Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Cap has tanked an air strike. But even more of that has gone up against gods and demons and Thanos.

The soldiers from Metal Gear from Rising onwards would barely even flinch let alone be hurt being shot by an anti materiel rifle.

Post Covenant War Spartans have tech that makes them literally invincible for a brief period of time.

I’ll concede that yes if we managed to create a better soldier decades from now those tactics would work, but the idea that they’d work on their fictional counterparts simply don’t match their feats.

Tactical": All of those can still be killed. Even captain America.

For starters, you’re really underestimating the damage an air or artillery strike can inflict.

Even assuming those guys are all invulnerable to weapons though, they’re still only a couple dozen guys at best. No matter how great they are they’re not going to be able to change the tide of a conflict alone.

Say that reminds me, in the comics, Cap has his shield called a bullseye several times, and he points out that's the intention.

If you are going to give someone a shield, shouldn't it be eye catching to drive fire away?

One thing to note is while Spartans are capable of simply wading through their enemies, they also like to utilize real tactics as often as they can.

Simply because there are plenty of things that can kill Spartans just as easily as any Marine or Grunt. Including but not limited to: artillery, airstrikes, starship bombardment, tanks, plasma swords, Forerunner weaponry and more.

And it shows in the games too. You try wading through enemies as if they were nothing on Heroic or Legendary difficulty. Those Hollywood Tactics will get you killed quickly and repeatedly. Real world tactics are often some of the best ways to win at those levels.

Regarding Captain America's bullseye shield, in The Dark Knight Returns, Batman explains a similar reasoning for his highly visible bat logo on his chest: It's a lot harder to armor his head.

As far as the Spartans go, there's a reason you only ever see a small handful of them in most of the games: Most of the Spartan II and Spartan III supersoldiers are dead due to attrition. Can't speak to the post-3 games as Halo 3 was the far end of my interest in the series. In any case, they are shown to be typically used as force multipliers, either performing high-risk-high-reward raids, or backstopping muggle troops like the UNSC Marines or the ODST cap troopers.

One interesting take on the supersoldier formula is Old Man's War, where a wide variety of very impressive and very expensive enhancements are able to elevate human soldiers to the lofty level of canon fodder (Puny Earthlings is in full effect in this setting, but the Earthlings notoriously punch above their weight and fight dirty). Some of the more advanced races mostly just ignore humanity and the other warring races as being beneath them unless they're interested in some sport.

Edit: Speaking of cap troopers, the Power Armor equipped troopers of Starship Troopers are effectively super soldiers even without physical enhancements (instead they rely on extensive training and conditioning paired with their crazy well-equipped armor). In return, the Bugs instead opt for a slightly different approach, and Rico observes that the Bugs can more than make up for lacking in fancy gear.

edited 19th Jun '18 8:18:27 PM by AFP

On the “highly visible bullseye” topic, comic writers sort of misunderstand drawing fire. You draw fire by being active, not by being colorful. If Cap is standing still with his bright shield and his friends are all running around his friends are going to be the ones drawing fire.

"Shoot ze guy with ze shield!" "Vat about ze other guys who are killink us?"

Thinking back to footage of General Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf in Desert Storm with his bodyguards in the technicolor body armor. I guess the idea there was that if things went sideways, everyone would be moving around or seeking cover, and the body guards would be a lot easier to pick out than the General. Hopefully it was pretty solid armor .

They were plainclothes units, that's the reason they were wearing colored shirts. At least if you're referring to the pictures/videos I'm thinking of.

I'm kind of wondering about something, We all know that combat in space will take place at absurd ranges.

Hell even in my Space'verse where most people can casually buy a FTL ship and there are fighter class ships (Moreover just escorts for larger vessels), a lot of combat takes place at very far ranges (as far as laser and particle weaponry are effective) but now I'm wondering.

Would there ever be a reason for ships to fight in close range and where would it be?

I've said this before, but close-range combat is the sort of thing you might expect if someone uses deception to get near a target. False colors, infiltration, pretending to be a civilian ship... there is a ton of potential ways to hide your intentions, most of which make for good dramatic stories as well.

Up close, one might try a variety of tactics, but one thing to note is that if you have weapons that are effective at distances of light-seconds, then using them up close is not going to be much more effective, and runs the risk of damaging the attacker in the blast. Mainly, you'd do it to bypass countermeasures designed to intercept long-range fire. Also, unless the attacker has some means to prevent counterattack or manages to inflict catastrophic damage, they shouldn't expect to get away from the battle intact.

Unless the intent is a suicide attack, an infiltration mission should not generally have open combat as its primary objective, even if it may devolve into combat for dramatic purposes.

Other situations in which close-range combat might occur...

• During a battle, one side is sufficiently damaged that the other can approach to close range, possibly for the purpose of capturing enemy ships or an enemy target. In this situation, the "defender" has already lost the major fight, but may be able to prevent their opponent from achieving their objective. This situation would pertain if the attacker wants something that they can't get simply by blowing everything up.
• If you have Space Pirates, then combat ships might be deployed to masquerade as civilian vessels, only revealing themselves once attackers are too close to evade or escape. This is because pirates need to board or capture ships in order to loot them, obviously requiring them to get in close.
• If your FTL technology has sufficient precision, allowing jumps to be calculated to within a few kilometers, then quite a few battles might be fought at close range — indeed, jumping into an enemy's fleet and just cutting loose might be a preferred method of attack for sneaky or outmatched sides.

edited 21st Jun '18 9:02:46 AM by Fighteer

The most common scenario, though, will be in orbit around important planets of stratetic value. If you want to land on the surface, simply defeat surface forces, capture orbital stations, impose a blockade, take advantage of the gravity well or the mass of the planet, or simply blend into the civilian traffic, then you have to move friendly forces into orbit. The potential for close range combat greatly increases.

“Close range” in orbit is still going to be hundreds or thousands of miles, though.

Engagement and detection envelopes are massively expanded in space, which means the definition of close range is similarly expanded.

Low Earth Orbit reaches up to 2,000km before its considered Medium/GPS Orbit, High Earth Orbit begins at over 35,500km, and lunar orb it is 384,000km. Even fighting in various orbits can easily translate to potentially very long range combat.

You are talking about potential differences from a few thousand kilometers up to a difference of literally hundreds of thousands of kilometers. There is a lot of wiggle room.

I wonder if doctrine and concerns about creating space junk would necessitate closer engagements, near orbits, so debris could fall back into the atmosphere

Except that runs into the issue that space junk projected by sufficient force could be kicked into a higher orbit there is also plenty of material in lower orbits space junk could easily hit.

Fighting in orbit is going to produce collision hazards no matter how you slice it. What would be needed is a way to clean up the messes. Hell we need that now alongside possible asteroid defense.

Hopefully, debris from battles would be saturated with waste heat so finding everything would be easier that finding an icy cold asteroid.

Still, we're back to the "Space Garbagemen" idea.

On a side note, if you're fighting within the Roche limit, debris won't clump up and you'll end up with a grinding effect of debris on slightly different orbits running into each other. This would produce smaller and smaller debris over a wider area. Individually less dangerous but collectively a threat.

Edited by Belisaurius on Jun 28th 2018 at 8:13:49 AM

You'd need a rapid response cleanup team, because radiation would cool it down to undetectability in a pretty short time.

Also, small junk wouldn't be affected by the Roche limit because tidal forces are too minute on that scale. Rather, collisions between debris would slowly break it up over time, with some deorbiting and some moving into higher orbits, but you're talking hundreds or thousands of years.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 28th 2018 at 8:16:01 AM

Keep in mind that space is insulating. Yes, objects can get very cold but it takes a long time to get there. Objects will also be absorbing heat from the Sun so you might never get to the super cold state that some objects in the asteroid belt get so long as it's a planet within the goldilocks zone or closer.

The preferred method especially for small space junk tracking now is radar. We are using ground based systems currently but it has limits in terms of small space junk.

Eventually, Earth gets it's very own ring system, made up of particulate debri. Take a while, though.

I was referring to low orbit. And compared to interplanetary range, a few thousand kilometers is nothing. All depends on what you mean by "close range." Tactics will change in very tight orbital trajectories, that's for sure.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jun 28th 2018 at 9:32:54 AM

DeMarquis: A few thousand kilometers is not a small distance by any measure for combat and it is quite easy to operate outside of low orbit. All someone has to do is choose to not be in low orbit. Space is big is in full effect here. There is a serious amount of room between low orbit and our lunar orbit and no reason at all to force yourself into the low orbit unless you have to. Travel time becomes notable at those ranges for kinetics. At even 10 or so km/s a projectiles flight time is measured in minutes. It will most certainly have an impact on weapons like missiles.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jun 28th 2018 at 8:49:28 AM

You’re going to be needing either lasers or weapons with potent terminal guidance.