The defense industry has a storied history of doing “big things” beyond fighting wars. The U.S. space program, for example, might be humanity’s defining achievement so far, but without McDonnell Aircraft, Grumman Aircraft Engineering, and North American Aviation, it would still be a dream on the drawing board. Before that, Stone & Webster was at the heart of the Manhattan Project, ushering in the atomic age. Koss Construction build the runways for the B-29 Superfortress, and then built the first miles of the Interstate Highway System.
Much of the modern world is defined by military achievements and built by the army or defense industry. The history surrounding us often goes unnoticed, or seems so impossibly large that it is rendered an abstraction. The occasional reflection on these big things is justified—they were once more than illustrations for postcards or fuel for comic books, but rather were essential to the survival of civilizations.
Napoleon’s Old Stomping Ground
The Kremlin in Moscow exists in that same nebulous mental plane as The Pentagon or Hollywood. It’s a structure, yes, but we tend to consider it more as a notion – the White House as the seat of power in the United States, or Scotland Yard in London. But the Kremlin was originally a fortress. Kremlin, in fact, literally translates to “fortress in a city.” The Mongols (who we’ll see more of in a moment) actually destroyed the original Moscow fort in 1237. It was rebuilt a century later, and improved and reinforced over time. Cathedrals, towers, and palaces were later erected inside the Kremlin’s walls. The glory days wouldn’t last. Though it survived a siege by Genghis Khan’s grandson, it was eventually conquered by the Poles and by 1773, the Kremlin was abandoned. It returned to fashion under Catherine the Great, who ordered the construction of a residence there for her, but readers of War and Peace know what happened next.
What Readers of War and Peace Know
Napoleon Bonaparte built the largest empire in Europe since Rome, and then he turned his Grande Armée east. Russia was a ripe target for conquest. Upon invasion, however, he ran into a weird problem: by and large, the Russians would never stick around to actually fight a big, decisive battle. Every time Napoleon moved for a city or strategic asset, before he could arrive the Russians would burn their city to the ground and run further inland. This left little for the French army to seize, especially in the way of provisions. Napoleon marched on, supplies running thin, his soldiers growing thinner, his horses dying by the bushel. By the time he reached Moscow, 200,000 French soldiers were lost to exhaustion.
Still, you might think: at least he’d get his battle in the Russian capital. Napoleon thought the same thing! But once again, the Russians packed up and left town before the first metaphorical shot was fired. The French army seized the abandoned Russian capital, and Napoleon ordered the Kremlin leveled. It burned for days, but was saved at the last moment by rain. (Weather, of course, would later lead to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat at Waterloo.) Eventually Napoleon would have to retreat from Russia or risk utter defeat and capture.
Under the Soviet Union, the Kremlin would again become the seat of government power, and remains so today. That isn’t bad for a little fort that just about everyone managed to set on fire at least once.
The First “Undisclosed Location”
Standing on the northern bank of the Tiber River—prominent and unmistakable on the Vatican skyline—is Castel Sant’Angelo, a majestic, walled stone building suggestive of the Coliseum as crowned with a castle. The bronze statue of the archangel Michael, patron saint of warriors, which looms above the building, reveals a hint of its one-time purpose. It is a fortress, and is connected to Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican by way of the Passetto de Borgo, a reinforced tunnel. Castel Sant’Angelo was where popes sought refuge during times of strife and during the sack of Rome in 1527. It was the fourteenth-century equivalent of Vice President Cheney’s undisclosed location.
The Vatican’s Defense Contractors
Castel Sant’Angelo wasn’t always a fortress though. When the first bricks were laid for the building in 123 AD, it was to be a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian and his family—a role it served for him and other emperors over the century that followed. Around 400 AD, the military-minded noticed that the mausoleum would make a pretty good fortress, and renovations began in earnest. It was, perhaps, too little too late. (Or, depending on your timeline, just right: a millennium too early.) The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the empire fell in 476, and the Goths came back in 537. (In that last siege, many of the mausoleum’s statues were weaponized, hurled down onto the invading hordes below.) Today Castel Sant’Angelo is a museum.
So who guarded the papal fortress? Defense contractors. Specifically, the Swiss Guard, which was then comprised of soldiers of fortune—the most famous, in fact, of their day—making it the prototype for Academi, née Blackwater.
The Newest Great Wall
Europe and Eastern Europe aren’t alone in undertaking mammoth fortification projects that would define entire cultures. When we look at China, it’s pretty clear that its defense industry is playing catch-up after decades of government opacity and its previous nationalization (though Chinese reforms are bearing fruit). Where the Middle Kingdom has wanted for a nimble commercial defense sector, it has compensated with one indisputable trump card: manpower. When China wants to do something, it can throw a million people at the problem. And if a million people stand in a project’s way, those people can be brushed aside as a trivial percentage of the populace. Consider the 1.4-mile-long Three Gorges Dam, one of the great construction feats of the modern world. Some reports place the total manpower that went into the dam’s construction at 250,000. To accommodate the dam’s 410-mile reservoir, 1.3 million people were displaced. (That’s the populations of Boston, New Orleans, and Cincinnati—combined.) Today the dam protects 15 million people who would otherwise risk the notorious floods of the Yangtze River, and reportedly generates as much energy as 18 nuclear power plants.
The Original Great Wall
When you get down to it, a dam is just a big wall, and nobody knows big walls like China. To stand on the Great Wall is to marvel at the impossible. It’s height, length, and architecture suggests less “wall” than 5,500-mile-long castle. Up mountains, across rivers, and down plains, the wall—perhaps more accurately described as a wide rampart or land bridge—feels as boundless and determined as the country that built it. Massive stone towers are interspersed, and centuries ago soldiers were quartered there and on alert for the Mongols. The towers also served as a communications network—think the warning beacons of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings. The Great Wall of China is without question the most astonishing fortification ever constructed.
So who built it? Everyone—soldiers, farmers, commoners, and criminals. Not just the defense industry, but every industry. The original wall, constructed two millenniums ago, involved the efforts of somewhere on the order of a million people over 20 years. The wall was later reconstructed during the Ming Dynasty (12th-15th century CE), this time taking 200 years. Because of the obvious danger associated with building the wall (not from invaders, but from quarrying and carrying massive stone bricks up steep and jagged mountainsides), an astonishing number of people were killed during the wall’s construction. Ming records indicate that one person died for every three feet of wall built, and it is often called the longest cemetery in the world.
The Second Superpower
Was the Great Wall worth it? It wasn’t impenetrable. Though 1 million soldiers guarded it during the Ming Dynasty, as Genghis Khan observed, “A wall is only as strong as the men who guard it.” Still, imagine that you’re an invading army (not unlike the French army in Russia). You’ve crossed the border into the territory of the most powerful empire in the known world. You’ve traversed mountains and forded rivers. You’re hungry and exhausted, as are your horses. And then suddenly you come up against this giant, fortified, guarded wall in the middle of nowhere extending forever in both directions. Psychologically, that’s got to do a number on you.
In the end, the Roman, Portuguese, French and Ottoman empires perished, while China remains massive and booming, standing on the threshold of superpower status. Having that wall probably didn’t hurt.
