3
3
0
Are walls useless? The author makes a couple claims which I'm not sure he answers. First, "But by setting up a barrier, a wall instigates a contest between attacker and defender..." Really? The Mongol hordes never attacked China UNTIL they put up the Great Wall? Second, "Walls don’t fail gracefully." Again, you can find examples where walls failed catastrophically (Maginot Line), and others where they stood and met their purpose for hundreds of years until the threat or the defender simply no longer existed (Great Wall, Hadrian's Wall). I think he's closer to the truth when he says we need to think of walls as filters (or inhibitors) rather than absolute or single-point solutions to a threat.
The Wall is the Wall: Why Fortresses Fail
Posted from warontherocks.com
Strategy
Defense
Homeland Security
Immigration
Posted 7 y ago
Responses: 1
7
7
0
I don't think we're talking about "Fortress America". Nor is President Trump's proposal akin to the "Iron Curtain". The Iron Curtain was designed to keep citizens in, more like a prison. However, I do like the image of a border wall as a filter. That seems more to the point. What most people don't realize is that America is not like the rest of the world. A good citizen in America is not the same as a good citizen elsewhere, and allowing people to come and go as they please is to dilute Americanism. In every other nation (and I'm prepared to defend what follows) a good citizen obeys. They obey their ruler, their king, their mullah, their parliament, their sovereign. In America, We the People are sovereign and we take responsibility for ourselves. Indeed, how can you trust anyone with freedom of choice and action who is not prepared to take responsibility for those choices and actions, and their consequences.
(7)
(0)
Col Joseph Lenertz
Thanks Jack, very well put. It makes me proud to think we are different, and the best of us still adhere to the idea that we are sovereign as individual citizens, and responsible for our own actions and our own lives.
(2)
(0)
Read This Next
Continue with Facebook 
Continue with Google