Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Tactical: Not pants down but the threat is clear and they have enough time to try and unite. There is enough knowledge at hand from any number of sources that they are not facing a single incursion point but a globally based incursion. They won't be building enough weapons but they may have just enough time to take what humanity has and lash it together into a united front.

Given the invaders likely don't care about borders what do you do if a force is sitting across more then one nations borders? Who takes the ball then?

At that point, I'd say fuck international law, and whoever steps up and takes initiative gets the right to lead.

Aka, Asskicking Equals Authority.

How do you ensure cooperation and coordination then? You want to minimize the competitive dick waving as much as possible to make sure everyone is hitting as best as they can. That means coordination of some sort.

You cant, the simple fact is that even working together, people are going to capatalize on it for dickwaving.

Its kind of human nature.

You can minimize the dick waving competition which is what I am looking at. That is why we have things like chains of command in the military in the first place.

edited 26th Aug '16 4:58:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Tuefel inadverdedly making the excellent case that a United Earth military is pretty much a pipe dream

It is a pretty damn daunting task. It isn't impossible just difficult to figure out how to do it. How do you get a Russian General to play nice with the American and Chinese Generals for example when tackling an enemy force that none of them alone could handle on their own in a particular location.

"When faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."

I mean, if we can't put aside our egos and dickwaving for a goddamn alien invasion, then we deserve to be wiped out.

True enough but how to organize it. Going in with everyone doing their own thing is just as likely to cause chaos and trouble for your side as theirs.

How are worldwide humanitarian efforts organized? Maybe we could take what works from there?

It's not hard if no one knows where the aliens are going to land. We just all agree that whoever doesnt get stomped on comes to the aid of anyone who does. You ensure this by integrating the supply/logistics/transportation system ahead of time, so that no matter where they land, the humans have a large mobile force ready to go support the defenders. You need at least one semi-developed alliance member on each continent, which isn't implausible. NATO + the BRIC countries would do it (everyone else is basically too weak and small to help much anyway). For example, if it's Brazil that ends up ground zero, we need to arrange enough infrastructure ahead of time that some portion of the integrated mobile force can move to Brazil very quickly. Given the likely technological advantage the aliens will have, this is probably going to have to rely on an extensive network of tunnels and large cargo submarines.

Okay I've been thinking about the Fighter-Launching Sequence. Well, the more nitty gritty. Most of them have it where the fighters are catapulted into the void, like on Aircraft Carriers, however some have it where the pilots simply take off on their own as soon as they turn the engines on and fly out through whatever barrier that keeps the atmosphere inside the ship.

Wouldn't you want to eventually get to where the pilots can take off individually in the event of the ship is caught with its pants down? I'd like to think some of the launch bays might be too damaged to launch safely or is there a much more practical reason to keep launch bays instead

Some of space carriers in fiction have the fighters attach to the ship like limpets or remora and then just simply drop off and fly off on their own that way.

Launch bays would have the advantage of protecting the fighters within from collisions with debris or other ships or whatnot, enemy fire, EMP and other radiation damage (natural or otherwise), and a host of other things.

Basically all the advantages below deck and land based hangars have in reality.

Hello again, everybody. Recently, I've been trying to deal with a dilemma. I'm aware of the fact that super soldiers are, in reality, not even remotely as good an investment of your defence budget as the media makes them out to be, and yet writing military sci-fi about super soldiers is so damn fun, so how can you possibly justify writing a realisitc story where there are several different varieties of the bloody things running around? So far, I've decided that everybody who uses super soldiers actually uses them for unrelated to warfare reasons - the local anti-anti-utopia fields them out of humanitarian concerns (if you're going to make Joe Conscript go into battle, you might as well use your taxpayers' money to turn him into a fearless unstoppable death machine first), the Free Planet Alliance's "Transhuman Warrior" program is primarily a massive cash cow for their military–industrial complex that occasionally churns out another batch of Captain Americas that attract disproportionate amounts of media attention but are actually too few in number to really matter, the Chang-Viatsky Union keeps pumping money into their "Defender of The Realm" project mostly because their current leader wants to use it as a publicity stunt to win back the crowd after his predecessor's disastrous economic reforms and the various Sovereign Planets of the Gulf run their unique but inevitably nightmarish and disastrous in equal measure "experiments" because they are ruled by whacked-out tinpot dictators who read Superman comics when they were little and wouldn't recognise rational decision making if it bit them in the ass. Does that sound plausible?

About the only military use of low rate production super soldiers I can think of that makes military sense is for Special Forces or other high risk type military careers like SARS and Para Rescue. Just like any other military asset it isn't simply having it and/or having it in numbers but in how you use what you have.

What if it doesn't make military sense? What if the supersoldiers, instead of the "loss of humanity" or what have you, are forced to deal with the understanding that they don't actually mean that much, after years of propaganda telling them that they are the dog's bollocks?

edited 17th Sep '16 2:11:40 PM by KnitTie

There is actually a couple of sci-fi books and series that covers that.

For the COBRA series they send them to colonize a hostile world. Red Liners does something similar.

What I'm going for is that the only ones to make super soldiers work are the Lįį (that's a long nasal "ee"), the anti-anti-utopians, and even then the reason why their transhumans don't suck like the rest is because they have a much better in general military in the same way the Israelis have a much better in general military than the Arabs.

edited 17th Sep '16 3:12:01 PM by KnitTie

I would read that.

Well just run with that. Everyone else is trying to imitate their efficacy but they lack the experience to pull it off. Sooner or later though someone is going to ask is this really worth it beyond the propaganda? Even the US has axed a lot of programs that turned out to simply not be worth the huge cost despite propaganda and other soft benefits.

Yes, the programs will eventually get axed (not the second one, though, if real!America can keep building F-35s, then space!America can keep building Supermen), and the result will be a lot of disgruntled super soldiers and the guys who made them for a living out on the street with no jobs. Sounds fun.

edited 17th Sep '16 9:40:22 PM by KnitTie

Yeah that will be loads of fun. A super grunt with PTSD and a grudge.

With an exellent civilian carreer opportunity as a retail cashier!

I heard that one before.