The 1973 Arab Israeli War - the last symmetrical battle to be fought between state armies of relatively equal force - saw the collapse of this last fortified line of defence. The last of the fortified lines to have gone the path of a fantasy of eternal defence, and then to collapse, was the Israeli Bar-Lev Line, built on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. Their surprise collapse turned them into giant archaeological monuments to the absurdity of standing still in battle, and to the belief in eternal territorial control. With the increase in the ability of armies for rapid maneuver, concentration of forces, and air-ground integration, these lines were easily by-passed or pierced through. Parallel to it from the west was laid the French Maginot Line, designed to delay the Wehrmacht's westward Blitzkrieg while French reserves are drafted, and lastly the German Atlantic Wall, designed to defeat an Allied invasion of the continent along the Atlantic coast. The German West Wall was designed to hold off the French Army while the Wehrmacht was to occupy territories on the east.
The post-WWI strategic doctrine that relied heavily on the principles of linear defence solidified into three major fortification systems - two were built along the volatile German-French border. They proved that shovels and barbed wires could become strategic weapons capable of indefinitely paralyzing the movement of two opposing coalition armies. The trenches of the First World War were barriers on a continental scale, stretched along hundreds of kilometers. Borders were initially fortified to control the movement of armies, but later used to regulate the movement of goods, labor, information, wealth, and diseases into the body of the state. With the complete mechanization of warfare in the twentieth century, and the relatively symmetrical power maintained across borders between similarly armed national and allied armies, defence was conceptualized no longer as a local practice, such as city walls and country forts, but as immense linear constructions amassed along the edges of the national space. If borders are nothing but abstract lines denoting the edges of jurisdictions, barriers make them concrete.
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