Housellama wrote:... If you call France getting invaded a functional success. The Maginot Line's ultimate function was the same as any defensive strategy: to defend. I'd say that was a failure. Sure, the Germans blew it up but it was built to stop troops, and I'm sure it was very good at it. But the Germans didn't attack it like that, so it's kind of a moot point. A fortress than no one attacks is pretty booping useless. And in the end, France still fell.
And that was not the fault of the Maginot Line. It was a problem with POLITICS. Politics prevented teh ML from covering the entry through Belgium, and that was not something the French could solve.
You are trying to give the French the motivation "The Germans must attack the Maginot Line to invade" for building the ML. That was NOT the goal of the line. The goal of the ML was to "Prevent the Germans from invading anywhere that the ML existed." And in that it succeeded 100%. Despite it's destruction, it was still a functional defense. The Germans never invaded across the Line, so it achieved all it could possibly achieve.
And, guys, the reason I'm discussing this at all is to reiterate Parson's point. Knowing your goal and what you can achieve is VITAL. The French were fully aware that Belgium wasn't covered by the ML and that was worrisome because in WW1, the Germans invaded through Belgium. They wanted to build to the sea, but were not allowed to. It was a failure of the Belgians to accept that the French needed a Line across all borders the Germans might invade from that caused Belgium to be invaded.
*facepalm* You said eggshells work. Sure. In certain circumstances, they work great. And yes, a band will do better than a simple eggshell.
Pure semantics. 1009% spin job/Strawman. We're talking about a defensive Line, vs. Defending everywhere in your territory equally. The thickness of the line is irrelevant, it's still an eggshell.
But even a band isn't Defense In Depth (DiD). That's just a thicker eggshell. DiD is multiple layers of different kinds of defenses.
You're just arguing semantics. Get over it. A campfire is not one stick on fire: it is all the sticks on fire. A defense is not jsut one tank ditch, but the tank ditch, the trench, the camo'ed artillery miles back, and everything else that can stop the attackers.
DiD means having guys on the walls, plus heavies behind the lines, plus air support, plus highly mobile reinforcements available to deploy at hotspots.
Again, semantics. They came up with a fancy term for things that had been done for millenia, and suddenly everyone taht used it before hadn't ? Hardly.
And your example of defending a castle is not relevant. Castles (unlike a walled city) are defended to the inner sanctum of the keep at the center, and while an example of a defense in depth, not an example of defending a nation. Another Strawman, but one I'll use against you later. We are talking about having a massive amount of terrain and defending just the frontier in strength, with the added issue of having some effect that causes problems with economy of scale which affects the number of units available to defend with.
Here's the problem with a band. Even a band of we'll say three moves from the border, a full turn move thicker than your example. If I had to pierce a ring and I knew that there wasn't much inside, I'd have a very highly mobile force, something that could cover that band in three to four moves.
1. How do you get past the scouts or magical defenses? Transylvito bats can hide in Jetstone without Slately knowing, so how do you know you even got one move in without me knowing about it?
2. How do you know how deep my band is? I'm not telling you, and if you've tortured it out of one of my units, we're at war. You sure you want to dump all your defenses to attack me? Any unit attacking me, is one not defending you.
3. How do you know what kind of reactionary force I am using to respond to breakthroughs? You know my defenses are weak past the border region, but you don't know the type of defenders I have chosen, nor what kind of forces I have kept to deal with Barbarians.
Do you know what I would do? I've said before that the most frustrating thing is doing nothing. Three turns pass as you race past my "defenses". Well, on my Turn, your force finds someone waving at you from the other side of a Hex wall. Holds up a sign that says, "Parley?" If yes, he'll come and talk. If not, he'll hold up signs. What does he say? "How's it hanging?" and then goes away. What do you do? Keep going deeper knowing that I know about you?
4. How are you going to defend your Side's cities which I just marched on? Need I remind that if you're not an Heir, when I smash your Side, you disband? If you're 4 Moves into my territory, that means I have 4 Moves of smashing your Side's weakened defenses. If it takes me three Moves to get to your Capital, then it will take you 7 to get back. I merely have to wait to launch my attack until you're too deep to defend against my attack, and then I get a Capital out of it, and anything you had occupied becomes Neutral.
5. You're the aggressor, so I can use that against your Side to demonstrate that I am only defending myself against your aggression to your neighbours who suddenly get nervous that I'm attacking you. You just handed me an excuse to expand my holdings.
No... no, I don't think it's quite as easy as you suggest. An invasion of that depth has repercussions, and no matter how successful. it would be quite Pyrrhic. You might Raze a couple cities, but you're not a serious threat. You're trapped the moment you show me where you are by attacking the first one. You cannot build units, so you slowly whittle away and die.
I'd also have a secondary force that was heavier and slower. Say it takes five to six turns to cross the band. I'd send the secondary force in first.
Yeah, you're forgetting that this is asymmetric warfare, and I AM MUCH BIGGER THAN YOU. You just emptied your cities, started a war, and I'm taking your cities. I don't need to fight your armies, if you have no Capital. And I am MASSIVE. You aren't. I have MANY Capital sites. You get near the current one, I move it. I concentrate on wrecking your Siege, and you're nothing. Unlike GK, I have the capacity to replace losses. I CAN do the dwagon trick (albeit with gwiffons or some other unit), and leave you 6 Turns inside my territory with no capacity to harm anything but a Level 1 city. You can't replace losses.
Let them hammer away at the band, get maybe a full one turn move distance in, a third of the way there. Sure, they are taking casualties, but that's their point.
How very uncreative you are. I WANT you deep in my territory, useless without siege, so when I am on the last turn of taking your Capital, I can offer you the chance to Turn, instead of disbanding.
And Haffaton thinks this way. They let Goodminton play with their castles as if they had a serious chance of any kind of Victory. They saved their own Side losses by letting Frenemy and Quisling have the city itself. They don't fight what they don't need to fight.
Even if just a small squad of fast and tough get through, you've got a real problem.
Siege ain't fast. So, no, they're no threat. Air will get whittled away by Tower defenses, so every attack reduces their capacity to attack.
That's is exactly what DiD is built to stop.
That's what the string of Forts were designed to stop, too, and that hundreds of years ago. Forts protect the garrison, AND ITS MOUNTS. Forts were protection for the horse borne forces that would be YOUR problem. Once you pass those forts, you're blind, deaf, and dumb, and restricted to whatever food you can steal from my people. You may have more forces than my nearest fort, but you're not getting any messages, because I CAN handle a small force for reporting.
This is the way it worked, conceptually. You cross the forts, either attack one or bypass, and I set the signal fires. Or tonight's signal fire doesn't get lit at the right time. Either way, the neighbouring forts know you've crossed the line that day. They light up, and down the line, the lights go on. Each fort sends it's mobile forces in the direction fo trouble. So where once I had a small force in one fort, now I have gathered a large cavalry force that had been spread across all the forts. You outnumbered one Fort, but not them all, and mine are mounted and mobile. Dealing with you from then on, depends specifically on your make up. I may have to call up the various forces garrisoned around the nation, or if you're small and not mounted, the horse could deal with you alone.
[quote[Say you've got a second ring a few more turn-moves in.[/quote]
Why would I want a "ring"? Every city has some defenses. I just wait until you hit one city, which tells me EXACTLY where you are, and all the cities outside two or three turn attack radius shed some defenders, and they congregate as six small armies around you. Scout units fill the circle, and now you can't get out without me knowing where you are, making my intel increasingly superior. What I exactly do depends on overall strategy, and are too numerous to list.
A good DiD strategy is pretty much exactly the opposite of an eggshell.
No, it's still an eggshell. Compare the thickness of the Kursk DiD to the entire size of the USSR. Definitely an eggshell.
Wow, man, you're way off base on what I was saying.
It gets harder as you go in. The deeper the enemy penetrates, the more force you are bringing to bear. Like thick jelly.
And that's expensive. First, your major defenses are not being engaged often, if ever, and so are not leveling. And on the outskirts, you're weak, so those forces die and don't level. Further, your major forces are far from the frontier and have to mobilize before they can do any attacking, whereas forces on the border can launch on the enemy immediately.
Sure, you can go through the first layer or two without much of a problem, but then you slow down, whereas their defenses are just getting started.
That's where I turn Left, and eat away your outer layer for the easy profit. Make you pay for being foolish with your defenses. You're weak outside, so I attack the outside. If I see a major buildup, I run.
Eggshells crack.
Again, not a part of the analogy, but yes, they do and you plan for that. Like I said, I did NOT deploy anyone on any front when I posted that description, so your assumption that I can only think little line of forts/castles stnading there to get sieged because I used the word "eggshell" is Strawman. Defense in Depth is a modern catch phrase for concepts that are ancient. You showed that it is ancient, with your analogy of a castle's defenses. Fight on Outer wall, and fall back to Inner. Lose on Inner, fall back to Keep. Kill in entryway, on the stairs to entry, and from murderholes in the passage to Inner Keep. (I think I'm describing Dover Castle. Not 100% certain... seen a few castles on documentaries recently.))
That's what happened with the French. They built their eggshell and the Germans, like any good army, simply ignored it.
The French KNEW the ML was incomplete and they were desperately trying to build the rest of it during the Phony War. They needed 2 years, unfortunately. But in the end, the maginot Line did it's job. And it wasn't a matter of just "going around", because the Germans ran iinto the lion's share of teh French and English forces that outnumbered the Germans more than 2:1. That was no soft eggshell they drove into, but the massed might of two nations' armies. An eggshell of a different type.
Further, the Maginot Line was a DiD. It wasn't just the massive structure, but also the location of the army bases behind it. Those were mostly emptied to defend the Belgium border during Phony War, though.
They didn't "Find a crack". They fought two armies instead of crossing a line. Conceptually, pre-war, that was stupid.
They found a crack and at that point it was all over but the crying.
Inventing Combined Arms is NOT the same as "finding a crack". You're talking like the Germans didn't fight through two armies to win that part of the war.
And it most certainly was NOT easy. It was brilliant strategy, and a demonstration of tactics learned on mock battlefields with the Soviets in the early 30's. And it could have failed for any number of reasons. The German Panzer 2's and 3's were much weaker than the French tanks, so if some wise officer figured out how to fight, they could have been brought to a screeching halt.
Russia on the other hand, pretty much perfected the DiD. The Germans marched in, but they sure as boop didn't march back out. (Although really, invading Russia in the winter isn't exactly a masterstroke of planning anyway.)
The Soviets lost millions of men learning how to defend against tanks. But you're wrong. The best defenders were the Germans. They made the Allies pay and pay for every yard. Look at the massive delays in Normandy. Only the Canadians made their goals on D-Day, and that against a vicious SS army of late teens led by Russian Front vets.
So no, not a strawman. Defense in Depth is simply not what you were talking about.
Yeah, it was. I was VAGUE. You are developing everything off of your perception of what I "Band" and "eggshell" meant. If all I have to do is use one word and you go off that far, then I'm not taking any heat for this bruhaha.
So I'l reiterate. Compare the thickness of the DiD in Kursk to the entire size of the USSR. Which is thinner? The Soviet line relative to the USSR, or an eggshell relative to the egg?
