Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

True. A restive population or rebels can hinder rebuilding efforts depending on how active the resistance is. Then again as part of the long term conquest providing the infrastructure support to rebuild would be pretty important.

So, in the context of the story I'm working on, orbital bombardment options are limited both by enemy ground countermeasures and a desire to avoid civilian casualties, so the invading force mainly uses kinetic strikes, large conventional bombs, and some "clean" tactical nukes.

For, my original question, your advice and some basic calculations put my invading force at 30,000 divisions, with each division being the equivalent of 5,000 men (The invaders do have some significant qualitative advantages) While extremely costly, the long term occupation will be unusually easy, and the invaders' economy is on a total war footing, so the logistical cost isn't going to stop anyone.

I'd say you'd need the economies of multiple planets in order to capture one planet. 150 mil people is an unpreccedented number for an army. Better use cryo-pods because feeding them is going to be a nightmare.

edited 6th Aug '16 12:19:38 PM by Belisaurius

Captain; That is a pretty damn big army. If we are going by Earth standards today that is around 2.5 Earth's worth of military bodies.

The sheer scale reminds me of someone's Galatic Invasion carrier that got hashed out in the other thread. The spitball estimate was it could drown the Earth's entire air forces in one fell swoop by combat craft numbers alone.

Ah Tuffel, it doesn't matter, Captain_Cactus' occupation is doom, DOOOOMED!

And I'll tell you why:

A resistance needs:

• Will: the will to kill their enemies (in this case the 3,000 divisions that are now occupying their planet)
• Space: places to hide and regroup.
• Time: time to train, rest, reset and make allies.

An occupying force needs to disrupt that triangle. Now they can cover the world in soldiers, but that just dilutes their power.

The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.” Robert Taber

"...the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win." Henry Kissinger

Even an army of 3,000 divisions (a 150 million troops) can't cover an entire planet. There will be cities with a small garrison, rural towns with no "imperial presence".

The insurgents will strike supply route to deny the occupier movement. Blow up food shipments and hospitals. Attack the power grid-because, if the occupier breaks it, he needs to set a new one up. Attack the phlebotinum mines, because troops make poor miners, the insurgents sabotage the works and kill collaborators. Street patrols are hit with IED's, VIP's get sniped as soon as they greet a crowd.

Soon the occupiers are afraid to leave the big cities without a large presence, taking that away from the rural areas. Any gaps in coverage give space to the insurgency, any pauses in the campaign create time for the insurgents to rest. Supplies? They steal from the occupiers-no security is perfect. Unless you have vat grown Designer Babies, troops will sneak off for some "alone time", or a smoke break. Or fall asleep at their post. Or get their throats slit by angry villagers tired of their food and labor going to the troops that are shooting their friends and families. Even with 150 million troops, not everyone is elite, not every soldier can be trained as super spies or assassins. There are going to be a lot of Soldiers at the Rear: vehicle drivers, military police, guards, supply, medics, mechanics, clerks and other odd jobs that will be easy pickings.

Now those natives on the planet that hate the invaders and want to kill them are the easy ones. You, the occupier, Kill Em All. There are those who work with the invaders and those who stand to profit. Why these guys are a boon!

It's the indifferent, the fence sitters, those who think they are too powerless to do anything.

Piss them off, take away the water, power, food, roads, show that you can't control the countryside? They join the insurgency. And they bring friends. They talk about the brutality of the occupation, of how they lost their homes and friends and family. And others listen.

Col. Hans Landa: "Now, my job dictates that I must have my men enter your home and conduct a thorough search before I can officially cross your family's name off my list, and if there are any irregularities to be found, rest assured they will be. That is unless you have something to tell me that makes the conducting of a search unnecessary. I might add, also, that any information that makes the performance of my duties easier will not be met with punishment. Actually, quite the contrary, it will be met with reward. And that reward will be your family will cease to be harassed in any way by the German military during the rest of our occupation of your country. You are sheltering enemies of the state, are you not?"

And here's the rub, no matter what the orders are, your 3,000 divisions are standing on someone else's property. Entering their homes, their places of work, their businesses and places of worship.

Get brutal and you just poured fuel on the fire of the insurgency. Too soft and the insurgency can claim that they have you on the run.

Gul Dukat: I should have killed every last one of them! I should have turned their planet into a graveyard the likes of which the galaxy has never seen! I should have killed them all...

Elite soldiers grow weary of being policemen, regular troops tire of bleeding in the streets and elites as commanders shuttle from post of post. Commanders lose focus trying to keep units sharp while fighting an enemy that blends in the shadows.

Fighting the planet's military is only the beginning. After the war, every member of the planet's population that can pick up a weapon will be thirsty for the blood of the occupier. And the occupation force will be tempted to use brutal tactics to get the job done.

And just going by kill counts and territory occupied isn't enough. That's a fools errand. The occupiers need to win over the populace, not mow them down. Try telling that to platoons that see heavy losses day in and day out.

The trick then, is for the commanders of that 3,000 division force to charm away other star systems. Get their enemies on board with the occupation. Make sure no other species will sell to them. Scare away, bribe away and charm away the smugglers and pirates that would provide arms and goods to the planet. Make sure nothing outside comes in.

Then divide the cities from the countryside: when the city is a hotbed of discontent, make nice with the rural folk. When the countryside is angry, be nice to the cities. The indifferent need a reason to stay on the sidelines, sure stormtroopering your way into people's houses sounds like a good idea on paper, but it's better to have some natives on your side. Trading with the locals instead of seizing their Green Rocks wins over those the insurgency needs.

But it's an uphill battle, occupation troops make poor peacemakers and many commanders will be tempted to skim from the occupation. And sooner or latter the occupation must end. Either the occupation will cease to be an occupation and the 3,000 divisions leave or they are given one hell of a bloody nose after decades of fighting and they leave with their tail between their legs.

edited 7th Aug '16 10:33:22 AM by TairaMai

Solution then: Don't fight with armies. Fight with merchants. Or even better: fight by using luxuries. Mining corporation are pretty good at this; at least that wass their portrayal in my country.

Taira: We have covered that a thousand times and you constantly exaggerate it. Once more for the record Guerilla movements fail all the damn time for a large variety of reasons. They have a pretty ugly track record of getting wiped out, just quitting, or even the public who really isn't interested in resisting turning on them. Even then going by the Captain's lay out for the story they aren't doomed to fail as the story already holes several of your requirements.

The US surge in Iraq was successful because commanders were able to get those who were fed up with the fighting on their side. Most of the insurgents were more interested in killin' and not really interested in a unified Iraq.

And what is on Mozambique's flag T-hound? It ain't a plow I'll tell you that. From Vietnam to Algeria, a lot of armed resistance movements did win (of course they also lost quite a bit as well).

Now an invader on a planet succeeds in doin' what that planet's artists and politicians fail to do: unite the factions. Of course their unifying agenda is "occupiers off our planet".

Captain_Cactus' invasion force should have the propaganda corps give the And Then What? speech to the resistance. Taking a planet is much easier than running it.

Like I said, charm away the allies and divide the planet's population. Just sitting on the plant after the last shot is fired just makes you Space Dubya, saying "We beat the rebels" as they blow up an orbiting drydock....

RBomber, Marry me..., you hit the nail on the head. Rather than be Space Hitler and suck the planet dry, the invaders can show up with a merchant "army" and buy the resources as low, low prices. Carrot and stick approach, don't want to play ball? We have 3,000 divisions that will stomp on your planet.

Merchants can charm away the rules and the economic class of the cities, they have a reason to carry medical supplies and goods that would make the rural population stop and think about fighting. Regular troops are all We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill, merchants would want peace. Makes for a good balance sheet.

There will always be come faction or another that doesn't want the aliens on the planet. The trick is to isolate them. Deny them the space, take away the will of the people, break the Guerilla "triangle". Rebels have the will to endure more losses than the occupiers. The key then is to dissuade the populace from agreeing with them, to "drain the sea" the rebels are swimming in.

Just dropping in on the planet drives up the price of peace but makes fighting (even a resistance) look cheap. The goal is to flip the script and lower the price of peace and make an insurgency look very costly from every angle. To the point that even the most die hard rebels will give up or leave.

edited 21st Aug '16 11:37:22 PM by TairaMai

Taira: There are several things you are leaving out. Like every truly successful Guerilla group that won was backed by an actual army. The VC were back stopped by the NVA and Soviet support. They still got effectively wiped out. If the there had been no NVA there that would have been it. Afghanistan still has US troops kicking around and there is still the US government backed leadership. Half of the insurgents there are busy fighting each other half of the time. Even in the history of the US it took French and American troops rather then pure guerilla efforts.

Adding rebuilding of what you smash after the fact tends to convince most of the public to leave you alone so you will fix it and undermines local resistance quite a bit.

I'll marry you...

Anyway, it all depends on the larger context. If there is an outside source of military aid, an insurgency can keep going forever in spite of high casualties. By itself, however, a resistance movement is unlikely to defeat an occupying military force. At least, going by Earth history.

Or, as history also shows, most successful occupiers and invaders are the ones who can use local elements to their advantage. Social stratification, luxuries, rivalries between factions, local common laws....

VOC doesn't win by having bigger guns, they win by selling bigger guns to greedy/ paranoid locals, by having their deed as payments.

And even then, occupiers need to balance their attitude with locals; be, at least, consistent. If you want to be chummy with them, make them your equal. If not, makes a strict segregation system that strict on all factions involved, with each factions should contribute something.

Very good points from both of you.

I agree with T-hound. A successful occupation is one that involves the locals and rebuilds the infrastructure. Just building a widget or paving a road is not enough. The locals have to see that it's for their own good as much as it lets the occupiers move around faster and/or keep their lights on.

Insurgents are constantly challenging the legitimacy of the occupation. By setting up infrastructure projects that benefit the locals and involving them, the insurgency loses the argument by blowing it up.

There are outside allies and local allies that insurgents need to be successful, the invading force must charm both away. Just a planetary blockage won't be enough, especially since the enemies of the invaders will pull and Enemy Mine and arm the insurgents. By charming the outsiders, the cost of smuggling arms and supplies goes up.

And by charming the locals, the invaders "drain the swap".

I'm not going to detail my entire story here, but suffice it to say that the invaded power is basically the epitome of an inefficient fascist state. Since they're basically a Vestigial Empire that has only just begun to lose physical territory and, for the most part, has done a horrendous job with internal affairs, the will to conduct an insurgency is basically nonexistent amongst the populace.

It has happened before in history. Where the populace begins to believe that maybe things will be better. As as they are of course.

If you can, basically, convince the leaders to open shop there, then, depending on invader's merchant culture and your timetable, you may don't really need massive, costly invasion. You just need to be friendly on majority of locals while make sure intellegence and most leaders stay blind, deaf, and drunk (read: be generous with bling and wine and other things).

VOC and IEC do that all the time.

So... it was WWII?

VOC: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie and EIC: East India Company.

So I've been thinking about my Mecha'verse and how one location would deal with a sudden war.

Mars is not a nice place to live, It supposedly underwent a revolution years ago but really that was switching out one set of dictators for another. Now the status is that human life is worth little, the aristocracy generally don't give a flip, and the only reason the Federation doesn't clamp down is thanks to political issues and resource trading.

There are rebellion and guerilla movements on Mars attempting to fight for freedom from this and to correct the mistakes of the past.

Now, I am wondering how Mars would handle the Federation suddenly sending in forces without the entire thing becoming a curbstomp.

... You don't invade planets with infantry...

Plan 7: Land on an airless rock. Set up a production line using von-neuman methods. Manufacture 20 billion drones the size of wasps. Solar powered, poison stinger, networked and sensor capable, very rudimentary ai.

Drop them onto the planet, have them chase down people without 2 drones in attendance, then just hang around them. Attack a drone, get stung. Attack members of the occupation, get stung, and the footage gets reviewed and whoever put you up to it gets stung. (it's a panopticon. That means an absurd amount of data to watch in real time... but you don't need to, you can just unravel and kill the entire chain of command whenever someone actually strikes at you. Not perfect security, but perfect retribution. Also infallible criminal justice if you want it.) Ect. Collateral damage to infrastructure: Nil. Collateral damage to people collaborating with the occupation? Also nil. Heck, you can trivially mark individuals as "untouchable". This scheme took me seven minutes to think up and it needs technology barely more advanced than what we currently have.

edited 10th Aug '16 12:27:44 PM by Izeinsummer

I hate to tell you but you need infantry one way or another. You need human interaction to actually conquer some place.

edited 10th Aug '16 12:35:15 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Wouldn't the sudden removal of everyone in power without anyone watching over or coming in leave a power vacuum?

What stops the enemy from nuking the drones as they hit atmo?

Plus the important thing here. What makes for interesting storytelling?

If the Federation could come in and just displace the mars authority with AI controlled drones with it being a total afterthought. Why didn't they do that earlier? Why even bother with the Real Politik then?

-You don't drop them in one package obviously. Bundles of a hundred, independent vectors.

You need to have orbital superiority to do this. Otherwise, yes, they just get blown out of space. But you can't land an army without having that either, so..

To avoid having to deal with civil disobedience? The drone panopticon isn't smart enough to stop people doing work-to-rule protests and the like.