Fingers curled around the handles of their famous two-hand steel-and-carbon Dadao swords, others equipped with nothing but bodies hardened by years of martial arts training, the men of Lieutenant-General Song Zheyuan’s 29 Corps made their way along the woodcutters’ trails below the Great Wall of China. For two days, they had been fighting medieval-style melees with Imperial Japan’s forces on the wall’s ramparts and fortified gateways. Now, General Song was preparing to take death into the enemy camp.
The men of the 29 Corps, historian Jiashun Du has recorded, slaughtered the Imperial Japanese soldiers in their beds, destroyed artillery guns with grenades, and set ammunition dumps on fire. Then, as morning broke on 3 January 1933, the Chinese disappeared into the morning mist. For the very last time, the Great Wall—left in disrepair since the Manchu invasion breached it in 1644—had defeated China’s enemies.
Hamas’s easy defeat of Israel’s so-called Iron Wall with Gaza—twin lines of six metre high barbed wire fences, made from a 140,000 tons of iron and steel, backed up with an underground concrete skirt to block tunnels, and a dense array of radar, thermal cameras, movement sensors and remotely-operated machine-guns—has set military planners across the world wondering if modern static defences are again as useless as the Great Walls which guarded medieval empires.
For decades after the Second World War, static defences—like the supposedly-impervious Maginot Line breached by Nazi Germany in 1940 or the Atlantic Wall pulverised by the Allies in 1944—indeed seemed a folly of history. Today, though, they have returned as critical elements of border defence around the world, from the southwestern borders of the United States to India’s frontiers in Kashmir and Bangladesh.
Though India is testing a smart fence in Kashmir—using, government sources say, sensors from Magal, which also developed the systems in Gaza and the United States—problems with infiltration remain. In recent weeks, jihadist units have shown the ability to penetrate the fence, strike and exfiltrate their personnel.
Fencing of the Line of Control, and the introduction of technologies like thermal imaging and ground-movement sensors, do not appear to have evident correlation with terrorist infiltration, official data shows.
Hamas’s ability to overwhelm the Gaza fences poses a stark question: Do these multi-million dollar fences really work?
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The rebirth of fences
France’s long, murderous counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria holds the key to understanding how border fences were reborn. Even with air support, a naval blockade and unsubtle arm-twisting of the governments of Tunisia and Morocco, French forces had little luck interdicting Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) fighters and equipment. There was reluctance to mine the border, since insurgents in Vietnam had shown considerable skill in digging them out, and using them against the military.
Lacking other options, France strung out a fence but it wasn’t a roseate success. In 1956, US military officer Timothy Bairstow records, the FLN removed a 5-km stretch, tauntingly leaving behind a page from a French military manual which read,“any obstacle not covered by fire is ineffective.”
The final French fence, the Morice Line, proved a formidable obstacle, though. Electrified with a 5,000-volt charge, powered by stations put up every 15 to 20 km, the Morice Line was also defended by modified naval surveillance radar. The French improved their reaction times to breaches by building roads, and using airborne forces. FLN infiltration was reduced to small groups.
Elsewhere in the world, similar efforts failed. The Rhodesian counterinsurgency cordon sanitaire, scholar Martin Rupiah notes, failed because the government lacked enough troops to effectively patrol it. Zimbabwean insurgents were able to clear the minefields using spades in just two hours. False alerts from the early warning system, caused by weather conditions, contributed to the system’s ineffectiveness.
Forts, electronic sensors and airborne surveillance were extensively used by the US military to monitor the movements of insurgents and traffickers across Iraq’s borders with Syria and Iran. The effort, expert Robert Bateman notes, was shackled from the outset by the fact that the US could never build up the necessary density of troops to respond to electronic intelligence. The costs of this were brutal as the Islamic State overwhelmed large parts of the territory after 2006.
The lesson, from Algeria to Iraq, was simple: Even though fences could be a useful tool in securing borders, there was no tech-fix to the problem of getting enough troops on the ground. Left unmanned, even the most lethal minefields and fences could be penetrated.
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Israel’s fence failure
From the evidence available so far, Israel forgot that lesson—in part because of the ideological priorities of its political leadership. Three entire battalions of soldiers, journalist Gershom Gorenberg has revealed, were moved to the West Bank on October 4, only to protect a convoy of Jewish worshippers to St. Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, a contested religious site. Large numbers of troops were thinned from Gaza, and frittered away in small pockets guarding settlements in the West Bank.
The Knesset’s powerful Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Gorenberg writes, did not hold a single meeting on Gaza—devoting its sessions, instead, to the issue of securing settlements and the roads between them.
Hamas began by bombarding Israeli observation posts and remote-controlled machine guns with drones, built on cheap, easily available commercial platforms. Even as Israeli command posts were blinded, it blew apart the fence with Bangalore torpedos—simple pipes filled with explosives—and rolled bulldozers through the gaps.
As the scholar Franz-Stefan Gady has argued, Israel became victim to a tech fetish, imagining devices could substitute for soldiers trained and prepared to fight wars. There was an important second lesson, too: Enemies constantly learn lessons from reverses, and find ways to overcome barriers.
The most fundamental problem with the Gaza fence—and others like it—is that there is no clear metric for judging just how well it works.
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‘A Great, Great Wall’
Five years after former US president Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant wall began going up on the country’s southwestern border, the Department of Homeland Security conducted studies that give some idea of their effectiveness. The number of so-called “gotaways”—“the number of subjects who, after making an unlawful entry, are not turned back or apprehended”, as defined by the DHS—rose from 85,505 in 2011 to 389,155 in 2021.
The number of successful turnbacks, or potential migrants the DHS stopped, also rose, but far more modestly—from 121,007 to 174,320 in 2021.
Few statistical studies of the kind conducted by the DHS—after prolonged prodding from the state auditor, Government Accountability Office—have been conducted elsewhere in the world. The DHS knew how many people it was arresting, but had no estimates of how many evaded its border defences. This has made assessment of the effectiveness of fencing almost impossible.
Ever since the 1940s, when the United States first began fencing the southwestern border to cut back illegal immigration, little evidence had emerged that the strategy could be successful. Efforts to close the border in 1969 and 1985 came to nothing.
Former president Ronald Reagan, who presided over that second closure, earlier suggested that “rather than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit.”
Even as Trump spent billions of dollars on the high-tech wall—a policy that has continued under President Joe Biden—traffickers applied private-sector ingenuity to circumvent the defences. The methods range from ladders and tunnels, to devices which allow four-wheelers to climb over the border wall. Trafficking cartels are also using drones to probe for gaps in the movements of border patrols.
Trained terrorists have little difficulty in circumventing obstacles that don’t deter drug traffickers or illegal immigrants. As early as 2018, arrested Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist Zabiullah Saqib told Indian interrogators that it took his unit of six just 30 minutes to penetrate the coils of concertina wire piled up on the Line of Control. Large parts of the fence are also damaged by heavy snowfall each winter, creating gaps that are not repaired until the spring.
Learning from the experience of Israel, India needs to be ready for the prospect that terrorists will find new means to test its preparedness on the Line of Control. The jihadist resurgence in Pakistan’s northwest could, for example, lead to India confronting large groups of well-trained insurgents rather than just small-unit infiltration. Technology cannot substitute for the training and preparedness that allow resilience in the face of surprise.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)