ABSTRACT
In medieval days, the seat of power was the castle, which provided protection against marauding knights, rampaging barbarians, rebellious serfs, and all manner of challengers. The castle may not always have occupied the moral high ground that is at issue in the contemporary information and infl uence campaign, but it nearly always occupied the actual high ground. As a defensive system, the castle evolved over time in response to changes in the strategies, tactics and implements of war available to those who would besiege it. Ramparts evolved from earthen mounds to rock walls, and rock walls from simple geometries to complex battlements with overlapping lines of sight to permit the control of all of the potential avenues of attack. Altitude relative to the surrounding territory was its own form of intelligence gathering, as the view from genuinely high and unobstructed ground is wide and clear, so castles tended to be built, where
possible, on hillocks or mountain tops with commanding views of their approaches. But not all fi efdoms are mountainous, and circumstances dictated that many castles needed to fi nd other devices to bolster their defenses. Among these were dry moats, fl ooded moats, fl ooded moats (rumored to be) fi lled with frightful beasts-all channeling access to a few, relatively easily controlled, gated points of entry. Castles were built over springs or around streams to assure access to a water supply, and provided storage space for grains and foodstuffs, fodder and shelter for diverse livestock, barracks and arms for defenders, refuge for supporters fl eeing from invading hordes, and ample supplies of fi rewood, large pots, and oil for boiling and dispensing among the enemy-over the counter, as it were. The walls were high, steep, and as smooth as the local materials and masonry permitted, and laced with small holes or crowned with architectural dentistry to facilitate defensive archery and to protect those who were thus deployed. The territory surrounding the castle was given over, where feasible, to the production of food and other critical materials, and was populated with loyal subjects of the castle’s owner. Among them, and especially in more distant lands, spies were embedded among the locals to provide early warning of any impending threat. Particularly in the later years, it truly was systemic defense in depth. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. It was an iterative process of sorts. Defenses would be erected against all, or most, known threats. Then some brilliant strategist or inventor would come along with a new kind of threat. Laying siege. Establish protected water supplies and store food. Battering rams to penetrate gates. Reinforce the gates and set them at heights or angles that limited their vulnerability. Mound-building to scale earthworks. Build higher walls, of wood. Fire to burn down wooden walls. Build rock walls. Portable ladders to scale rock walls. Boil oil, collect urine and excrement. Tunneling to undermine the walls, divert water supplies, or simply provide an unannounced arrival in the defenders’ midst. Build and fl ood a moat, and possibly a series of defensive tunnels. Archers to span the distance across a moat or a no-man’s land, fi rst with longbows, then with crossbows. Develop protective architecture (slit windows, dental work) in and on the walls. Catapults, and then trebuchets, to knock down all but the stoutest of walls. Cannons to do the same. Give up on castles and fi nd some alternative system of defense. This iterative character of castellar defense revealed itself only slowly over many years, over decades, even over centuries. The pace of travel, of communication, of innovation, of construction, of testing-in short, the pace of history itself-was deliberate, the rate of acceleration minimal. The iterative character of attack and defense in contemporary information and infl uence campaigns, on the other hand, has been greatly compressed in time, as befi ts an age of instantaneous communication. It is-actually quite literally-as the fl icker of a light to the wielding of the quarryman’s chisel. Information, not rocks or arrows; perceptions, not parapets;
relationships, not breastworks. The alternating stages of challenge and defense, the duel of competing messages and frames, may last little more than a single news cycle, and sometimes less. But in both cases, the shaping and evolution of defenses occurs in anticipation of and response to the shifting form of the attack.
