at home at any rate.
It was the screaming and shouting that caused recognition to dawn on me. There was unmistakably a battle going on in my building. Peering out my office window on the seventh floor I saw police snipers working their way across the rooftop of neighbouring Somerset House into positions overlooking the Strand quadrangle. What was going on? Should I run? If so, to where? I had no idea which route out if any led to safety. I could just as easily be walking into danger as away from it. Should I barricade and hunker down in place? Since the front wall of my office is made entirely of thin frosted glass, while the side ones are little more than hollow-core drywall, this did not seem a very healthy idea either. Bullets would tear through that like nothing at all. A grenade in the corridor would have showered the room and me in glass fragments.
There did not appear to be any good options. The 2002 Moscow theatre siege – in which forty or so Chechen terrorists took hostage nearly 900 people, 170 of whom died in the rescue operation – sprang to mind. So, too, did the November 2008 incident in Mumbai in which ten terrorists killed 160 people in a series of coordinated gun and bomb attacks that wracked the city over four days, and the then-recent January 2015 attack by terrorists in Paris in which seventeen people were killed, including eleven employees of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine. If it had happened in those places, why not in central London – or any place for that matter?
Perhaps I was just unlucky?
As it happened, no; my luck was good. The Battle of King’s College London, as I have called it, was in fact just a large and realistic exercise against a very plausible threat. ‘Operation Strong Tower’, as the exercise was officially called, was designed as a two-day ‘noisy and visible’ practice for 1,000 armed police, soldiers, SAS, emergency services, and other government personnel practising their ability to respond to an attack like those mentioned above.5 It had been advertised but I had forgotten about it.
The findings of the exercise were not publicized, but police and city authorities said it was only through such testing and exercising, refining tactics, and learning that they could be confident in their ability to respond to an attack. I was glad to not have been perforated by shrapnel and glass.
The New Normal
I was also not unperturbed, however, for it is a fact that the potentiality at any given time of such scenes recurring on the streets of the world’s cities is high, which further piqued my interest. As an independent review into London’s counter-terrorism preparedness would conclude, the ever-present prospect of coordinated terror attacks using a variety of means to cause mass casualties was the ‘new normal’ of urban life.6
This concept of the ‘new normal’ began to preoccupy me seriously. What would it mean if it were true? I had studied war and military strategy for thirty years, nearly always in a context in which my own country’s involvement had been in an expeditionary capacity. In other words, I was an expert in wars that occurred somewhere in the distant abroad, not at home. I had just written a book on the effect of ‘connectivity’ on war which argued that a main consequence was that we could no longer expect that distance and solid frontiers would insulate the ‘home front’ from ‘over there’. Wars that originated any place could be fought, in part, in practically every place – including on our own streets.7
From the perspective of 2022, the validity of the assessment of the ‘new normal’ is hard to gainsay. To continue the list of attacks that I started earlier, in Paris in November 2015 terrorists methodically shot or blew up 130 people, including ninety in the Bataclan nightclub alone. In June 2016 a terrorist shot to death forty-nine people in an Orlando, Florida nightclub. In July the same year, a terrorist in Nice, France drove a heavy truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day, killing eighty-nine and wounding another 450. A full and complete list of these sorts of attacks would be gratuitous and superfluous.8 Everyone knows this danger exists.
A Notion of Death and Destruction
In 1989, on the eve of the end of the Cold War, the annual BBC Reith Lectures were given by the French poet and critic Jacques Darras. Titled ‘Beyond the Tunnel of History’, the ostensible purpose of the lectures was to reflect on the bicentenary of the French Revolution, but the main focus was on the social meaning of the built environment. The thrust of Darras’s argument was that there is always a relationship between the physical features of any city – the morphology of its public squares and parks, its main buildings, and thoroughfares, and so on – and the ambitions and fears of the political culture it embodies. Speaking particularly of the latter, he declared:
what we can now see as contributing to the strength and resilience of many of our great European cities is that they have had to integrate into themselves the notion of death and destruction which is always potentially lurking there, but at the same time they have triumphed over death and destruction to become the great metropolitan centres that so many of them are today.9
The notions of death and destruction that shaped London, for example, in the past are different from those shaping it now; but it is being extensively reshaped, as are all major cities, as we shall see in detail in the following pages.
This book focuses primarily on the reaction to perceived threats, rather than on the threats per se. Broadly speaking, it has two main parts, one focused upon military fortification and another, somewhat larger, focused upon civil fortification. When I first became interested in this subject, I had not thought the latter category of fortification existed, let alone that it was distinctively more important than the former.
What I intend to show is how fortification strategies have resurged. We are seeing a new chapter in the long history of fortification that is massive in scale, design ingenuity, and pervasiveness, though perhaps not obviously to many because so much of it is hidden in plain sight. This is a general and global phenomenon – its effects may be perceived in military operations and in civil (especially urban) life more generally. The guarded character of contemporary life has several important manifestations and causes rooted in global politics, economics, and society that go beyond pure security.
Many people are concerned that the reaction is an overreaction, that the measures taken to guard society are more harmful and more costly in many respects, sometimes by far, than the threats being protected against.10 This is my own opinion, also – for reasons I shall explain below. But whether it is right or wrong, popular delusion or wise policy, there is an observably powerful movement towards guardedness that is especially obvious in our cities. I call it a fortification zeitgeist, German for ‘spirit of the era’, because it seems to possess a certain ineluctability. I do not like what I see but neither can I unsee it.
Plan of the Book
Chapter 1 sets the context for all else discussed in the book. In the main it is a discussion of the disjuncture between the way the future was imagined at the end of the Cold War and the way it has in fact developed. Chapter 2 covers the same period but with a narrower focus upon military theory and practice as well as a discussion of the impact of cultural mood on strategic behaviour. Chapter 3 starts with an articulation of the idea and importance of what I call fortified strategic complexes. It then presents contemporary cases of different types of fortifications for the strategic military purposes of pacification, separation, and consolidation of control of people and territory. That is roughly the first half of the book.
The fortification strategies that typify the guarded age are concentrated more on the civil environment than the military, and particularly on urban areas. This is the focus of the latter half of the book.
Chapter 4 looks in some detail at the history of how the city has been shaped both internally and on its periphery by the long and circuitous interplay of methods and means of attack and defence of urban areas. The main object is to develop the transition from fortification in the military sphere to fortification in the civil environment. Chapter 5 focuses on problems of securing cities from a theoretical perspective to elaborate a conceptual framework for the case studies of contemporary urban fortification, which are presented in Chapter 6, focused on government and public architecture, and Chapter 7, focused on more private and corporate fortification, particularly of critical infrastructure, which is by no means exclusively located in urban environments.
My overall aim is to show you two main things. First, that many everyday elements of our contemporary civilization – things that you see all the time – are part of a vast and ingenious fortified strategic complex the object of which is to ‘secure’ you, whether you want it or not, or recognize it or not. Second, that surprising as that first observation might be, much of the fortification activity occurring so frenetically in recent decades is not new per se; it is a variation of old ideas updated for an age that has its own specific requirements of its fortresses as did previous times. In short, I want to show that fortification is a lively and important part of strategic practice, despite being largely ignored by strategic studies.
I will use examples of past fortification strategies to illuminate present ones, combining theory and practical observation. The premise is that something is happening, which I believe is that our age is increasingly fortified and surveilled: guarded, in a word. I intend to bring into full view the details of that development which many people apprehend partially or dimly. Why is it happening in this way? Finally, given an understanding of what and why, where might we be headed?
Methods and Sources
What follows, therefore, is a mixture of military history and strategic theory with social science theory and a lot of direct empirical observation. For the research in these chapters I have attended half a dozen security industry trade shows in the UK and elsewhere, as well as three separate military engineering conferences, spoken with countless managing directors, product specialists and marketers of firms selling fortification devices, consulted with a half dozen architects and designers, questioned dozens of builders, security-product installers, civil and military engineers, real estate developers and entrepreneurs, shopping mall, university, and hotel security managers, police officers and military officers, data centre builders, municipal officials, railway and airport operators, and more.
In trying to understand and explain the increasing guardedness of society I have dipped promiscuously into many disciplines which I will confess are far from my own comfort zone in military strategy. I have relied very heavily in particular on architecture and design, urban studies, and geography, amongst others. I think that my interpretations of and conclusions about some important things differ from the experts in those fields. I can only say in my defence that my dabbling in other disciplines has been respectful. I have borrowed tools from the toolboxes of others and used them as seemed correct to make something of my own that I hope they will find interesting.
One thing which quickly became obvious during this research is that the fortification community of interest is very large and diverse. Most of those involved in it, outside of some of those in military uniform, would not describe themselves as being in the fortress-building industry, which is not surprising as governments (a primary consumer of their products as well as the main regulator) tend to avoid the words ‘fortification’, ‘fortress’, or ‘fortified enclave’ when talking about the domestic scene, for reasons discussed further on. A quick look at the brochures and catalogues of the industry, however, filled as they are with products named ‘Bastion’, ‘Barbican’, ‘Palisade’, ‘Citadel’, ‘Centurion’, ‘Sentry’, and so on, can only lead one to the conclusion that fortification is the correct term, even if it is politically unpalatable.
Over the years in which this subject has interested me I have visited nearly all the places mentioned in the following chapters. The Covid-19 lockdown, however, impeded some of my intended formal field research in places I wanted to revisit with a more explicit aim of data-gathering, or to see for the first time. However, with the help of contacts, many of whom are former students, I managed to conduct extensive ‘tours’, interviews, and focus groups via Zoom of urban fortifications globally, including favelas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil; two gated communities in South Africa, two more in China, and another in Papua New Guinea; the fortified middle-class compounds and government districts of Lagos, Nigeria; several fortified residential compounds, offices, and hotels in the Gulf States; the extensive ‘Green Zone’ surrounding Mogadishu Airport in Somalia; and UN compounds in Timbuktu and Bamako, Mali, amongst others. That this was possible at all is itself exemplary of the paradoxical combination of high ‘virtual’ connectedness with increasing physical separation that characterizes this guarded age.
I have also visited many of the military fortifications both old and new under discussion here, several in Afghanistan, and many in Europe, from the Kremlin in Moscow, to the walled city of Krakow, to the Iron Age hill forts of Britain. I toured the Jerusalem section of the Israeli security barrier with its main designer, visited the premises of the manufacturer of Hesco Bastion (on which much more to follow) to speak with its designers and engineers, walked two of the more fortified sections of the United States–Mexico border at El Paso in Texas and San Diego, California, and virtually toured three separate fortresses that are part of Morocco’s massive Saharan ‘Sand Wall’. I corresponded with Gulf-based engineers involved in the construction by Saudi Arabia of linear defences on its border with Yemen, and talked with countless soldiers involved in recent military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the most interesting of whom were at that time students on the British Army’s Urban Warfare Instructors’ course taught at the Infantry Battle School in Brecon, Wales.
Many of the examples in the book, however, are drawn from Britain – very often, as above, from the area of central London around where I happen to work: roughly that part of the Strand from Temple Bar to Wellington St, including those buildings enclosed by the Aldwych crescent. Studying contemporary fortifications is a bit like The Matrix – after a while you start to notice it everywhere: the armoured glass partitions in the shopping mall food court, the ‘impact-rated’ planters at the top of the High Street, the hydraulic ‘rising road-blocker’ at the entrance to the hotel forecourt, the cameras everywhere. They all start to stand out and you find yourself compelled to remark on them.
Many of these things are relatively recent additions to the urban landscape, but it is important to note that there is a sometimes surprisingly long history at work, with plenty of relatively old but highly pertinent examples. A personal favourite: the disguised machine-gun ports (now windows) on the front of Leconfield House on Curzon Street in London. These were installed during the Second World War, when the building served as the headquarters of the London military district, as security against possible German parachutists landing in nearby Hyde Park. They were retained after the war when it was taken over as the home of MI5, which stayed there until 1976. Supposedly, they were manned into the 1950s.11 The fact is that there is a gigantic amount of fortified infrastructure out there, as my children will attest from many happy hours playing the games ‘spot the bunker’ and ‘let’s count the cameras’ with their dad.
These illustrations, though, however UK- and London-centric, are generalizable of global trends and developments. Readers who are not familiar with Heathrow Airport, for instance, or the financial district of the City of London, may reflect on what is discussed in those parts of the book at whatever major international airport is closest to them or in the central business district of their own city, where, undoubtedly, there will be examples of everything discussed here. In many ways, London, indeed Britain generally, is at the forefront of the fortified state, which is more and more the default condition of contemporary life, but it is not unique nor particularly far ahead.
Notes
1.
Jay Price, ‘Surreal Afghanistan Boardwalk Fading into Memory …’,
Star Tribune
, 17 September 2013,
https://www.startribune.com/surreal-afghanistan-boardwalk-fading-into-memory-as-u-s-troops-withdraw/224171091
2.
Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives,
Warlord, Inc
(Washington, DC: June 2010).
3.
David Betz, ‘Communication Breakdown: Strategic Communications and Defeat in Afghanistan’,
Orbis
, Vol. 55. No. 4 (2011), pp. 613–30.
4.
On the matter of trust and credibility in communications, see Francesca Granelli, ‘What Does it Mean for a Communication to be Trusted?’,
Defence Strategic Communications
, Vol. 5 (2019), pp. 171–214.
5.
Matt Chorley, ‘Britain Prepares for its Nightmare Scenario’,
Daily Mail
, 30 June 2015,
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3143410/Police-stage-mock-Tunisia-style-marauding-gun-attack-streets-London-biggest-counter-terror-exercise-prepare-atrocity-British-soil.html
6.
Lord Toby Harris,
Independent Review of London’s Preparedness to Respond to a Major Terrorist Incident
(October 2016), p. 6,
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/londons_preparedness_to_respond_to_a_major_terrorist_incident_-_independent_review_oct_2016.pdf
7.
David Betz,
Carnage and Connectivity
(London: Hurst, 2015).
8.
The Global Terrorism Database hosted by the University of Maryland lists 200,000 attacks in the period 1970–2019,
https://www.start.umd.edu/research-projects/global-terrorism-database-gtd
; Lord Toby Harris’s update of London’s counter-terror readiness has a select list which continues up to the end of 2021 – see
London Prepared: A City-Wide Endeavour
(March 2022), pp. 12–16,
https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/harris_review_-_march_2022_web.pdf
9.
Jacques Darras and Daniel Snowman,
Beyond the Tunnel of History
(London: Palgrave, 1990), p. 16.
10.
See for example the call to resistance in the conclusion of Stephen Graham’s
Cities Under Siege
(London: Verso, 2006).
11.
Roy Berkeley,
A Spy’s London
(London: Leo Cooper, 1994), p. 385.
1The Rise of the Walls
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States to cries of his supporters chanting ‘Build that wall! Build that wall!’ at rally after rally, up and down the country. His administration pledged to massively scale up and extend the existing fortifications on the border with Mexico, which, while obviously porous to illegal migration, was already quite fortified.1 People familiar with the geography of the border and the social pressures driving migrants were sceptical. One analyst who had walked and studied practically the entirety of it remarked: ‘A wall? A massive concrete fortification? None of this made sense. Walls can be climbed, and fences can be cut, especially when tall, thick reeds make illegal entry that much easier to conceal.’2 The point is eminently logical. The experience of other places that have tried to stem illegal cross-border movements with much more heavily guarded walls on a much smaller frontage suggests that determined migrants are prepared to escalate the levels of force required to get into a place more than border guards are prepared or permitted to escalate their efforts to stop them.
I refer here to the Spanish north African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, two autonomous European cities, an incongruous legacy of Spanish colonialism on the coast of Morocco. As early as 1993, the European Union paid an estimated $25 million to build a defensive wall around Ceuta running for eight kilometres, plus two parallel 2.5-metre-high fences with cameras and spotlights every thirty metres, to secure its southern boundary, which in these two spots lies on the continent of Africa.3 In subsequent years these fortifications have been continuously bolstered.
Nevertheless, results have been poor. From 2016 through to June 2022, there were 145 physical assaults on Europe’s southern border defences. In one attack, on 24 June 2022, twenty-three migrants were killed and 140 members of the Moroccan security forces injured.4 Many thousands of migrants have successfully scaled Europe’s ramparts here.5 The scenes of migrant mobs in the hundreds launching semi-organized escalade assaults on the walls and fences with ladders and ropes, while hurling showers of rocks and bottles at ranks of police wielding batons and riot shields, look like something out of a mediaeval war film.
Ultimately, as we shall see below, even the most dread wall is hardly an obstacle if the people guarding it are absent or unwilling to use potentially very large amounts of force. This has led some to conclude that Trump’s promise to build one across nearly 2,000 miles of border was more an act of ‘performative statecraft’ given that ‘the wall’ worked better rhetorically, as a political idea, than it did as a real barrier against border crossing.6 At any rate, the wall was not built.
The point is that it was politically highly popular. People like walls. There is no denying it. The evidence is literally concrete and it’s all over the place. We shall discuss this in much more detail further, but for the time being a short exemplary list will be useful. Consider:
Since the building of the Israeli ‘security barrier’ in 2006 – a combination of walls and fences physically separating its claimed territories from those under Palestinian control – dozens of similar walls, many of them much larger, have been completed around the world. Fortification of the boundaries of the European Union has been particularly intense.
7
Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, every airport in the world big enough to be regulated by the Convention on International Civil Aviation, which means nearly all of them, as well as many private and public buildings ranging from hotels to hospitals and museums to shopping malls, not to mention schools, have been ‘target hardened’ to a greater or lesser extent – meaning they have been fortified with ballistic- and blast-resistant barriers, surveillance systems, sophisticated access-control systems, and extensive perimeter security measures.
Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror – an old term used to describe a series of ongoing military engagements now more often referred to as the ‘Forever War’ – armies have adopted a pattern of warfare that is strikingly positional and fortified. Moreover, it is not only armies that are operating this way but also the representatives of NGOs, international organisations, journalists, and others who are living the ‘guarded life’, operating out of fortified compounds wherever there is perceived to be risk, which seems to be practically everywhere.
8
I could go on but, as a rationale for a book based upon the premise that there has been a metaphorical explosion in contemporary fortification strategies, that is enough for now. For a person of my vintage (fiftythree) the situation is weird because the accumulated preconceptions of a lifetime say that this is not how it was supposed to be. We were supposed to get a different future from the one in which we now live.
What happened?
It is perhaps ironic to have a chapter entitled ‘The Rise of the Walls’ in which the first subheading is ‘The Fall of the Wall’. The fact is that, in the long view of history, people build walls for one reason and then tear them down for another only to build new ones again, and so on and so on. There is, in other words, a cycle of guardedness that is written on the landscape in the form of forts and barriers built on the rubble of earlier forts and barriers.
It would be possible, therefore, to start answering the question above from very far back in time indeed. After all, the art of fortification had already reached a high state of development many thousands of years ago, and remnants of powerful military works dating back to the remotest periods of history can still be seen today in Asia Minor, Greece, in the basins of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the Nile valley. That would, however, make for a very long book. Let us then start our story a little less far back in time and closer to home.
The Fall of the Wall
On 5 March 1946, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill famously warned that an ‘Iron Curtain’ had descended across Europe, from Stettin on the coast of the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic.9 It traced the battle lines as they stood on the date of Germany’s surrender in the Second World War on 7 May 1945. On the Western side were those people and places occupied by the armies of the democratic Allies. On the Eastern side were those people and places occupied by the Soviet Army. In the former there was liberation – a genuine return to national self-governance (or, in the two thirds of Germany occupied by Britain, France, and the United States, the chance of an eventual redemption and return to independence) – whereas in the latter, ‘liberation’ amounted simply to a switch from Nazi domination to Soviet.
The ‘Iron Curtain’ was initially one of Churchill’s arrestingly perceptive metaphors, a description of an emerging political reality not yet obvious to everyone else; but it was not long before the border between East and West was in fact demarcated by extensive fortifications that could not be missed. Its longest and hardest section was the 1,381km Intra-German Border (IGB) separating the two new countries: the Federal Republic of Germany, created after the amalgamation in 1949 of the sectors of Germany occupied by the Western allies; and the German Democratic Republic, founded a little later on the territory of the Soviet Occupation Zone in the northeast.
By the mid-1970s, throughout its length the IGB featured at least two layers of heavily mined and booby-trapped chain-mesh fencing, a deep concrete-lined anti-vehicle ditch, hundreds of guard towers, piers for floodlights by the thousands, and a lighter fence studded with electronic sensors to detect potential crossers. Where towns and villages were bisected by or abutted on the border, they were further enclosed by concrete walls.10
The most famous of these concrete walls was, of course, in Berlin, the historic German capital. In fact, Berlin was nowhere near the IGB; it was located 100 miles inside East Germany. However, because the city had been split between the occupying powers, it too had a West and an East fraction under effectively different political control – a microcosm of divided Germany. To say that this arrangement of sovereignty was a complex point of friction in the early Cold War would be a dramatic understatement.
Nonetheless, although the ‘Iron Curtain’ was effectively closely guarded everywhere else on its length, for many years it was still possible for people to cross it freely between East and West Berlin. That was until the early morning of Sunday, 13 August 1961, when East Germany unleashed a well-planned surprise called Operation Rose in which, over the space of a few hours, an improvised ‘border closure’ was erected through the middle of the great city.
At first, the Wall was hardly any sort of wall at all, just a jury-rigged mishmash of concertina and barbed-wire, with a few expedient walls mortared together here and there out of whatever materials were easily at hand – bricks, rubble, concrete blocks, and so on. The East German government that erected it called it the ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Wall’. However, its object was not military defence but the completion of the de facto imprisonment of its own population against the possibility of their flight to the greater freedom and prosperity available in the West – a problem that had plagued the East German economy since its founding just over a decade earlier.11
Better than a war
There is little doubt that the Wall and the IGB were effective in slowing the flight to the West, ultimately bringing it to a nearly complete halt. On the first day the Wall went up twenty-eight people escaped from East to West Berlin, the next day there were forty-one, but after that the number of escapees dwindled to a trickle. By the mid-1970s it had become extremely risky to attempt escape. The most viable means became to tunnel under the Wall, but that took great bravery as the chances of detection were high and the number of successful underground escapees was low.12
If the Cold War had an epicentre, it was the Wall in Berlin. It was certainly the scene of some of its most powerful rhetoric, such was its unmistakable symbolic power. The ideological struggle between East and West was concentrated there, materialized in concrete and wire, guard towers and floodlights. On 26 June 1963, in his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, President John F. Kennedy put it this way: ‘While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your mayor has said, an offence not only against history but an offence against humanity.’13 He went on to declare that Berlin was ‘a defended island of freedom’. In truth, though, it seems that Kennedy extemporized the most memorable parts of his speech, his emotions carried away by the power of the scene, the vast crowd he was addressing, the stark brutality of the Wall itself.
Privately, however, in the Cabinet offices and War Rooms of the major powers on both sides of the Cold War divide, leaders and advisors were quietly relieved about the Wall, or at any rate ambivalent about it. As Kennedy observed to his advisor on national security affairs Walt W. Rostow, the Wall was ‘not a very nice solution, but [it was] a hell of a lot better than a war’.14
From the Berlin Blockade in 1948, when Stalin first attempted to force the West out of Berlin by laying economic siege to the city (a gambit successfully countered by the Berlin Airlift), through to 1963 when Kennedy visited, Berlin was a potential flashpoint of a Third World War which everyone feared.
