Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

There's a difference between taking it and holding it. If the goal is to just destroy and move on, the amount of men needed becomes significantly less.

If the goal in the invasion of Iraq was just to "win" and go home, we would've had all our troops home by Memorial Day 2003.

The US is absolutely garbage at long term occupations, winning conflicts in the initial invasion? Child's play.

This. Very true. Because we chose to linger and try and control we failed. We lacked both the willpower and the man power to do it.

You want a good look at what real long term plans look like to take and hold a country for extensive periods of time look at the British Empire. Even before the era of Empires they were doing something similar to the Welsh lands. Extensive fortified lands with the backing of a full blown individual military. The point was to sit and hold out making the locals used to them and live with the fact they were not going anywhere. Over time they integrate and the castle is no longer needed. Problem is that process takes a long time.

To bring the discussion back to something more grounded, I've been inspired by Modern Warfare 2 to recreate a Storming the Castle scenario where the protagonists are storming the Grand Palace of my army.

Several things

1)Your task to defend said palace as it's both strategic and symbolic. If it falls, your nation may follow it. What kind of defenses would you have to deter/slow down and army, not regular Secret Service like security? Assume technology far surpassing the US military, existing or theoretical.

2)Palace is practically a city into itself, would you bring MB Ts or Armored Personnel Carriers like the Bradley?

3) Air cover is practically non-existent due to extensive AA guns, which will have to be taken out before ANY Cool Plane gets within 40 miles of the air space. Focus on getting air support or keep pushing towards the objective and fly your victory flag over the rooftop?

4) Where would you strategically place your best soldiers, "worse", and your regular run of the mill infantry?

5)Would you send Special forces to help storm the castle? Or just infantry where your Spec ops are doing the "odd" jobs with their specialized skills?

More info is needed like how big is the target area, any detailed plans and layouts, locations of key objectives and targets, assets in both personnel and material available, best Intel on enemy force composition, what support options are available if air support is out, when does this op launch and what time of day/night, and how long do they have to complete and reach a final goal?

Doing some quick and rough calculations, the area is around 28,000 acres or about 44 sq miles. Which is roughly the size of Disney World in Florida.

The layout is fairly straightforward as the palace is in the center, much like the Disney castle to keep the analogy going. There are 5 layers of defense, all towards making sure the capital building is a fortress. Think walls on the outside, walls on the inside as well. SAAM batteries are placed strategically equidistant from each other, and others are well hidden in the sense of how NK hides it's artillery pointed at Seoul.

The palace is in the middle of a city, roughly the size of San Francisco near the center. Outside of the palace's outermost walls is fairly open ended field 3 kilometers out on all sides so any advancing army can be seen coming a mile away. Most of the intel they have is just that the palace is heavily guarded and they need to expect EVERYTHING . They can't spare too many men because the army is fighting multiple fronts and they believe capturing this will demoralize the enemy army.

If Air support isn't available, their best option is just to bring as much land-based fire power as they can.

edited 26th Jan '15 11:13:37 PM by TacticalFox88

What stops me from simply flattening the place with long range artillery? Especially the grid square eraser kind? If the target area is that big I needn't worry about collateral or inaccuracy.

edited 27th Jan '15 4:55:37 AM by MajorTom

Same reason why air supremacy alone can't win wars.

Because the F-35 hasn't entered service yet? -duck and run-

On the flip side simple artillery barrages would do wonders to reduce the enemies ability to defend that target area especially one so large.

So I have been wondering. What tactics could be used with Mecha? Like what tactics would work with a robot (my limit being 30 feet tall and no taller) and how would it benefit them for military use.

I have often seen how a mecha wouldn't work for war, let us presume that mecha have existed for years and work just fine in universe (Minovsky Physics is applicable here) so what use in military could they serve and how would they be used.

I ask for a story I am writing and I can't really look at some typical Mecha shows because the general fights either get down to move and shoot, stand and shoot, and get in close and fight melee.

I think it may be better too look at other media that have done it already and go from there. Mech Warrior might be a good one to take a peak at.

Elaborate. I know why air supremacy alone can't win a war but why is artillery out of the question?

With creeping fire and saturation bombardment I need not do a traditional Storming the Castle. I merely keep up the fire blasting everything to bits including AA defenses, the walls themselves, infantry in the open (or not), and armored vehicles positioned defensively. Then I simply surround the facility and use creeping fire to tighten the noose and force the complex's surrender or destruction.

The only thing you on the incoming end of artillery fire can do is keep your head down and pray to <insert deity here> that you don't get turned to giblets or retreat.

edited 27th Jan '15 6:38:39 PM by MajorTom

It would certainly be symbolically decimating to have the majestic grounds hammered badly by indirect fire power mangling any defenders and pulverizing most of the defenses outside.

You wouldn't even need to rely on the big guns you could easily have hundreds of mortars pounding the shit out of the target. Creeping barrage is certainly destructive but call for fire from FO's highlighting targets and firing a few rounds per battery tube will likely get the job done.

An area that big is going to be very difficult to defend even from the ground. Using combat engineers/sappers, big guns in direct fire such as from tanks or something like Stryker MGS, and other options have made breaching walls fairly easily. Anything mounted on top of the walls will go first then the side most denuded of defenses by the initial assault will be the side most likely to be breached.

If this is a key target the enemy is likely not going to hold much back including things MLRS, HIMAR, Self Propelled Howitzers like Paladin, IFV with a mortar package are known to pack 120mm mortars, and even various ATGM's could be used to help breach a wall or hardened gate.

The only reason to not try and totally flatten the palace and the grounds leading up to is they want to capture someone or something inside. They could walk fire from artillery across the various walls to create a series of breaches then follow it up with several Anti-Personnel and/or DPICM to hammer anything but the most hardened of targets.

Special forces could be used to infiltrate while the barrage is ongoing and their purpose would be to slip in and start capping command centers and taking out defense controls and other key structures while the defenders are busy fending off a major assault. Then everyone links up and they push for the final objectives.

I would make sure at least some tanks and IFV's are available for basic fire support to help the assault.

Being in an obvious area surrounded by city scape provides would be assailants with lots of vantage points to at least observe and possibly post light artillery like mortars. Also serves to provide hard physical cover until the move on to the assault. If they expect a mine field breaching vehicles can clear a few lanes to assault through to reach the walls or breaches made by artillery.

Mind you, if the fortress has artillery batteries of its own, you may not get to shell it with impunity, especially if the fort's designers felt that, having no need for the guns to be mobile, that they could instead make them as big and powerful as possible.

Now, the only such forts I can recall from Real Life tended to be coastal batteries or harbor forts, using battleship-grade batteries. Several of them in World War II ended up being bested by battleships carrying heavier armaments (at sea, a battleship of course would have none of the mobility issues as a land-based artillery battery). As long as this fort isn't near the sea, I see no reason why it shouldn't be able to make use of very large guns to hammer any enemy artillery units that got too ballsy. In a more modern setting, replace the guns or augment them with rocket artillery or missile launchers.

This is more a fortified palace though. I could see them having mortars of their own but they would have to have them in certain obvious locations to make full use of their ability and ensure they have clearance to make it over walls with reasonable clearance. Big guns are big and obvious and require a fair bit of space. Dedicated heavy artillery would stand out like a sore thumb.

It wouldn't even need to be located within the palace to protect it. You could have batteries placed in the surrounding area.

Batteries don't do you much good in a crowded city and firing at the position you want to protect or into the dense city not far off would likely be a bad idea. Once the other forces are near the target it becomes rather risky to lob something like shore battery sized guns. That and such weapons tend to rapidly attract the kind of attention that launches bunker busters.

edited 27th Jan '15 11:48:06 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Without an actual presence in a given area, the enemy can simply move back in after a barrage. Additionally, without onsite observers you won't be able to asses if a fortress was truly destroyed or just looks that way from afar.

Observing even a walled palace in a nice big open clearing smack bang in the middle of city would be very easy to do. Many buildings make rather nice observation/listening posts. The number of potential OP/LP positions would be numerous. You would need an amazingly tall wall to prevent any observation over it.

Remind me again where they are going to retreat to? Considering the only place to run off to is the target being shelled in the first place. If they wanted to oblige the attackers with a turkey shoot they could leave the walls. The ones who are at least dug into a common fighting hole would better off then the poor buggers in obvious positions as they are at least by comparison lower profile.

The location as described would be what many would call "A target rich environment" with things like gate houses/entry control, the painfully obvious heavy weapon emplacements like oh say anti-aircraft weapons and artillery, things like machine gun bunkers, the OP/LP posts needed to see over the walls, fuel and ammo dumps or smaller ready ammo dumps tend to be pretty obvious, things like antennae and radars, and the many other things you could easily spot with OP/LP gear from a long ways off by just parking on a high roof.

The glaring problem of being in a big open space in a city is cities tend to have more then a few buildings whose upper floors and roofs can see over pretty much most walls. That big open space to see someone approaching is a double edged sword. They can see you to. Given the attackers are attacking from an area with far more maneuver and cover options the described target location is what you call a nice obvious target range for both indirect and direct fire weapons.

You put a big wall around it that leaves only so many places to look over and at a minimum there are the OP posts. Heavy weapons that would defend the beaten ground same thing. Anti-aircraft guns or missiles short of the less than effective MANPAD missiles take up a fair bit of space and tend to have really obvious things like antennae and radar equipment nearby. Especially the kind of AA that would deter an airstrike using stand off weapons like long range glide bombs and assorted missiles.

If the attackers wanted they could simply cut off any escape from the palace while the cannon cockers work an artillery pattern for practice on the grounds. That nice big open ground means they try and escape they get shellacked by the guys still sitting pretty in hard cover. You just have to keep them bottled up which they have obliging made easy by placing the target in the middle of an open field. Pick off the OP/LP and any of the other obvious targets and you can plink at your leisure.

All the attackers have to do is lay siege and wait for more of their guys to show up. From the description the other side is putting up some fight but they are unlikely to last very long especially if they can so easily detach a ground assault force to take a swing at such a potentially important target.

If it's a large, established fortress in the middle of a city then it likely has an extensive underground network that may ad hoc the existing underground infrastructure. In this case you may never know when forces enter or leave the palace.

So you could absolutely level the surface of the palace but unless you send someone in to poke around the ruins you'll never know if there was something more. You could keep shelling with bunker busting artillery but you're shooting blind.

True, they could. But it depends on the mentality of the fortress designers, the city governance and the interaction of military and civil power.

If they are in harmony and particularly paranoid, definitely expect a rabbit warren. If the city was pre-existing, that sort of defensive pattern will be insanely intensive to implement. Short term knocking through of cellars may be the alternative, however. If there is an existing underground metro system, however, that may double up.

The main purpose of the artillery strike will be to knock out larger installations, wipe out solid defensive structures and to suppress defenders. Artillery by itself is, arguably, pointless, unless you follow up with an assault to secure the area you have just shelled. This is because, as previously mentioned, the enemy will likely move in and reinforce the area again.

The other thing to consider - how self-sufficient is this city and how much of it do you need intact? Because if food is in finite supply, you could starve them out for a few days, shell anything that, from recon, looks like large storage areas and use area denial artillery and cluster munitions to disrupt the infrastructure.

The advantage of the defenders is that they will be able to focus defense on any area the attackers go for; if the attacker tries to assault everywhere at once, they are spread too thin potentially and will be repulsed, wheres if they assault an area en masse, it potentially makes for a target rich environment for the defender, especially if they have artillery of their own that has, as yet, not been compromised by any hostile action.

As an attacker, you may be able to use infiltration and SF units to compromise and cause panic in the defensive arena - disrupting power, supply lines, stocks, even defensive positions.

One example to look at for a ground war is Fallujah and how the US Army had to fight street by street once inside the town. FIBUA is a messy, prolonged business, manpower intensive from an infantry point of view. Combine that with the underground network of the Vietcong, and entry into the city will need to be fast and, possibly, very very brutal.

So, pinpoint artillery to knock out defensive structures and potentially compromise enemy Line of sight on your own entry points, combined with ongoing interference by SF units, followed by an armoured support strike to creat beach-heads in the city that allow you to bring in further long range weaponry and close-to force multipliers (Mortars, snipers, combat engineers etc). You will need a triage and medevac plan, plus a stragey for removing POW (If the cultures you have actually adhere to that and don't just summarily execute prisoners) which places a further drain on your infantry.

Is the local population armed? Are they hostile to you, or sympathetic to you? Because it won't just be the military defenders and standing army, you may end up having to counter militia and impromptu lone-gunmen, which will in turn impact your invaders. Unless they're drones.

Again, it comes back to your ROE and how much of the city you want intact. And this can be scaled up to a planetary level if we go back to the planet invasion. Becheads, force multipliers, and whether or not your value the local populace enough to spare them collateral damage, or even if you need their infrastructure.

They aren't attacking a city though. They are attacking a large compound in a very large clear space that is located in the middle of city.

The enemy leaving the area because it is surrounded is a bonus if you just want the grounds. Sure you can go back your positions but you can't rebuild that MG bunker or replace that long range AA system or build a new gate or fill in the holes blown in the walls or do much for damaged or destroyed permanent positions. Even if they try to run away they are still in the target area in general getting up and running around in the middle of an artillery barrage is a far surer way to catch fragments then hunkering down in a handy space and hoping.

edited 28th Jan '15 4:27:08 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Wait, no shelling.

Capture of VIP and lives of special tech inside.

You could still shell without bringing down the roof. It becomes a choice of fusing and shell at that point. Sling some M982 Excalibur rounds down range and you can plink the hard points and ADA with high precision with very minimal drift off of target. They also make various mortar rounds that are guided as well.

The cluster munitions over combat positions are very unlikely to do anything to anyone inside the palace while being unpleasant outside. Same for air burst HE or Blast Frag shells. They won't kill everyone but they can do enough damage to erode defenses to make it easier to get into the palace itself. Artillery rounds used to breach exterior walls would likely be fairly safe as well.

While the folks inside are likely to be scared silly by the shelling and more likely to keep their heads down you could still use artillery and turn anyone outside into bloody chunks. Arty has gone from bracketing fire dumb rounds and just pummeling the target to PGM weapons over the last decade or so.

But you would still have to bring your forces THROUGH the city towards the fortified palace.

The other thing to consider is that, if defenses are layered, you will have to conduct several phases of the interdiction into the fortress. The Japanese fortress design was never to keep people out permanently, but to have layers which would funnel besiegers into kill boxes and channelled the method of attack.

Also, as a defende,r will they be booby trapping things: usin IED's. A common tactic in Afghan is to embed explosives into walls around compounds, putting a pressure plate in the door frames: that means that as the invader breaches the door, they trigger the device which then wipes out the wall and, as infantry doctrine usually posits, any soldiers who are lined up ready to push into the compound.

Also, Stalingrad is another good example: you can reduce bunkers and trenches to mud and rubble, but it is still cover of a sort, maybe easier to traverse and less reinforced, but unless the weaponry used can reduce cover to atoms, you won't 100% remove obstacles. If the palace is to be siezed vaguely intact as well, that will limit your supporting fire options as well.

If it was me, I would look for weaknesses: access points that could be exploited, blind spots around the defenses, the use a form of pinpoint artillery to wipe out major defensive structures and to reduce freedom of movement within the fortress. Then push into each layer, siezing key points and reinforcing as you go. Your intent as the attacker is to minimise time spent bogged down against entrenched positions.

One example of how to wipe out a solid entrenched fortress: The Maginot line at the start of WW 2: a belgian line of fortresses built into hillsides, with huge fixed emplacements and turrets. They relied on a river line and a forest to act as another layer of defence, to prevent an armoured advance and to limit infantry action.

What did the Wehrmacht do? Used gliders to drop commandos onto the top of the bunkers and used a shaped charge (Copper cone inverted) to breach one of the bunker turrets. This ignighted the ammunition in the bunker tower and wiped out one part. The bunker was designed with this in mind, so it only too out one emplacement, but it allowed the Germans to get inside and sieze several other emplacements, forcing the garrisoned soldiers back. When the German armoured divisions rolled up, one fort had been taken with the garrison surrendering. They could've held out, but they couldn't have effectively stopped the Germans just going past them. And only hitting a couple of these emplacements allowed a wide enough gap in the line for the Germans to breach and roll through Belgium.

Now, that's a macro example, but it shows that relying heavily on fixed emplacements can be double edged: they've vulnerable and losing one stymies your ability to react, especially if your defensive structures are built around them.

As a defender, you want focused coverage, killing zones and plenty of fallback positions. Most likely a defender worth their salt will have dsignated zone marker for defensive artillery fire of their own, to staunch an advance and to creat blocks and disrupt vehicle movement. Also, bridge denial and controlled demolition to bring buildings down and create blockades.

However, the more you fall back, the more are you have to focus on and the more force an aggressor can bring to bear against you at specific points.

edited 29th Jan '15 5:36:32 AM by JerekLaz