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.
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.
Drones democratize airpower but have significant limits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.
> 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.
They can't (yet) hit an aircraft carrier. They can hit an airbase, though, and have. That's more than nothing.
Accurate long-range attacks are not new. If anything they are less effective than at any other time in modern history.
Turns out, none. Plenty of stationary targets, like US-owned data centres in US-aligned countries. Plenty of huge, slow-moving, undefended tankers.
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.
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.