A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands...
and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in Africa (MARCH 2026) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06502
> The United States and its allies should align its efforts accordingly. That means accepting longer time horizons, investing in less visible cross-border mechanisms over high-profile bilateral wins, and recognising that the periphery is now the centre.
oh boy
> African governments understand this dynamic, which is why regional organisations like the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and even the juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States increasingly emphasise multinational responses.
Not to be too much of a panafrican commie here, but AES left the Ecowas months ago I hope(?) the authors were aware of this? Seems like worth mentioning, perhaps it means something who knows. I guess we learn more about what to think about the Shael states when the US or France invades them again in a few months from now.
Just in this century, the US used fortified camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so did the French in Sahel. And the Ukrainians fortified Dombas and effectively prevented the Russians to take it quickly. Then the Russians fortified the Zaporizhzhia frontline (the Surovikin line) which stopped the Ukrainian counter offensive in 2023.
And talking about Africa in particular, the border between Morocco and Algeria, and also Western Sahara, has been a fortified wall for the past 40 years now.
https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/mitte/article228419835/Sch...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Iranians control the strait. This wasn’t a problem for the military, it was a problem for diplomats, as previous US governments knew.
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.
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.
It is a sign of police incompetence, government collapse and the fact that those places are ruled by gangsters.
It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."
