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Why would large fortifications make a comeback in the near future? When I say fortifications I don't need Maginot line type defences, just fortifications in general. It could be closer to something like the Mannerheim line. Fortifications don't have to be prevalent everywhere. They only need to exist in some places as a defining feature of warfare. The technology level is near future. Most warfare is conventional between roughly equal powers. The 2 restrictions are:

  1. No making people stupid, no disappearing tanks or airpower
  2. No extreme environmental conditions, this is on a future earth rather than a different planet
OT-64 SKOT
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  • Well, first to not make people stupid, you would have to need a good reason for conventional warfare between equal powers. In order to do so, you would have to remove the pressure of intelligence warfare, economical blockades and (especially) nuclear missiles; Unfortunately, this nibbles at condition 1, as you don't want weapons to disappear. Interesting :p. By the way, what is the 3rd restriction? – Tortliena - inactive Aug 12 '21 at 01:12
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    @Tortliena when i say "not make people stupid", mean no weird honour rules or unenforceable treaties or something. In terms of blockades, most countries have internalised most of what they need within their alliance & the nuke situation is too complicated to explain here. – OT-64 SKOT Aug 12 '21 at 01:38
  • This is a tad open-ended. Kaiju? Zombies? GMO corn monsters? Super soldiers? Plague? How do we know what the right answer looks like with such little information? – rek Aug 12 '21 at 13:16
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    @rek

    Most warfare is conventional between roughly equal powers.

     – OT-64 SKOT Aug 12 '21 at 13:23
  • @OT-64SKOT That's exactly the same thing I thought about. A conventional war is very costly and not "thought to be fun" by citizen, especially after the mark of WWI and WWII. It's far easier to work on the diplomatic and intel warfare scale. Only "unenforceable treaties", "honour rules" and unstable/one-man powered countries would take that step, which are not necessarily the most advanced ones technologically. You will have to admit some point of silliness, but that's ok, not everything is smart. And out of your question, too. – Tortliena - inactive Aug 12 '21 at 15:08
  • There's one thing that poses me a true problem with your question though and that you didn't answer : What is your 3rd constraint? There are only 2 bullet points. – Tortliena - inactive Aug 12 '21 at 15:09
  • Missed that, but I think it's still too open-ended. The permutations of combined motives, tactics, materiel, etc, is endless. – rek Aug 12 '21 at 19:47
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    @rek I believe Kaiju, Zombies, GMO corn monsters, Super soldiers, and Plagues all violate either the "No extreme environmental conditions" or "Near Future" constraints. "Near Future" generally means only technologies that could be explained with our current understanding of science and are expected to be practical and achievable within the next few decades. Millitary tech development is much less secretive than it used to be; so, what technologies major powers expect to have in the next 10-20 years is not that hard to find now. – Nosajimiki Aug 12 '21 at 21:14

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Plasma Shields

Traditional fortifications went out of style because of a the linear-cube law. As world builders we should all know the square-cube law by now, but the linear-cube law is kind of the same but even more unforgiving. As the scale of a fortification increases at a cubic rate, its defensive capabilities go up at a linear rate. Imagine you have a wall, 1x2x10 meters, and you triple it up to 3x6x30 meters. you have increased is mass/size/cost 27 fold, but only tripled its ability to resist pentation.

Because of this relationship, in a contest between scaling up a weapon to pernitrate a fortification and scaling up a fortification to resist pentation, the weapon wins hands down... but what if you had a way of defending a large area that scales up at a linear cost? That's is where plasma shields come it. Unlike a wall, a plasma shield takes a source of energy and used an array of lasers to create a plasma barrier just in the path of an incoming weapon. Because its potential is not spread across your whole perimeter at any given moment, it means that if your shield array doubles in size, it takes twice as powerful of an attack to break through... or it can split its beams to focus on twice as many simultaneous attacks of equal power... or you could have all of your lasers target threats independently to wipe out a large swarm of cheap slow moving drones in the blink of an eye.

Current designs of plasma shields are powerful enough to stop High Energy Lasers, block explosive shockwaves, and maybe detonate missiles, but they are relatively small systems designed to go on a plane, but a much larger shield powered by nuclear reactors could potentially stop all sorts of weapons.

Now, the defender has a true advantage. To attack a fortress guarded by a shield you need to attack it with vehicles which are much more expensive than fortresses by size, and harder to make on a really big scale. So if you just make a shield array large enough, and attach it to big enough of a powerplant, it would become virtually unassailable unless you attack it with a force of truly extraordinary size. Even a nuke could be blocked by such a system if the lasers cause the detonation system to explode from the wrong point of origin before it reaches its designated distance.

... if shields are not in your setting, any other adequately advanced active defense system should work. Plasma shields just scale up best IMO because so much of the system is power generation which can be done internally on a particularly large fortification.

Nosajimiki
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Drones.

Freaking drones. You can have the sweetest tank that cost your taxpayers millions, and some $30 drone comes and lands some high explosive on it. Or worse a cloud of freaking drones that cost less than cosmetic surgery intercepts your cruise missile, or your jet that cost the same as 20 of that tank that blew up earlier in the paragraph. And forget about people on foot. When it comes to war, drones own the earth.

Drones. They are too cheap and too fast and too destructive and there are too many of them. You gotta hide your precious self and your tech from those drones, and get them toe to toe with your antidrone drones. And that means you and your tech and especially your antidrone drones need to hide someplace safe where the drones can't find them and blow them up while you get your pants on and have your coffee.

And someplace safe means a fortress.

Willk
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  • That's exactly what I thought, with one difference : They're not more dangerous than the sum of it + people; however Nations signed a worldwide treaty to reduce war casualties, so that sending off people when you can keep to drones gives an even more bad vibe to the countries you're not in war with. This and also I'd precise that fortresses are nice to store many things, such as components to repair said drones. – Tortliena - inactive Aug 12 '21 at 01:30
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    A $30 drone isn't going to have the range, altitude, or speed to catch up to a cruise missile or jet. Even most MANPADs can't do that and they cost orders of magnitude more. – GrumpyYoungMan Aug 12 '21 at 03:04
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    Why is a tank vulnerable to a drone, but not a fortress? A tank could at least try to drive away from it. – Cadence Aug 12 '21 at 17:14
  • a hundred euro drone with wings can handle the weight of a shaped charge weapon that would penetrate any tank armour and could have a range of at least a kilometre – vulcan_ Aug 12 '21 at 17:37
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    @Cadence - I really like the scene where the tank crew sees the drone coming and tries to drive away from it. It would be like the time I tried to run away from a horsefly. – Willk Aug 12 '21 at 21:58
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    A modern tank is not so easy to kill. Unlike a drone, they pack advanced 360 degree sensors and countermeasures. Drones without a significant investment in stealth technology will be seen by the tank from several kilometers away. Since drones are slow and weight limited, that is a lot of time for electronically targeted firearms to gun down a whole swarm of drones before the drones can get into attack range. On top of that, there is the new Trophy APS which has a 100% recorded effectiveness at intercepting a wide range of anti-tank weapons including supersonic missiles. – Nosajimiki Aug 14 '21 at 06:59
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    In one test, a single tank with Trophy was shot by 48 anti-tank missiles, and all missiles were intercepted. If 1 tank can take out 48 missiles, it can very easily take out that many slow moving drones... and by extension, a tank platoon could take down a swarm of hundreds of drones. Also, once you load a drone with all the electronics, optics, and weapon systems it needs to be combat effective you are looking at several thousand dollars per unit, not $30; so, if each drone actually costs closer to $5000, then a platoon of tanks could easily gun down a million dollar drone swarm. – Nosajimiki Aug 14 '21 at 06:59
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People devise fortresses because in the past, the cost of defense is cheaper than the cost of attack. The defender builds a very high and thick stone/brick wall (certainly not cheap, but the cost is spread out throughout time)and station X amount of people on top of it, and the attacker will need at least 5 times the amount of people and equipment (immediate and present cost) to take it (just look at how many people is scurrying up the ladder, and how many is being killed on the ladder by arrow, hot water, burning log in the movies).

It is not until recently, when the advancement in long range artillery technology and modern mass-production industry that reversed the situation. Even the toughest wall can't hold against the repeat bombardment of cheaper, and more powerful artillery rounds that can be sent off the factory floor around the clock.

Also, smart generals from all era and places in history always try to dismantle a fortress without turning it into a slug match. Sun Tsu has said that "Attack a forturess head on is the worst strategy", and Clauswitz (I forget whether it is him) has said something similar to "If you barricade yourself in an impenentrable fortress, your enemy will seek other ways to get to you." A fortress must have self-sufficient food, water, medical, and basic manufacture ability to resist a seige. Special forces has been used to sneak into the fortification to destroy these vital facilities. The larger the fortress, the more unfamiliar the inhabitants are to each other. This allows spys and sabotager to sneak in.

To make fortress prominent again, one of these factors must be eliminated. Perhaps this is after a nuclear war that decimated most of the factories around the world. The fortresses are the remaining factories, who needs to be defended with everything the defender has and who can pump out ammunition and other war machine as fast as possible while the attackers must use numerical advantage. Some new methods can be used to detect spys and sabotageurs, such as bio-integrated microchips or just a guard dog/bear/mechanical dragonfly.

Faito Dayo
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fortresses are a massive expense to build, and are only options when those controlling military spending need a project to embezzle from. When the Maginot line was constructed it was already obsolete .. there was never a time when it made military sense. It was just that the generals approving their construction were a decade behind in their understanding of air power and repeating weapons. They thought, incorrectly, that tanks were all they had to worry about.

vulcan_
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    In reality the Maginot line worked beautifully and fulfilled its purpose of limiting the options of a German attack. The attacking Germans didn't even try to breach it. It's not the fault of the Maginot line that the the French generals were taken by surprise when the Germans went around the Maginot line. – AlexP Aug 17 '21 at 01:36
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    LOL, yes .. the fault was theirs in that they were wasting time and money on the Maginot forts instead of modernising their armour like the Germans were. – vulcan_ Aug 18 '21 at 23:18
  • @vulcan_ To modernize armour, you need doctrine and accurate concepts. French had neither. But they had a symbolic history of efficient fortresses with Vauban. And, no fortresses were not obsolete: see the Mareth line, Mannerheim line, Corregidor.... – totalMongot Aug 19 '21 at 16:58
  • Corregidor was not a fortress, it was a delaying tactic that used up thousands of lives. the Mareth Line lasted only a few days against a mobile force that outflanked it and then rolled it up from behind. The "strength" of the Mannerheim Line was a myth .. quoting Wikipedia "However, "flexible" defense lines (Mannerheim Line, Árpád Line, Bar Lev Line) were not based on dense lines of concrete bunkers and pillboxes (as the Maginot system was). The main intention of this type of field fortification was to close potential traffic and attack barriers .." There were no major fortifications. – vulcan_ Aug 21 '21 at 18:06
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If you want just ordinary reinforced concrete bunkers, as you say, on Mannerheim line, then they are still in use, so you do not need anything new happening.

The problem is that superpowers and major powers have weapons to effectively break such forts, including missiles that can penetrate metres of reinforced concrete and tens of metres of ground. So don't expect the bunkers to hold powerful enemy for long.

On the other hand, bunkers have way more use in a regional conflict between small states, though they still can be defeated by recoilless guns and some AT launchers.

Archelaos
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