Comment by oblio
4 days ago
> Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.
Moats and high walls, sure. But to this day, the absolute best way to stop any attacker is to dig a trench (most minus water) and to build low parapets, primarily of dirt, sand, barbed wire and ideally some anti tank stuff.
The moat never really went away.
Moats were there to protect your castle which had your military and the supplies to keep them fed.
If you go to guerrilla warfare immediately, you’re basically now forced to face the enemy on the field on even ground even when you are on the defense.
All they have to do is burn your lands, destroy your fields, kill your civilians and you have lost.
They’ll do all that and safely retreat back home leaving you defanged.
That’s what medieval warfare was all about. Not absolute surrender and conquest, just temporary suppression and maybe forcing your enemy to pay your tribute.
How does your moat do against a B-52?
A lot better than expected, as Vietnam proved.
That had really nothing to do with the planes. If the US had wanted to turn Vietnam into radioactive glass, the VC had nothing that could stop them.
The problem there is that the US was trying to convert them rather than annihilate them, and then you're not actually trying to penetrate their moat, you're trying to limit casualties, whereas they're not.
And then they're not winning by having a functioning moat, they're winning by refusing to surrender to an enemy that has the ability but not the appetite to wipe them out.
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You may be missing the point, unsure if purposefully or not, but you can't just rent B-52 for $250 a month.
The B-52 analogy seems pretty spot on where the (relatively) sudden capabilities of Claude are similar to now having a B-52 where you can just fly around and find silly little moat/wall defenses and easily destroy them with your one-shot bomb-release button.
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trenches aren't stopping the attackers, only protecting the defenders. You "men" the trenches to make them effective
Moats or high walls also didn't stop attackers. You "manned" the walls for both to be effective.
Why do you think star forts had that shape? Why do you think castle walls had murder holes or arrow slits? Etc, etc.