Architecture as a helpful metaphor

Corporation to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East, where “swarming” — the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like “clouds” operating in small, loosely coordinated groups — has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with each other in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Which brings us back to the barrier Israel is building. Compared to Navez’s dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a contemporary counterpart to the Roman “limes,” the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes — to separate civilization from barbarity.

We do not know whether the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal even know of General Navez, but there is a connection between the paper’s criticism of the Department of Homeland Security and Navez’s criticism of Israel’s barrier. In an editorial titled ‘The Maginot Department,’ the WSJ editorialist offers several examples to highlight the many problem the mammoth department has faced since its inception. The editorial then ads:

Such examples, of course, are merely anecdotal, and it would be unfair to tar the work of the DHS or FBI based on these shortcomings. Nor is it right to suggest that things aren’t capable of improvement; DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff might well prove the man for the job. But the points aptly illustrate the underlying problem with our collective homeland security apparatus, which is that no government bureaucracy is ever going to be the kind of well-oiled machine that can reliably and effectively prevent domestic terrorist threats. And this is to say nothing of natural disasters.

Instead, what we have is a kind of antiterror version of France’s pre-World War II Maginot Line; an expensive, highly visible static defense against a nimble adversary. Congress loves it because it offers the chance to throw money at domestic constituencies, and liberals love it because it allows them to sound hawkish on terror without having to fire a shot. The rest of us, however, need to be realistic about its abilities.

In the view of General Navez and the Wall Street Journal, the Israeli defensive barrier, the Maginto Line, and DHS are all large, cumbersome, static, hierarchical, rigidly structured, expansive, and inefficient means for fighting a war which should be fought by a nimble, flexible, creative, decentralized, mobile, and imaginative approach.

Fighting terrorism is war of the present and future. It is a problem that cannot be dealt with by building concrete or institutional monuments. “We wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor.” Indeed, it is.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times