5 ms·
The sewer men who changed the war
- pacaro 10y agoThis clearly inspired the early part of "The Proof House" by K J Parker (part 3 of The Fencer Trilogy)
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI just imagine that this was the dream of hundreds or maybe thousands of years of sappers, carried out by 18 men.
- dba7dba 10y agoTunneling in war was first done centuries before WW1. First known incident is from Roman times.
- azernik 10y agoAnd even doing it with explosives in trench warfare wasn't new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Crater
- dalke 10y agoWhich is likely why the article says "an attempt to master the art of mining and reinvent it for the age of the machine gun." Italics mine. The need to master mining in the first place is because "in the belief that siege warfare tactics like this were a thing of the past, the Royal Engineers had wound down their military mining section."
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoWasn't there a bit in the Iliad about sneaking into Troy through a tunnel or ditch? (Here we go, Odysseus and Diomedes steal the Palladium, use a 'secret passage'; apparently not in the official Homer version of the story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_(classical_antiquity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_(classical_antiquity... )
- robterrell 10y agoThe BBC show "Peaky Blinders" includes flashbacks to fighting in the tunnels at the Somme.
- csense 10y agoWould tunnelling robots make military sense in the 21st century?
- Viper007Bond 10y agoNo. We have airplanes now, with precision guided bombs including bunker busters.
- drdeadringer 10y agoI'm imagining a future war where there will be robots bombing robots trying to dig underneath other robots while AIs try cracking each other as well as the robots. All the while, the Humans on either end of the battlefield will be participating in the war as if playing a game. I'm not sure if I want to picture the poor suckers mixed in the middle.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoYou can deny aircraft from an area. A TBM dragging a thermonuclear weapon might be a bit tougher to guard against.
- Viper007Bond 10y agoWith modern seismic detection devices, you'd be able to detect that from great distances. Not to mention those dig very slowly.
- bfuller 10y agoon the small end of asymmetrical warfare, they always make sense