Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

If they are going to do Spec Ops type training starting them as kids is a bad idea. That kind of training has a tendency to beat up hardened adults never mind still growing adolescents. If they started their baseline training until they were in their late teens early 20's where they have had more time to fully develop before they begin the special operations training that would likely work better. Unless you plan on using cybernetics and/or genetic tweaking or modification common to the Super Soldier types in sci-fi. Most humans are not quite done growing until sometime in their 20's.

edited 20th Sep '14 8:00:08 AM by TuefelHundenIV

You can definitely expose teenagers at 15 or so to military discipline and some degree of physical training.

Physical training it'self is almost a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. After a matter of months, humans tend to plateau in terms of fitness and further improvements suffer from decreasing returns. Any level of fitness can be lost in a matter of weeks without some sort of training so actual physical conditioning is more of a matter of maintaining physical fitness rather than continuous improvement.

Most training is for mental conditioning, acclimating them to extreme stress and fear and beating responses into their psyches so they don't shatter under pressure. Better trained soldiers think clearer under fire. Special operations troops always fight at their best despite days of stress and being horrendously outnumbered.

The last bit of training is technical skills. In this, military training is like any other training. If you keep it up for five years chances are they're going to pick up everything a soldier could possibly need to know, from marksmanship to demolitions to ship command to logistics. I suspect by the end of three years you may run out of things to teach them unless you switch to a more civilian curriculum.

Well, like Tuefel suggested, I'm starting out with an somewhat accelerated civilian curriculum from 15-18, to get most of their core civilian classes they "need" out of the way. In that time period, they learn basic training, discipline, how to march, fold clothes, etc. The most brutal they can go is the hand-to-hand, which is Krav Magra, full contact, with both instructors, and Hard Light Holograms so they can simulate a real fight in a variety of conditions. 18 is when things get really intense, depending on what the cadet wants to specialize in, i.e being a Scout/Assassin, Infantry, Orbital Assault Troopers (It's Raining Men), Counter-Terrorism, etc.

The better idea is to start with tactics and teamwork:

• Team sports to build a sense of selfless service but with a competitive edge.

• Games like poker, blackjack, chess, et al to get children to think outside the box.

• Then comes the video games that are more realistic.

• As they enter their teen years actual simulations with units and uniforms, a JROTC Up To Eleven.

So when they grow up, basic training is old hat.

DOUBLE NINJA!

I think tactical has the idea of it. Prime them first to ensure more can hack it by the time they enter and then throw the heavier stuff at them.

Bel:Basic discipline and education yes. Even simple daily exercise would be useful. But there is a world of difference between basic healthy exercise and serious military conditioning and training.

Physical training is not a minor issue at all. Especially when it comes to training for Spec Ops. Notable considering one of the key factors all spec ops select for is physical ability. Even doing intense boot camp type exercise and conditioning produces fair number of washouts due to injuries over a few short months with 18,19,20 year olds who as a group are overtly more developed and physically capable then any group of 15 year olds who are as a group largely still stumbling through puberty.

That isn't accounting for distinct mental and emotional unsuitability even those in their late teens and most in their early 20's have for special forces. A gangly teen of 15 is not going to cut it by any stretch of the imagination outside of unrealistic fiction or truly extraordinary accounts and will not likely develop it by the time they graduate.

Take a look at the average age for special forces they are not boots or callow youths. Most of them are in their mid to late twenties or even in their 30's with very few in their early 20's and very damn few younger then that. Age for physical ability, experience, and mental and emotional maturity are definitely big factors in selection that no teen even one from academy is going to meet.

No they will not run out of anything to teach them. At best they can teach them basics contrary to your statement there is a lot to learn and frankly five years is not really going to cut it. There is a massive world of difference in a classroom environment vs actually doing the job for pretty much every MOS. On average by the time an individual has even made it to special forces selection they have had a few years on the job with additional training on top of it. Also last I checked the military does regular training to keep skills sharp and learn new things because changes never stop.

It takes years of both on the job experience and continuing training to get skilled shooters, infantry, technicians, sharp shooters and snipers, officers, ships captains, logisticians, and even cooks. The assumption that you can just crank out the training and have the same quality from an academy is at best laughable at worst it would be gross negligence. No cadet with years of sitting around a training ground or bumping around an academy will ever match someone who has been actually doing the job every day for two or three years and learned there is more to it then what they teach you at the school.

All you have to do is take a look at the prime example of how an academy cannot teach anyone everything they need know by any stretch of imagination in a 4-5 year span. We call them Lieutenants. They are considered unskilled, reckless, and the most likely to fuck up bigger then Dallas. It takes them a few years to become an actually decent officer. They may be better educated and pretty fit by the time they are in but their inexperience and immaturity shows through. The old joke about a Sgt Taking an officer aside is only partly kidding.

Realistically all you can do is better prime the youth for their entry into the military it will not realistically prepare them for special forces. They will be more physically fit and better educated going in which will help. It certainly won't hurt the Special Forces if they can choose from a larger selection of better educated and trained individuals when it comes time for selection but your not going to get Spec Ops ready troops from an academy training the youth.

There is a really good reason the US does what it does for selecting special forces and many other nations do the same or similar.

edited 20th Sep '14 12:22:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

You think so, even with Hard Light simulations they can't be as good?

I wonder if anyone has ever done an analysis of how well the various "trained from a young age" military units actually performed in history, at least as compared to their regular counterparts. The idea that this produces more elite soldiers strikes me as part of the irritating tendency among military historians to fetishize brutality in training for its own sake.

edited 22nd Sep '14 5:30:51 PM by Achaemenid

In real life I dont think it works as well as it does in theory. Human beings are so much more than simply a product of their training that such a program would be very challenged to get the success rate high enough to justify the time and expense that would have to be invested.

Hardlight is just another training tool. It doesn't build real experience or maturity the same way doing your job for a few years would. No I don't think any such academy program would ever honestly create Special Forces ready operator right out of the school. What I do think it will do is improve the quality and possibly the quantity of Special Forces overall. It will also help improve the quality of the other groups who get the better trained and educated individuals. They are still going to need that real on the job experience and a bit of time to finish maturing.

It is really difficult to shortcut or substitute what even a few years of experience can give you. It is nearly impossible to shortcut combat experience. You would have to find a way to at least very closely simulate those years and combat experience. Even then compared to the real thing it would be pretty hard to exactly match actually living the experience.

Rather then an academy a simulation that is so real it is difficult for those who go through it to tell the difference between reality and the simulation. Even then I don't think they would be quite Special Forces ready but I think it might possibly shorten the amount of time and experience needed to be ready by an appreciable degree.

All right, let's take Special Forces out, then. Just Elite Infantry. Say, something akin to the First Division of the US army or MAYBE the Rangers.

Even then your looking at least a year or two of being regular infantry but compared to the amount of training and time it takes to be a full blown reliable operative that is much shorter time frame. They would certainly be better prepared to step into elite infantry ranks and it would up the quality of the bog standard infantry.

The nearest analogue are the Spartans. They conscripted and trained young boys to be warriors. Good skill, extremely bad in attrition scenarios. The problem with The Spartan Way (in the literal sense) was it took too long to make soldiers and the qualitative difference was nowhere near enough to overcome the quantitative difference the rest of the Greek nations could put out. Those 300 Spartans at Thermopylae were more or less irreplaceable, unlike their Athenian or Mycenaean counterparts.

Ultimately, this led to their decline at the end of the Peloponnesian War despite their victory. They couldn't replace their losses fast enough to be a dominant power over the long run.

edited 22nd Sep '14 8:22:44 PM by MajorTom

I guess Sparta (and other Militaries) should've made the best of both worlds within the boundaries of the ethics of their respective societies.

Actually it wasn't the Peloponnesian War that did in Sparta, it was the Corinthian War that occurred after that marked the beginning of the end for them, but close enough. The Spartans lost The Battle of Leuctra which was a huge setback for Sparta which included the death of a Spartan king and over 400 Spartan Citizens.

Sparta also extensively used non-Spartan Citizens on the battlefield as part of their armies with the Spartans themselves serving as the elite components. To add to their problems the only way to become a Spartan was to be born a Spartan to Spartan Parents. So the part about the severity of loss of Spartan warriors is true but it wasn't really what brought them down per se so much as it was their own laws that hamstrung them.

They had a large population of Helot's mostly taken as slaves and they were rapidly outpacing the Spartans in sheer numbers. From the end of that battle onward Sparta began a steady decline across two centuries. They faced several Helot revolts and further defeats including a bad thrashing in Macedonia which killed another Spartan king and a number of Spartans and allies.

Now having an academy or other process that isn't so severely hamstrung as the Spartans were could put out quality military members as long as they have the population to put through the academy.

Incidentally, the Boy Scouts have their roots in a similar mindset. They don't train as soldiers for the most part, but they learn many skills that translate well to life in the military, such as some general concepts of rank and authority, and of course the fieldcraft that many urban folks never had a chance to learn otherwise.

I've variously read (depending on the source) that Robert Baden-Powell either started the Scouting movement after seeing how unprepared many of his troops were to what we'd now call an expeditionary lifestyle, or because he found that books on military matters and fieldcraft were already widely popular with boys and decided to roll with it.

And of course, there's also the Civil Air Patrol, JROTC, etc. for other youth organizations that similarly act as a primer for the military life, though they're typically pretty light as far as any military training goes.

I'm thinking that there would be multiple Academies across different colonies. I was thinking of the population being around 5k, but then I thought...this is a military that has half a billion Active Duty members...they'd be a drop in the bucket, quantitatively, even if every last one of them (EXTREMELY unlikely) made it through....

Goddammit...

AFP: There is no doubt scouting was originally about military training and skills. Just gotta get your hands on the old scouting manuals. You have some remnants of it in the current manuals.

While they wouldn't be much of an army, they'd certainly be useful. Military discipline is second nature to them and you can be pretty sure of their loyalty. They've got plenty of time to learn all the intel you have and have the training to make sense of it all. This makes a great staff officer or intel analyst. Possibly counter intelligence.

If you're desperate you can have them lead troops but it would be better if they advise the actual commanders.

There was one occasion during WWII where some scouts acquired a German tank and used it to help liberate a concentration camp. The Polish Boy Scouts did the Scouting tradition proud during WWII, but ultimately suffered for it between the Nazis and the Soviets.

Anyone think Island Hopping/Leapfrogging (WW 2) could potentially be applied to whole planets/colonies?

Oh yes, the basic strategy was "Hit'em where they ain't!" Hit weaker islands and bypass the well defended ones. As they were cut off, hit them when they get weak or just surround them.

That depends on the tech level, and the exact nature of interstellar logistics. The reason the US could engage in Island Hopping in WWII was because we had air superiority and could defend our supply lines more effectively than the Japanese. Thus, when we "hopped" past an island full of enemy forces, it was their island that got cut off, not ours. I imagine the equivalent scenario would be a space-fleet that could dominate the interstellar medium, while bypassing planetary systems that were heavily defended.

The US didn't have full air superiority at the start of that campaign though. Especially since the Japanese still held both air fields and had air craft carriers. The Japanese were an actual challenge to US Naval air power at the start of the leap frog campaign. The US gained air superiority after it started. They certainly did not start out with it. 1944 was a good year for sinking carriers. Subs alone tagged several.

^ Pretty much until after the New Guinea Campaign and the sea battles of the Solomon Islands the US had nowhere near anything resembling air superiority. In fact it was a pretty even and brutal fight for the air until the Marianas Turkey Shoot in 1944.

A big reason for the island hopping, of course, was to build airfields so we could better challenge Japanese air superiority (an airfield can carry far more airplanes than an aircraft carrier can, and is much harder to sink). One of the major reasons we wanted Okinawa was so we could use it as a base for bombers to strike at Japan (airfields in China had the bombers at the edge of their endurance, which meant lighter payloads for planes like the Liberators and much magnified problems for the heavier and longer-legged but still unrefined Superforts).

And of course, bypassing bigger bases didn't eliminate them from being a threat in the short term, but if you could attack their supply lines more effectively than they could attack yours, you'd basically have the enemy base in a choke hold. They could continue to fight hard and use up their limited resources, or try to conserve to make it last longer and be less of a threat in the short term. The whole while, of course, you could still continue to hit them with aerial attacks and such to grind them down.

edited 2nd Oct '14 8:17:51 PM by AFP