Modern Siege Engines
With the advent of gunpowder, firearms such as the arquebus and cannon—eventually the mortar and artillery—were developed. These weapons proved so effective that fortifications, such as city walls, had to be low and thick, as exemplified by the designs of Vauban.
The development of specialized siege artillery, as distinct from field artillery, culminated during World War I and II. During the First World War, huge siege guns such as Big Bertha were designed to see use against the modern fortresses of the day. The apex of siege artillery was reached with the German Schwerer Gustav gun, a huge 800-mm caliber railway gun, built during early World War II. Schwerer Gustav was initially intended to be used for breaching the French Maginot Line of fortifications, but was not finished in time and (as a sign of the times) the Maginot Line was circumvented by rapid mechanized forces instead of breached in a head-on assault. The long time it took to deploy and move the modern siege guns made them vulnerable to air attack and it also made them unsuited to the rapid troop movements of modern warfare.
Siege weapons are considered obsolete, owing to the effectiveness of aircraft-delivered munitions and cruise missiles which have made defensive area fortifications obsolete. The only cost-effective static defensive structures are now deep bunkers used for military command and control. Even these fixed assets are of questionable value, as it appears that the most survivable command and control of mobile defensive forces (such as modern tactical and strategic aircraft, mechanized cavalry and mechanized infantry) are through decentralized command and the use of mobile command centers.
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Famous quotes containing the words modern, siege and/or engines:
“He was naturally so sensitive, and so kind. But he had the insidious modern disease of tolerance. He must tolerate everything, even a thing that revolted him.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)