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Defence in depth is a military strategy sometimes referred to as elastic defence or deep defence. Military strategy is a National defence policy implemented by Military organisations to pursue desired strategic goals Derived from the Greek Defence in depth seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of an attacker, buying time and causing additional casualties by yielding space. Rather than defeating an attacker with a single, strong defensive line, defence in depth relies on the tendency of an attack to lose momentum over a period of time or as it covers a larger area. A defender can thus yield lightly-defended territory in an effort to stress an attacker's logistics or spread out a numerically superior attacking force. Logistics is the management of the flow of Goods, Information and other resources including Energy and people between the point of origin and the point Once an attacker has lost momentum or is forced to spread out to pacify a large area, defensive counter-attacks can be mounted on the attacker's weak points with the goal being to cause attrition warfare or drive the attacker back to its original starting position. Peace, in the modern usage is a concept defined by the ideal state of relationship as absence of hostility at the international level that of a War. A counterattack This article is about the military strategy For the Israeli-Egyptian conflict see War of Attrition, for the game theoretical model see War of attrition (game The idea of defence in depth is now widely used to describe non-military strategies. A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning

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Military defence in depth

A conventional defence strategy would concentrate all military resources at a front line which, if breached by an attacker, would leave the remaining defenders in danger of being outflanked and surrounded and would leave supply lines communications and command vulnerable. A front line is a line of confrontation in an Armed conflict, most commonly a War. In Military tactics, a flanking maneuver, also called a flank attack, is an attack on the sides of an opposing force Military supply chain management is a cross-functional approach to procuring, producing and delivering products and services The broad

Defence in depth requires that a defender deploy his resources, such as fortifications, field works and military units at and well behind the front line. Fortifications are Military Constructions and Buildings designed for defense in Warfare Humans have constructed defensive works for Fortifications are Military Constructions and Buildings designed for defense in Warfare Humans have constructed defensive works for A military organization is a way of structuring the armed forces of a State as a need to offer Military capability required by the National defence policy Although an attacker may find it easier to breach the more weakly defended front line, as he advances he continues to meet resistance. As he penetrates deeper, the attacker's flanks become vulnerable and should the advance stall, the attacker risks being enveloped.

The defence in depth strategy is particularly effective against an attacker who is able to concentrate his forces and attack a small number of places on an extended defensive line.

Defenders who can fall back to a succession of prepared positions can extract a high price from the advancing enemy while themselves avoiding the danger of being overrun or outflanked. Delaying the enemy advance mitigates the attacker's advantage of surprise and allows time to move defending units to make a defence and to prepare a counter-attack. A counterattack

A well-planned defence in depth strategy will deploy forces in mutually supportive positions and in appropriate roles. For example, poorly trained troops may be deployed in static defences at the front line whereas better trained and equipped troops form a mobile reserve. Successive layers of defence may use different technologies or tactics; for example a row of dragon's teeth may be a problem for tanks but no barrier to infantry while another barrier of wire entanglements has the opposite effects. During World War II the term " dragon's teeth " came to designate square-pyramidal fortifications used to impede the progress of mechanized armies A tank is a tracked, Armoured fighting vehicle designed for Front-line combat which combines Operational mobility and tactical In the Military science of Fortification, wire obstacles are defensive obstacles made from Barbed wire, Barbed tape or Concertina wire Defence in depth may allow a defender to maximise the defensive possibilities of natural terrain and other advantages.

The disadvantages of defence in depth are that it may be unacceptable for a defender to plan to give ground to an attacker. This may be because vital military or economic resources are close to the front line or because yielding to an enemy is unacceptable for political or cultural reasons. In addition, the continuous retreats required by defence in depth require the defender to have a high degree of mobility in order to retreat successfully and the morale to recover from the retreat. Morale, also known as esprit de corps when discussing the morale of a group is an intangible term used for the capacity of people to maintain Belief in

The earliest known example of this came at that Battle of Cannae in 216 B. For the 11th century battle in the Byzantine conquest of the Mezzogiorno, see Battle of Cannae (1018. C. [1]when Hannibal employed this maneuver in order to encircle and destroy 10 Roman Legions all at once resulting the largest single slaughter of Roman troops in the history of the empire.

Later examples of defence in depth might be European hill forts and the development of concentric castles. A hill fort is a fortified refuge or defended settlement A concentric castle (or multiple castle) is a Castle within a castle with two or more concentric rings of Curtain walls and in cases no central In these examples, the inner layers of defence can support the outer layers with missile fire and an attacker must breach each line of defence in turn with the prospect of significant losses, whereas the defenders have the option of falling back to fight again.

More recent examples of defence in depth include the multiple lines of trenches of the First World War, plans for the defence of Britain under threat of German invasion and the Soviet plans for the Battle of Kursk in World War II. World War I (abbreviated WWI; also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All British anti-invasion preparations of World War II entailed a large-scale division of military and civilian mobilization in response to the threat of invasion The Battle of Kursk (Курская битва refers to a series of German and Soviet operations on the Eastern Front of World War II World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including During the Battle of Normandy, Wehrmacht forces utilized the hedgerows of the area to create successive lines of defences to slow the attacking Allies in hopes that reinforcements would arrive. Wehrmacht (literally "defense force" was the name of the unified Armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945 A hedge is a line of closely spaced Shrubs and bushes planted and trained in such a way as to form a barrier or to mark the boundary of an area

Non-military defence in depth

The term defence in depth is now used in many non-military contexts. For example, a defence in depth strategy to fire prevention does not focus all the resources only on the prevention of a fire; instead, it also requires the deployment of fire alarms, extinguishers, evacuation plans, mobile rescue and fire-fighting equipment and even nation-wide plans for deploying massive resources to a major blaze.

Defence in depth may mean engineering which emphasizes redundancy - a system that keeps working when a component fails - over attempts to design components that will not fail in the first place. In Engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the System, usually For example, an aircraft with four engines will be less likely to suffer total engine failure than a single-engined aircraft no matter how much effort goes into making the single engine reliable.

Defence in depth (nuclear engineering)

In nuclear engineering and nuclear safety, defence in depth denotes the practice of having multiple, independent layers of multiple, redundant, and independent safety systems for the single, critical point of failure: the reactor core. Nuclear engineering is the application of the breakdown of atomic nuclei and/or other sub-atomic physics based on the principles of Nuclear physics. See also Nuclear debate Nuclear safety covers the actions taken to prevent Nuclear and radiation accidents or to limit their consequences This helps to reduce the risk that a single failure of a critical system could cause a core meltdown or other catastrophic failure of reactor containment.

Defence in depth (computing)

Likewise, in information security defence in depth represents the use of multiple computer security techniques to help mitigate the risk of one component of the defence being compromised or circumvented. Defense in Depth is an Information Assurance (IA strategy in which multiple layers of defense are placed throughout an Information Technology (IT system Information security means protecting information and information systems from unauthorized access use disclosure disruption modification or destruction This article describes how security can be achieved through design and engineering An example could be anti-virus software installed on individual workstations when there is already virus protection on the firewalls and servers within the same environment. A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or Engineering workstation, is a high-end Microcomputer A firewall is an integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system A server is a Computer dedicated to providing one or more services over a computer network typically through a request-response routine Different security products from multiple vendors may be deployed to defend different potential vectors within the network, helping prevent a shortfall in any one defence leading to a wider failure; also known as a "layered approach". A vector in Computing, specifically when talking about malicious code such as Viruses or worms, is the method that this code uses to propagate A computer network is a group of interconnected Computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics

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External links

In Warfare the hedgehog defence is a military tactic for defending against a mobile armoured attack or Blitzkrieg. Strategic depth is a term in military literature that refers broadly speaking to the distances between the Front lines or battle sectors and the combatants’ industrial core A scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method (possibly more often referred to as a tactic but this is not entirely correct as there is a difference between The culminating point in Military strategy is the point at which a military force no longer is able to perform its operations.
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