Volume 7, Issue 4, Winter 2022 28 [iii] David Betz, ‘Citadels and Marching Forts: How Non-Technological Drivers are Pointing Future Warfare Towards Techniques from the Past’, Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2019), pp. 30–41. [iv] David Betz, ‘On Guard: The Contemporary Salience of Military Fortification’, Engelsberg Ideas (19 November 2021), https:// engelsbergideas.com/essays/on-guard-the-contemporary-salience-of-military-fortification/ [v] See Hansjorg Schwalm, ‘Fortification’ in Franklin D. Margiotta (ed.), Brassey’s Land Forces Encyclopaedia (Washington DC: 2000), p. 395. [vi] ‘Fortification and Siegecraft’ in Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 312. [vii] See David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), p. 8. [viii] A surprising thing about renaissance city fortifications, for instance, is how often security was compromised by the design of magnificent gateways that owed more to urban design than military defence. See Simon Pepper, ‘Siege Law, Siege Ritual, and Symbolism in CityWalls’ in James D. Tracy (ed.), CityWalls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 586. [ix] O.H. Creighton discusses the complex and only partly military logic of siting of mediaeval fortresses in Castles and Landscapes (Bristol: Equinox, 2002), chap. 3. [x] As Philip Warner puts it in The Mediaeval Castle (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), p. 5 the primary function of the castle was to dominate as a base of patrolling not to act as a refuge. [xi] For example, note the description of the T-Wall built during the 2008 Battle of Sadr City as the ‘equivalent of a Roman siege engine’ in David E. Johnson et al, The Battle of Sadr City: Reimagining Urban Combat (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2013), p. xxii. [xii] See, for example, Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Artillery Fortress as an Engine of European Overseas Expansion, 1480-1750’, in Tracy (ed.), City Walls, pp. 386-415. [xiii] A point illustratedwell byR.C. Smail inhis account of the strategy of CrusadingWarfare, 1097-1193 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), esp. chap. vii. [xiv] On account of inflation it is often easier to grasp the relative costs of fortifications in past times in terms of key components rather than money. The Maginot Line, the poster child of expensive fortifications, required 1.5 million cubic metres of reinforced concrete, for example. In comparison, the German AtlantikWall, built against the threat of Allied crossChannel invasion, consumed 17 million. Even that huge sum, though, is exceeded by an order of magnitude by the 200 million planned for the defences of Germany against aerial bombardment—an amount that would have equalled that of all civilian construction for the previous 20 years. See William Allcorn, The Maginot Line, 1928-45 (Oxford: Osprey, 2003), p. 9; Steven Zaloga, Defences of the Third Reich, 1941-45 (Oxford: Osprey, 2012), p. 27. [xv] See Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 55-58. [xvi] Christopher Gravett, The Castles of Edward I in Wales, 1277-1307. Also see for insight on the economics of castle-building in Jurgen Brauer and Hubert Van Tuyll, Castles, Battles and Bombs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), pp. 53-65. [xvii] Konstantin Nossov, Russian Fortresses, 1480-1682 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), and Ron Field, Forts of the American Frontier, 1820-91 (Oxford: Osprey, 2005). [xviii] Quentin Hughes, Military Architecture (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1974), p. 145. [xix] Cited in Betz, ‘On Guard’. [xx] Betz, ‘On Guard’. [xxi] As noted by Todd Greentree in ‘What went Wrong in Afghanistan?’, Parameters, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter 2021), p. 16. [xxii] Michael Jones finds in ‘War and Fourteenth Century France’ in Anne Curry and Michael Huhes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications of the Hundred Years War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1994), p. 110 that the average density of strongpoints in The Hundred Years War was approximately one per 20 or 25 square kilometres. Not much different from today. [xxiii] See the introductory discussion of Roman frontiers in Philip Parker, The Empire Stops Here: A Journey Along the Fortified Strategic Complexes David Betz
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