Are castles/fortifications completely and utterly dead in the

Tunnels and civilians

>>34453135
Civilians being a fortification is brilliant, if you kill enough the democracies of the world will be forced to attack you, at least economically, because of the feels of their voters and pressure from political opposition.
So just put civilians around something you want defended, and it can't be bombed or shelled.

10/10.

>>34453154
>So just put civilians around something you want defended, and it can't be bombed or shelled.
America don't care

>>34453109
First let me say, that castle is sick but also pretty shit if an enemy army had enough guys to just sit nearby and wait for you to die off starvation.

Modern fortifications absolutely have their place in modern war. Since air power, mortars, and other heavy weapons can smash buildings easy, fortifications are made to be preventative against infantry and small arms and to be cheap.
Hesco bastions, fence, wire, rubble, wood. Stuff you can put up and take down quickly.

The best defense is to have a good offense. The better your offensive counter measures, the "lighter" your fort and army can be.
You can have a plywood FOB with fences around it if you have the ability to prevent enemy mortar teams from getting close enough or if you have anti-air missiles.

Hesco baskets. Cheap easy and strong.

>>34453154

Hasnt stopped Israel from creating more and more Lebensraum.

>>34453228
>>34453621
I guess it doesn't work if you are fighting the USA or the USA's brain slug.
The other democracies can't fight Murika militarily or economically at the moment.

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Yes and no. There is still value in digging in, but large, permanent fortifications are thoroughly obsolete. See, any position that's going to be occupied for a while should be fortified to offer protection against small arms, mortars and the like, for this we have sandbags, hesco bastions, wire and the like.
But the vast, permanent fortifications of days past are obsolete thanks to combined-arms mobility warfare. The time it would take to build something akin to Fort Douaumont or the Maginot line is well out of proportion to the time it would take to bypass it and/or destroy it with heavy ordinance. Much more efficient to have a multitude of small, quickly and easily assembled FOBs spread about and keep things elastic and mobile than trying to strongpoint one particularly juicy piece of land with all or most of your force.

>>34453621
Actually- it did. Not entirely, depends on quality of target and the specifics potential collateral, but I personally witnessed dozens of airstrikes on targets being cancelled in the last moment/in advance due to possible civi casualties. Call them faggots if you will, but the military doesn't employ robots with a love to kill- this guys are usually getting flagged as emotionally unstable and/or dangerous, and moved to non-combative roles/get released (a friend of mine dodged by walking around with a loaded gun, telling everyone that he can't wait to find an "Arabush" to kill. He was sent to a shrink that decided not to risk it and gave him a discharge form).

>>34453135
All of this. Explosives for all and air area made massive fortifications into expensive easy targets.

>>34453802

That may just be Israel then. Reaperguy knew all about collateral damage.

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My experience on Team Fortress Classic told me that forts are very effective in modern and futuristic warfare.

On a serious note: if even Syrian rebels can blow up a bunker by setting a charge of explosives, I don't think it is very useful past slowing down the enemy's advance.

>>34454244
>Team Fortress Classic
My nigga.

>forts are very effective
Tell that to a timed wall-penetrating airburst from the engineers EMP grenade

>>34454244
Forts aren't for sieges anymore, mainly cities these days fill that role.

What they do is form a hardened core around which defenses can be clustered around a strategic position and offensives can take place from.

You do not sit still in a bunker for extended periods of time.

>>34453228
* When bombing for Israel

>>34453154
Mr Putin, is that you?

>>34454343
So it's just a base ?

>>34453109
No. If you can't into an elastic defense then your only choice is a reverse scorched earth, making it too costly to be worth the effort of invasion.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5919581/how-switzerland-camouflaged-its-ready-to-explode-architecture-during-the-cold-war

>>34453802

Noone, I repeat NOONE believes your lies Israel. Noone.

Im old enough to have witness regular invasions into Gaza, which is always claimed to be "retaliation", but its literally a culling of the numbers.

You will get outbred. Shooting kids playing football at the beach is gonna end one day.

>>34454741
Im old enough to remeber when gaza was given to the kebabs by the kikes as a peace offering.

Retarded kebabs spent no time using it as an ebin new rocket launch pad.

I could care less who wins, im just tired of every side whining. I say take the gloves off and let you guys go at it. Whoever wins, wins, whoever loses, loses.

>>34453109
I wonder how much money and MANpower it would take to build that.

>>34454741
Ahmed go back to pol and have gay sex in your retarded echo chamber with all your faggot nazi pals and cry moar about how the Jew completely cucks you.

>>34454764
I wish Israelis would bathe Gaza with sarin and all of the other chemical goodies. [spoiler]There are no holocaust survivors left, just do it, and chuck in the haredi shits while at it.[/spoiler]

>>34453265
Literally every castle ever is shit if the enemy has enough time, money, and men to starve you out

>>34453109
>>34453265
Those thatch roofs are looking mighty flammable

>>34457788
/Thread

>>34457741

Well ya, the point is to make it not worth the investment of all that time, money and men.

>>34453109
Old siege warfare was rad.
>castle town with fucktons of supplies, able to hold out for a long period of time
>use catapults to sling corpses and bags of poo in
>wait for disease to do most of the job

>>34455805
>>34455067
Bit extreme, arent you?

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>>34453109
What are the tunnels of Cu-Chi?
>allowed an army of mostly farmers and villagers to wage a war against a far more numerically and technologically superior army for half a decade without totally seceding the territory
>endured bombing that made a ww1 artillery barrage look like a mortar strike (see a b-52 bombing run for example)
>Americans literally cleared acres upon acres of vegetation with firebombs, bulldozers and poison sprays so no one could hide above ground
>all villages were bulldozed to the ground and residents forced to leave
>area became a free strike zone for any excess ammo from sorties and artillery that felt like lobbing a few shells for the fuck of it
>Cobra gunships hunted this poisonous, cratered desert for anyone, no ROE here
>Thousands of American troops, APC's and helicopters continually launched large sweeps of the area
>Vietcong continued fighting here until the end of the war despite this

Fortification isn't totally obsolete

>>34453109

I feel like the Pentagon is the closest thing to a modern day castle, but I also have no idea what I am talking about

>>34457840
But modern states constantly invade places not worth invading.
Russia is losing tremendous amounts of money over Crimea, USA over Afghanistan and Iraq, Morocco over that fucking one town desert they have been occupying for decades, where it costs them like 10000% of market price to even bring water.

Wasn't a crusader castle used to great effect by the government forces in Syria to hold territory for a long ass time?

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>>34453109
They aren't ineffective when you're actually forced to face them, they're just expensive to create and don't really offer much return for their resources in most situations. A skyscraper armed with ATGM and AA in the middle of a city is a freighteningly effective defensive tool, but who would devote that many resources to defend a single point? And the maintence required for it? Supposedly, the areas surrounding the White House are armed to take on a siege, but they have yet to be tested.

>>34460090
Yes, but they were fighting decidedly sub-modern forces.

>>34460090
The Castle of Krak Des Chevaliers was used by both sides at one point or another, more as an observation post than anything though (high ground).

The Citadel of Aleppo was a pretty critical part of the battle there.

>>34460163
The rebels didn't exactly artillery shell or bomb it though.
It was also not sieged, since it could always be supplied from one side or the air.

Still useful, but not in a "modern war" context, as the Syrian war isn't really very modern most of the time.

>>34454244
Oh dude they need to do that shit again, that was so fucking epic holy shit.

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>>34461182
>as the Syrian war isn't really very modern most of the time
you can say that again!

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They freaking suck to deal with when you don't have artillery. God-damn I hate castles. They make me long for Age of Empires 1, where I could melt everyone with horse archers.

>>34459583
Remember that some dudes flew a plane into the side and caused complete mayhem. Modern castles are built inside mountains oand will probably be built into the sides of continental shelves (underwater) because threats from the air are a thing now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Yamantau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex

Those are just a few that we know about. There are probably dozens of large underground bunkers around the world that we'll never hear of.

>>34453109
Depends entirely if your enemy has artillery.

>>34462748
You see, this is great for 3000 AC Hollywood. They won't need to care about anacronysms and boring shit. Just put knights throwing javelins at HINDs and it probably happened in Syria.

>>34459564
Mah nigga, have you read the tunnel rats book?

>>34464109
I know you're talking about the knife-on-a-stick kind of javelin, but I had a chuckle thinking of a medieval knight transported to the modern era, yelling for his squire to hand him a javelin, and receiving the missile launcher instead.

Short answer: No. Fortified structures are stil prevalent today. Bunkers, hardened communication posts, underground storage areas and airplane hangars work on a strategic level while foxholes and contemporary underground shelters provide resistance against shrapnels and bombs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPrgbtDQhm4

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>>34459564
>>34465101

pic related

>>34466335
>>34459564
Americans romanticize vietcong tunnels so much, it never ceases to amaze me.

>>34468696
There had to have been SOME reason we lost instead of an internal inability to purge communists and their sympathisers

>>34468718
How about trying to wage discount war instead of properly committing?
I know you can't go all out so close to the USSR, but just a bit more at least.

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A modern fortress is completely possible and would be very effective but really it's the political environment that stops fortifications from being built, Any war worthy of the investment of permanent fortification is a war the public wants to avoid at all costs.

>>34453109
Trenches and tunnels. Iraq/Syria and Ukraine as current examples.

Trenches for when the USA isn't bombing you (Ukraine and Kurds) tunnels for when the USA is bombing you.

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>>34470246
>fortress that reaches near space
>how West can even compete?

>>34470337
>they didn't incidentally made it a swastika

so close

>>34461223
just hit replay my man

>>34466335
How the fuck did they get a tank down there?

>>34470337
>Those blue balls and a dick
are they trying to send a message?

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>>34470337
MFW the first tsunami sucks all that sand from under them.

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>>34459564
>b-52 bombing run
>optimized to burn / shrapnel the shit out of everything on the surface and not waste explosives on digging a bigger crater; aka explode underground
>doing fucking anything to dug-in positions
I literally got training to make a fighting position in a day's work that could sit there and survive most any barrage besides a direct hit. Soil is a good protection.

If you wanted to smoke out a deep-underground-but-not-concrete-fortified position, you'd likely want something like a very narrow, pencil-shaped, relatively light bomb (50kg maximum) and lots of it. They'd have to come with a timer, so they only detonate after stabbing (relatively) deep into the soil (2-6 meters)and then detonate, collapsing everything like these tunnels immediately.

I don't think a bomb like that is in the arsenal though, given that that kind of application is ridiculously specialized.