Volume 7, Issue 4, Winter 2022 26 motivation behind such constructions. It is estimated that by the end of 2021 Pakistan will have built (or recommissioned) as many as 1,000 forts and border posts along its border with Afghanistan.[xxix] These are but one part of a fortified strategic complex that includes approximately 1,500 miles of dual chain link and barbed wire fencing, plus a 400-mile-long, eleven-feet-deep and fourteen-feetwide ditch, combined with an array of cameras and other electronic sensors, built at a reported cost of $500 million. [xxx] The Afghanistan-Pakistan region is impressively heavily fortified–but similar levels of effort are observable elsewhere in the world too. Perhaps the most well-known is Morocco’s Western Sahara Wall, often referred to as the ‘Sand Wall’.[xxxi] The appellation is not surprising as the vast majority of its 1,600-mile length is of a sand berm and ditch construction. It is also, however, somewhat misleading as to the degree of effort and sophistication of its construction. Dotted with relentless regularity, easily observable on Google Earth, every three to five miles along the Sand Wall are forts manned by as many as 100,000 Moroccan soldiers. The gaps, moreover, are covered by high fences in many places, several layers of barbed wire, a range of electronic surveillance devices, and approximately seven million land mines. By any measure this is a serious work of fortification that has occupied the bulk of national military effort for the last thirty years. The number of such barriers in the world today varies according to how and what one counts.[xxxii] Some such as that between Kenya and Somalia are seemingly halfbuilt or mired in delay;[xxxiii] the so-called ‘European Rampart’ on Ukraine’s border with Russia, now scheduled for completion in 2025, a decade after works began, is another example;[xxxiv] others such as the North & South Korean DMZ are thoroughly militarized to the point of practical impregnability outside of a major war. In recent years, among the largest and most technically sophisticated have been built in the Middle East, inter alia by Turkey on its border with Syria, and by Saudi Arabia initially on its border with Iraq and now along the Yemeni border as well.[xxxv] There are two significant and related points here. One, national peripheral barriers are truly big business. The investment in the works described is hard to estimate because it rarely appears as one budget line in national defence accounts; it is, rather, spread across a range of public works covered by different ministries. We know, however, from the public estimates of US-Mexico border installations that it is measured in the billions. More generally, an indication of scale can be gleaned from things like the IFSEC Global Directory, which currently lists 355 companies selling ‘perimeter security’ products (and a further 709 selling associated systems). The perimeter security business alone is estimated now to be worth $61 billion annually, with the potential to rise to $96.5 billion by 2026.[xxxvi] Two, these are serious works of military engineering. Even those aimed solely at preventing unarmed civilians from crossing borders illegally are impressively complex and powerful structures. The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa in recent years have witnessed quasi-mediaeval battles in which large and well-organized groups of migrants have accomplished several escalades in the face of increasingly overmatched resistance by border guards.[xxxvii] Those which are intended as barriers against armed infiltration, such as Israel’s West Bank and Gaza fortifications or even more so those of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, are truly powerful military assets integrated in national security strategies. IV. Consolidation On the eve of the First World War all the major European powers subscribed to a large degree to a national security strategy based on grand fortifications.[xxxviii] Whole countrieswere armoured byparallel lines of fortresses along their frontiers, while important cities and communications centres were similarly fortified. The greatest of these defensive complexes such as the Belgian fortresses of the Meuse Valley or those of the French at Verdun, both built to ward off German attack on likely invasion routes, were potent symbols of national pride and the military engineers who designed them, like Generals Henri Alexis Brialmont and Sere de Rivieres respectively, were well known public figures.[xxxix] The strategic logic: territory-wise, what you own is what you can hold. But the credibility of such strategies was badly shaken by the arrival of war. In the first few weeks of the First World War, forts which were thought to have been impregnable were blasted into submission by specialist German siege artillery like the 42cm Krupp gun, one of whose 1,600lb shells cracked open the concrete shell of Fort de Loncin, a Meuse fort near Liege, and exploded its powder magazine killing 250 Belgian soldiers and compelling its surrender. Even more famously, France’s Maginot Line, a mighty network of underground fortresses built in the 1930s, impeded German operations hardly at all. Even today, as a result, the words ‘Maginot Line’ are used as a simile for something expensive, retrograde, and doomed to failure. In fact, fortifications gave good service throughout the world wars.[xl] Nonetheless, nuclear weapons and highintensity conventional warfare became the preoccupations of strategic thinkers while fortification came to be seen as a ‘redundant science’.[xli] Again, though, grand strategic fortifications are back in use. For coming on two decades, China has been building man-made islands in the South China Sea through massive dredging of sand piled over shallow reefs. Though it once promised not to fortify them it has done so extensively with particularly powerful installations now to be found at Fiery Fortified Strategic Complexes David Betz
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