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A bastion in naval strategy is a heavily-defended area of water in which friendly naval forces can operate safely. Typically, that area will be partially enclosed by friendly shoreline, defended by naval mines, monitored by sensors, and heavily patrolled by surface, submarine, and air forces.
Soviet and Russian Naval Bastions [link]
The bastion became an important strategy for the ballistic missile submarine fleets of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Barents Sea was made a bastion for the Soviet Red Banner Northern Fleet, and the Sea of Okhotsk for the Soviet Pacific Fleet, both of which remain important to the Russian Northern Fleet and the Russian Pacific Fleet.
The Soviet Union had (and, of course, Russia now has) limited access to the world's oceans: her northern coast is ice-bound at least the majority of the year, and access to the Atlantic requires transiting the GIUK gap; much of her eastern coast is also ice-bound and requires moderately close approaches to either Alaska or Japan; travel from her southern ports involves transiting first the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and then either the Strait of Gibraltar or the Suez Canal.
The Soviet Navy originally attempted to directly contest with the navies of NATO for control of the blue-water ocean. As the Cold War progressed, however, it became clear that the Soviets could not win a toe-to-toe fight in the deep water, and the information sold to the Soviets by the Walker spy ring in 1980s made it clear that the ballistic missile submarines, in particular, were very unlikely to be able to carry out their nuclear attack missions.
Realizing their vulnerability, the Soviets adopted a two-level approach. They armed their older, noisier, and less reliable "second generation" ballistic missile submarines with shorter-range nuclear weapons and deployed them as close as possible to the United States. Soviet submarine K-219, which suffered a catastrophic explosion and fire off Bermuda on 3 October 1986, was one such boat. Meanwhile, they used the information provided by Walker to build both dramatically improved attack boats such as the Akula-class, as well as more-survivable "boomers" such as the Typhoon-class armed with increasingly accurate and long-range missiles. Then they held those "third-generation" boats close to home, patrolling only near and under the Arctic ice cap. To secure the bastions, they also built large numbers of Sovremennyy- and Udaloy-class destroyers, whose primary mission was anti-submarine barrier and picket patrol.
The United States Navy practiced penetrating these bastions; one such attempt resulted in the 20 March 1993 collision between USS Grayling (SSN-646) and K-407 Novomoskovsk, a Delfin-class ballistic missile submarine. The collision was inadvertent and potentially catastrophic, but did demonstrate that US attack submarines were able to get rather near their intended prey.
Chinese Naval Bastions [link]
There are indications that the Chinese PLAN is adopting the concept as well, fortifying the Bohai Sea for use by its growing number of ballistic missile submarines[1].
United States Naval Bastions [link]
In the sense that a bastion is set up to protect the naval forces themselves rather than a land feature (e.g. the Panama Canal), the United States Navy has never made significant use of the bastion concept.
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Bastion
A bastion (also named bulwark, derived from the Dutch name "bolwerk"), is an angular structure projecting outward from the curtain wall of an artillery fortification. The fully developed bastion consists of two faces and two flanks with fire from the flanks being able to protect the curtain wall and also the adjacent bastions. It is one element in the style of fortification dominant from the mid 16th to mid 19th centuries. Bastion fortifications offered a greater degree of passive resistance and more scope for ranged defense in the age of gunpowder artillery compared with the medieval fortifications they replaced.
Effectiveness
Bastions differ from medieval towers in a number of respects. Bastions are lower than towers and are normally of similar height to the adjacent curtain wall. The height of towers, although making them difficult to scale, also made them easy for artillery to destroy. A bastion would normally have a ditch in front, the opposite side of which would be built up above the natural level then slope away gradually. This glacis shielded most of the bastion from the attacker's cannon while the distance from the base of the ditch to the top of the bastion meant it was still difficult to scale.
Bastion (Nanaimo)
The Bastion, also known as the Nanaimo Bastion, is an historic octagonal shaped bastion or fortification located at 98 Front Street in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. The Hudson's Bay Company, which then held a royal lease on all of what was then the Colony of Vancouver Island, built it between 1853 and 1855 to defend its coal mining operations in Nanaimo. Square logs were used for the walls of the three-storey building whose third floor extends out over the lower floors. It has been called "Nanaimo's premier landmark", because of its shape and its "high visibility from both land and sea." In 1891 and again in 1979 it was moved a short distance for historic preservation purposes.
During the Summer of 2010, the Bastion was torn apart, to renew rotting boards, and stabilizing steel beams. The director of the event said that they were 'Making a historic movement'. On December 12, 1985, the city of Nanaimo designated it a local heritage site. Today the Bastion is under the supervision of the Nanaimo District Museum and is open to visitors during the summer. The Nanaimo Museum has heritage interpreters in costume on-site, and also hosts a daily cannon firing at noon during the summer months.
Bastion (video game)
Bastion is an action role-playing video game produced by independent developer Supergiant Games and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. In the game, the player controls "the Kid" as he moves through floating, fantasy-themed environments and fights enemies of various types. It features a dynamic voiceover from a narrator, and is presented as a two-dimensional game with an isometric camera and a hand-painted, colorful art style. Bastion's story follows the Kid as he collects special shards of rock to power a structure, the Bastion, in the wake of an apocalyptic Calamity.
The game was built over the course of two years by a team of seven people split between San Jose and New York City. They debuted the game at the September 2010 Penny Arcade Expo, and it went on to be nominated for awards at the 2011 Independent Games Festival and win awards at the Electronic Entertainment Expo prior to release. Bastion was published in July 2011 for Xbox Live Arcade and in August 2011 through digital distribution for Windows on Steam. Supergiant Games made it available as a browser game for Google Chrome in December 2011. It was released for Mac OS X via the Mac App Store in April 2012 and directly followed by a SteamPlay update in early May 2012 which allows the version purchased via Steam to be playable on both Mac OS X and Windows. A version for iPad was released in August 2012. In April 2015 it was released for the PlayStation 4. Bastion's soundtrack was produced and composed by Darren Korb, and a soundtrack album was made available for sale in August 2011.
