alt.hn

7/1/2026 at 1:49:59 PM

Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

 https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/06/25/medieval-style-fortifications-are-back-in-the-sahel

by andsoitis

7/1/2026 at 2:06:40 PM

For anyone with an interest this article is cut down and pared slice of a portion of the work of Dr. Olivier Walther and Dr. Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida.

A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands...

and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in Africa (MARCH 2026) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06502

by defrost

7/5/2026 at 6:10:23 PM

That background is useful, though it seems more like "how" than "why" - my instinct is James C. Scott-style rebellious hinterlands[1] but I haven't gotten a sense if the bandits are the product of social dislocations, or just opportunists. My naive assumption would be all of the above, some conflicts along the edges of Sahel being ideological or about lack of resources or political participation, and others being just smash-and-grab (not that they're mutually exclusive).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Scott#The_Art_of_Not_...

by blacksmith_tb

7/5/2026 at 2:20:35 PM

Thank you for the extra links i was think this article seemed to be missing context or a conclusion

by xphos

7/5/2026 at 7:47:37 PM

I'm not a fan of the geographic argument as it removes agency from state and non-state actors who are backing various groups partaking in the Sahel insurgency.

The most obvious ones are the France/US-Russia, the UAE-Turkiye, and UAE-KSA rivalries, but even those is being exploited by Morocco and Algeria in the Sahel due to their existential rivalry.

Morocco and Algeria view each other as existential threats, and the Sahel will never become peaceful until that rivalry is resolved. Instead, it is becoming worse - Morocco is now transferring military IP and technology from the US, Israel, India, and the UAE while Algeria from Turkiye, China, Pakistan, and Russia.

The geographic argument also ignores the ethnic tensions that have always existed in the Sahel. Vast swathes of Maghrebis, Baggaras, Amazigh, and Tuaregs continue to down on Sub-Saharan Africans, and they tend to be the leadership in JNIM, AQIM, ISSP, ISWAP, and other Islamist groups in the Sahel. Their leaders remember how they and not Africans were the rulers of slave states in the Sahel before the French came.

And those who don't subscribe to ethnic chauvanism subscribe to religious chauvanism, hence why leadership of formerly secular insurgent groups like the Polisario Front and MPLA became hardened Islamists who are trying to enforce Sharia in states where the religious demography is not uniform.

by alephnerd

7/5/2026 at 3:12:14 PM

Thank you very much.

by subscribed

7/5/2026 at 3:03:33 PM

Thank's it adds a lot to explain why something like this pops up in the Economist of all places

> The United States and its allies should align its efforts accordingly. That means accepting longer time horizons, investing in less visible cross-border mechanisms over high-profile bilateral wins, and recognising that the periphery is now the centre.

oh boy

> African governments understand this dynamic, which is why regional organisations like the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and even the juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States increasingly emphasise multinational responses.

Not to be too much of a panafrican commie here, but AES left the Ecowas months ago I hope(?) the authors were aware of this? Seems like worth mentioning, perhaps it means something who knows. I guess we learn more about what to think about the Shael states when the US or France invades them again in a few months from now.

by lyu07282

7/5/2026 at 5:38:26 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

7/5/2026 at 4:28:29 PM

Fortifications never went anywhere.

Just in this century, the US used fortified camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so did the French in Sahel. And the Ukrainians fortified Dombas and effectively prevented the Russians to take it quickly. Then the Russians fortified the Zaporizhzhia frontline (the Surovikin line) which stopped the Ukrainian counter offensive in 2023.

And talking about Africa in particular, the border between Morocco and Algeria, and also Western Sahara, has been a fortified wall for the past 40 years now.

by stymaar

7/5/2026 at 8:07:34 PM

For a long time, basically since WW2, the assumption was that fortifications are at best a delaying measure, and worst case, the attacker can go around them (mobile warfare, blitzkrieg and all that).

In the past decade, however, the changes in battlefield tech resulted in a situation where fortifications can be genuinely impregnable.

by int_19h

7/5/2026 at 6:29:34 PM

A government fortification protects against military attack.

A city fortification protects against basic lawlessness in the absence of a government protective order. It’s a sign of personal level violence

by digitaltrees

7/5/2026 at 4:37:58 PM

[dead]

by MagicMoonlight

7/5/2026 at 6:08:16 PM

It's not just Africa. Take a look at the Ukrainian battlefield and you will see a similar trend: kilometers of trenches with some concrete bunkers here and there; even longer anti-tank ditches; along them dragon's teeth-type anti-tank obstacles; along them several rows of concertina razor wire; plus anti-drone netting along logistical routes. then there's vehicles with layers of cages, spikes and metal plates all over them to protect against drones, to the point where they look like medieval rams. with all the high tech precision weapons and satellites and drones, people sometimes forget that wars are about dealing and withstanding kinetic force.

by iammjm

7/5/2026 at 8:08:55 PM

But that is precisely because there are drones. Drones are what allows both sides to see so deep into the battlefield that it's basically impossible to make a surprise attack now. Your advance units start getting hammered as soon as they move into the "dead zone" (within range of drones from the contact line), and so is the logistics.

by int_19h

7/5/2026 at 2:04:12 PM

I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls. Walls can protect you from men with swords, but not from heavy artillery or bombers. Today, wouldn't a fleet of cheap drones render a wall moot?

by 0xcafefood

7/5/2026 at 8:20:26 PM

That was always a bit of a myth. Walls are not meant to stop things from getting destroyed, they are to prevent easy entry. Even in antiquity the ability to lob something over a wall existed, but if you were in range to do so, the defenders on the walls were in range to lob things at you, structures within the walls could be hardened to resist damage from things lobbed at them, and ultimately lobbing things over walls simply didn't win conflicts. Even the strategic bombing of WW2 wasn't sufficient to bring any side to its knees - only boots on the ground or the imminent threat thereof actually got the job done.

Further, the disappearance of walls does not coincide well with developments in weapons technology. Walls adapted to the introduction of gunpowder and explosives, with fortresses being key parts of strategy well into the 20th century. Even medieval fortifications with minimal upgrades still proved reasonably effective in modern conflicts. Walls are very good for their intended purpose.

The disappearance of city walls was not due to technological but rather social progress. The early modern period saw the development of strong central states able to field large armies. These states did not want a lot of fortified cities that could close themselves off easily from either a foreign invader or from their own government. Instead the national army would defend cities as needed, operating from fortresses in strategic locations and setting up temporary fortifications as needed. Cities were redesigned to make it easy to march an army into them. At the same time, population growth and changing economic systems meant cities rapidly grew, far outstripping the limited space available within medieval walls. Again, detached networks of mutually-supporting forts were simply more economical than contiguous walls. Finally, the changing world meant that you were simply no longer worried about wandering war bands pillaging settlements. Most of what walls were needed for could be done more economically with fences and legal markers.

by jjk166

7/5/2026 at 2:08:30 PM

But they also protect you from more low level lawlessness and if the law situation inside and outside the wall are the same (because of stronger states) they stop being worth maintaining.

Think in the US, the cops wouldn’t survive against a couple of machine guns and a drone strike, but they are still useful for security purposes.

by reillyse

7/5/2026 at 6:13:25 PM

Walls also keep out grazing animals with suicide vests, which is something a friend who served in Afganistan said he saw once.

by youainti

7/5/2026 at 8:10:41 PM

On the contrary, a fleet of cheap drones is what renders walls (and more broadly barricades) useful again. They don't have to stop the advance - they just have to slow it down so that the advancing units can get hammered by drones and by drone-guided artillery. Drones also make it nigh impossible to do any kind of surprise attack, which in turn means that fortifications can be made where they are actually needed, and not like e.g. the infamous Maginot line.

by int_19h

7/5/2026 at 4:16:39 PM

Yes, but while the moat surrounding the US embassy in London will not deter drones, it will prevent any car from reaching the proximity of the building.

A car can carry a much higher explosive load than even a lot of cheap drones. Moreover, in London a car will become suspicious only when it is already close to the embassy, and there is little time available to react, but drones should be detected much earlier.

by adrian_b

7/5/2026 at 5:17:14 PM

"drones should be detected much earlier"

Not if you follow in the steps of Ukrainian "Operation Spider Web", which concealed the explosive drones into a double roof of a truck and when the truck got into the proximity of the target, the roof opened and everything flew out at once.

Granted, in the case of an embassy in London, you probably couldn't get a semi there, maximally a modest truck, but that should be enough for some damage.

by inglor_cz

7/5/2026 at 4:17:14 PM

Not everyone has bombers. There are other examples of relatively recent use of forts. This apparently withstood an army with artillery but lacking bombers for 50 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_Fort

by graemep

7/5/2026 at 2:30:40 PM

The article is more talking about landscape fortifications like trenches, ramparts, moats, and berms that slow down trucks.

by jubilanti

7/5/2026 at 2:19:49 PM

I suspect people are motivated by the desire not not catch stray bullets more than dissuade a concerted attack.

by CuriouslyC

7/5/2026 at 4:50:54 PM

ISIS-style soldiers usually have light-weaponry because they need to be mobile. Having heavy artillery or bombers will make them an easy target for an organized army which they are very not equipped to fight. Their advantage is in there ability to hit in random unprotected areas with little damage but to do it constantly and unpredictably.

by csomar

7/5/2026 at 2:07:28 PM

Walls can not protect you from dhijadists either, the mortars take out the city- and besieging starves it out. In sudan- a "walled and ditched" city recently fell to the djandjhawid.. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/commentary/fall-el-fa...

by cineticdaffodil

7/5/2026 at 2:35:23 PM

Of course no fortification can withstand overwhelming force indefinitely, but el-Fasher held out 1.5 years while completely surrounded, which isn't too shabby. (Here's a map from a year prior: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/5/52/... It's the small pink blob of army-controlled territory labeled "Al-Fashir" within the gray mass of the RSF.) And the RSF are a formerly government-affiliated civil war faction with a lot more firepower than jihadist militias like JNIM or ISSP.

If some trenches and an earth wall turn a short raid into a long siege, that at least gives the army some time to send reinforcements and attack the besiegers.

by yorwba

7/5/2026 at 6:12:38 PM

Kuweires airbase in Syria never fell to isis and held for over two years.

by MaxPock

7/5/2026 at 2:52:01 PM

Alone, no. But the fact that modern militaries still build them around bases in insecure areas should give you a moment's pause before dismissing them entirely.

by ceejayoz

7/5/2026 at 2:33:57 PM

They give you time though. It's certainly not perfect, but no wall ever was. You could scale the old wall with a ladder if you wanted to, but it slowed you down and that gave the defenders time to do something about that.

by bluGill

7/5/2026 at 3:48:20 PM

Depends on who you want to protect against.

For example if you want to protect against hordes of teenagers stealing everything from an Apple store, you just need a button to deploy barbed wire at all entrances and exits, and then a few guards with rubber batons beat the shit out of everyone.

When the state is weak, communities take the law into their own hands, which is why we see this medieval-style fortifications appear again.

by dist-epoch

7/5/2026 at 6:53:41 PM

Actually, the best way that doesn't get you bogged down in battery charges (for beating a teenager) or manslaughter charges (oops, your barbed wire caused a fatal infection) is social services that help fight poverty and teenage vagrancy (and possibly an accessible iPhone model that takes the edge off of the iPhone jones/envy that your iPhone marketers purposely built).

by 59percentmore

7/5/2026 at 7:50:35 PM

You might have missed the point.

You don’t get battery charges when there isn’t a functioning state with courts, police and prisons.

City fortifications are an indication that the functional unit of society has compressed to city scale.

It can collapse further to single buildings — castles and further to nomadic warring tribes.

by digitaltrees

7/5/2026 at 4:10:53 PM

Or you can just remotely brick the devices so there is no value in stealing them.

by allthetime

7/5/2026 at 5:01:53 PM

Isn’t that already the case, yet some amount of store theft still occurs?

It could be there is a base rate of people who don’t know yet and thus a natural rate would be higher if remote locking wasn’t a thing.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

by adolph

7/5/2026 at 3:59:28 PM

Goodness

by theoreticalmal

7/5/2026 at 3:09:46 PM

> I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls.

Yes, but people will also say that "Security through obscurity is not security" and then in the same breath sneer derisively at how leaving ssh on port 22 is just amateur hour stuff.

by ErroneousBosh

7/5/2026 at 3:37:15 PM

Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think. Obliterating US bases in the region, and used precise targeting (for example, hit actual correct hotel floor number hundreds of miles away where commanders where stationed with cheap drones ~$30k). So the only real protection now seems to be distance, and not being a target worth the missile. Individual motorbikes in Ukraine conflict, vs any sort of troop concentration or high value vehicles like tanks, worth targeting how things are evolving

by dukeofdoom

7/5/2026 at 4:25:17 PM

How many US ships did the Iranians hit?

Ed: The answer suggests to me this is highly overblown in combination with the total number of US military casualties from missile and drone attacks (7). It makes “obliteration” of bases sound like extreme hyperbole and propaganda. It certainly suggests that, given one of the most powerful militaries in the world threw everything they had at the US and couldn’t do anything more than that, that the calculus has not changed much due to new missile and drone tech. It’s not like the status quo before was invincibility.

by Amezarak

7/5/2026 at 5:39:09 PM

That's video game thinking. The effectiveness of a military force is not based on its ability to fight enemy forces, but on its ability to achieve its goals and prevent the enemy from achieving theirs.

US military could strike enemy targets and defend itself in the Iran war, just like in other wars in the past decades. But this time, its ability to defend its bases and the countries hosting those bases was clearly insufficient. Due to this deficiency, Iran managed to achieve not only its primary goal (to survive) but also a secondary goal (to make other countries in the region question whether US military presence is an asset or a liability).

Cheap drones and missiles create an asymmetry between offense and defense. A small offensive force can strike anywhere it wants, but the other side needs sufficient defenses at every target worth striking. The US had sufficient offensive forces, but it lacked the several times larger defensive forces needed to protect the region from Iranian counterattacks. Its regional allies might have had those, if the US had told them in advance and given them time to mobilize.

by jltsiren

7/5/2026 at 5:49:52 PM

US forces performed better than people have been saying they would for decades against drones and anti-ship missile, and their defense tech performed better than what we’ve seen in prior wars with similar matchups.

You and the other commenters keep focusing on overall strategy about eg the strait but the argument was about drones and missile attacks changing the game. Rather than changing the game, they were shown to be less effective than in past conflicts. The real video game thinking here is the bizarre idea that the US and was totally invincible and untouchable until this showed otherwise. They took shockingly few losses.

by Amezarak

7/5/2026 at 6:30:35 PM

The strategic level is the level that matters.

In a video game, military forces fight other military forces and the stronger side wins. In the real world, a military force may choose to fight enemy forces, if it believes that's the best way to advance its goals. But if the enemy is clearly stronger, fighting it directly is probably counterproductive, and it may be more useful to hit softer targets instead.

US forces suffered limited casualties, but that wasn't particularly relevant. Iran realized quickly enough that engaging US forces directly wasn't an efficient way to use its resources. It targeted infrastructure such as oil refineries in Gulf States allied with the US and caused serious enough damage to steer the course of the war.

I think the war revealed two deficiencies in US forces. First, the US did not have sufficient offensive capabilities to prevent Iranian counterattacks. Iranian drones and missiles were cheap and plentiful, while the US used expensive platforms designed for hitting high-value targets. And second, the forces available to defend allied civilian infrastructure were insufficient. The US only had limited forces in the region, and force composition focused heavily on offense.

by jltsiren

7/5/2026 at 5:35:43 PM

The key point in the whole saga is that overwhelming US strength has failed.

The Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.

by lostlogin

7/5/2026 at 6:13:09 PM

I don't know how to make it any clearer that my comment was a response to:

> Iran changed the game with their missile and drone defense ability forever I think.

Not an invitation for discussion on the vagaries on the larger strategy and outcomes of the Iranian war: specifically a comment that this statement is clearly wrong; Iranian missile attacks performed worse than historically would have been expected due to US anti-missile defense tech and drone attacks performed markedly worse than "experts" have been anticipating for years. The "conventional Internet wisdom" was totally wrong and appears to perhaps be immune to actual events, since we continue to see comments like "drone and missile attacks changed the game".

You can argue about the larger strategy all you want but technical reality we saw is that the US military outperformed expectations when it came to missile and drone attacks: far from "changing the game", they showed that long-range attacks are less effective than at any time since the early development of missile technology. The fact the Iranians were unable to do anything about ships a few dozen miles off their coast is absolutely bananas and perhaps historically unprecedented for a military of that size and capability.

by Amezarak

7/5/2026 at 4:33:15 PM

Yes and no. They can't hit a moving target yet. They can hit a stationary one very precisely at a fairly long range.

They can't (yet) hit an aircraft carrier. They can hit an airbase, though, and have. That's more than nothing.

by AnimalMuppet

7/5/2026 at 4:40:50 PM

Not just carriers, they couldn’t even hit US Navy destroyers transiting the strait with massed attacks. E.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/2-us-navy-destroyers-transit-st...

Accurate long-range attacks are not new. If anything they are less effective than at any other time in modern history.

by Amezarak

7/5/2026 at 4:54:08 PM

How many US warships did the Iranians need to hit?

Turns out, none. Plenty of stationary targets, like US-owned data centres in US-aligned countries. Plenty of huge, slow-moving, undefended tankers.

by michaelt

7/5/2026 at 5:08:35 PM

1. We’re not arguing about the strategic outcome of the war, which different people interpret in totally opposite ways based on their party affiliation.

2. The USN fired thousands of missiles at the Iranians so obviously they were highly motivated to retaliate. They tried and failed to do anything about it. Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about. If anything it would appear that defense tech has changed things in the opposite way, considering its track record in prior conflicts.

by Amezarak

7/5/2026 at 5:42:10 PM

> Thus the idea that Iranian missile and drone tech changed the game would seem to be falsified, which is what this discussion is about.

The U.S. lost billions of dollars in expensive military hardware, proved incapable of defending Gulf allies, and had to abandon all of the stated goals for starting the war—note Trump’s eagerness to sign a treaty so bad even Congressional Republicans were willing to publicly criticize it—despite a massive disparity in the size of their respective military budgets. It’s hard to see that as the game not changing in key ways.

by acdha

7/5/2026 at 2:37:10 PM

The UK built [1] castles in Afghanistan recently too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

by rjsw

7/5/2026 at 2:40:24 PM

More of a Roman fort I'd say.

by pigpop

7/5/2026 at 3:11:00 PM

Or an early Norman one, for the same reasons. The people in the fort were different to those outside, city walls were built later in the medieval period once those differences had reduced.

by rjsw

7/5/2026 at 4:09:37 PM

Coincidentally, this morning I happened to be in a hotel room where there was a TV-set showing some random TV channel, and there was a documentary showing that medieval-style fortifications have come back in the form of the new building of the US embassy in London, which is surrounded by a moat, presumably for fear of terrorists.

by adrian_b

7/5/2026 at 7:01:16 PM

Is there anyway to actually read the article without paying?

by anotheraccount9

7/5/2026 at 4:38:08 PM

In many of Latin America big towns and most of border towns, most middle-class houses are tiny versions of fortresses.

It is a sign of police incompetence, government collapse and the fact that those places are ruled by gangsters.

by diego_moita

7/5/2026 at 6:27:10 PM

The great revelation of Google Street View for me has been that such is more or less the world norm. Neighborhoods of entirely unbarred windows and unfenced lots are scarce on any continent.

The tragedy is that so few, at least here in the US, see the liberating value in them.

by everybodyknows

7/5/2026 at 3:12:09 PM

"Newly walled towns are a sign of shrivelling state authority" was my thought when I saw the walled off Capitol.

It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."

by ufocia

7/5/2026 at 6:32:17 PM

> shrivelling state authority

Sure, but state authority alone is no substitute for cultural norms.

by everybodyknows

7/5/2026 at 4:44:30 PM

Awesome

by michaelfm1211

7/5/2026 at 2:05:31 PM

[flagged]

by cineticdaffodil