Defence in depth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Defence in depth is a military strategy sometimes also called elastic defence. Defence in depth seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of an attacker, buying time by yielding space. The idea of defence in depth is now widely used to describe non-military strategies.
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[edit] 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 very vulnerable.
Defence in depth strategy requires that a defender deploy his resources, such as fortifications, field works and military units, both at and well behind the front line. Although an attacker may find it easier to breach the more weakly defended front line, as he advances he continues to meet effective resistance. As he penetrates deeper, the attacker's flanks become vulnerable and should the advance stall, the attacker himself 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 military units to make a robust defence and to prepare a counter-attack.
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 highly 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. 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.
Early examples of defence in depth might be European hill forts and the development of concentric castles. 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 lines of trenches of the First World War and plans for the defence of Britain under threat of German invasion in World War II.
[edit] 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 an engineering solution which emphasizes redundancy - a system that keeps working even when a single component fails - over attempts to design components that will not fail in the first place. 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.
[edit] 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. 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. Different security products from multiple vendors may be on different vectors within the network, helping prevent a shortfall in any one defence leading to a wider failure.
