Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Okay, I was thinking of a concept on the way home from work, and it's multifaceted, yet related. So, it might be a bit long, just bear with me as it's a bit raw.

First question, is relatively simple. First, we're assuming a relatively soft-scifi verse (FTL[albeit, relatively "slow"], artificial gravity, Space Fighters with dogfighting). Second, what's the fastest it would it take for a military to train non-combat bare bones personnel infantry tactics? Enough to lay a solid foundation, and the rest to come with experience? We're assuming, for sake of argument, that everything is going smoothly, i.e the personnel aren't slackers/lack discipline, everyone is eager to learn for sake of survival, are in good-to-excellent physical shape, and that's all they do: Wake up, train to shoot like a squad, do the bare minimum to maintain their skills in their current skillsets in their primary Military Occupational Specialty, sleep, do it all over again.

All of this is related to what I call tentatively titled "The Last Carrier", which is...exactly what it sounds like. Like in Mass Effect, dreadnoughts and big cannons ruled the void, and as such, they were extensively guarded, as they were strategic weapons of mass importance. Rare, powerful, expensive, as all hell, only made sense? Well, of course, Space Fighter was important too, but on the whole, you could sacrifice flights upon flights of fighters and a carrier rather than a dreadnought...or so everyone thought.

Basic premise is that an enemy faction (have not decided if they're aliens or not.) played a long con. They attacked a single dreadnought in dock, destroying it, causing a mass panic, that heightened security for all of the capital ships, as they anticipated, but that wasn't the real target(s). They were the carriers. Fighters could harass destroyers, and frigates, and in some cases, cruisers, depending on circumstances, and were a secondary, yet important part of the human factions overall doctrine. So they simultaneously attacked carriers, through combination of suicide missions, guerilla warfare, terrorism, etc. Some were crippled, most were destroyed...except one.

That's where the story is centered on. How would you use this carrier in a war now that it's your last one? Of course, some of your ship classes can carry fighters (12 at max, because they had a Crippling Overspecialization). To give more of an idea of what you're working with, you have a space equivalent of a Ford-Class. It can hold a standard 18 squadrons or roughly 200+ fighter craft, plus space for dropships, a Marine company, and their vehicles. Offensive weaponry is simply missile batteries scattered across the outer Hull.

Rest of the fleet's ship classes are relatively fine, it's just that nearly all the carriers are gone.

Interestingly enough, the US Pacific Fleet actually found themselves in that position with the USS Enterprise after Hornet was sunk during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in October of 1942.

The crew of the damaged carrier, naturally, put up a banner on the flight deck reading "Enterprise Vs Japan", as one does.

While the US recouped their losses (among other things, by mass-producing small cheap Escort Carriers), they also convinced the British to lend the US one of their aircraft carriers, HMS Victorious, which saw service with the US Pacific fleet. Sometimes she gets referred to as "USS Robin" for her service in 1943, but I'm not sure if it was ever an official nickname at the time. Victorious departed the Pacific and returned to service with the RN in the Atlantic in July when two new American flattops, Essex and Yorktown, reported for duty at Pearl Harbor.

That said, I'd float this question: Is the carrier the only ship that can carry out fighter operations? Can cruiser and dreadnoughts do the same, albeit in a more limited capacity (compare to WWII battleships and cruisers carrying seaplanes for scouting and spotting, or CAM ships, merchant ships that carried catapult-launched fighters for self-defense), can other ship types be modified or redesigned as poor-man's carriers (compare to Merchant carriers, merchant ships with flight decks, and Escort carriers, which were carriers built on merchant hulls.)

These options might all of course be off the table for narrative reasons (they don't fit the story you want to tell), or they might be considered inadequate substitutes (much as all of the aforementioned examples were in Real Life, but nonetheless saw use as desperate times called for desperate measures...)

EDIT: Sorry, just re-read your prompt, other ships can carry out limited fighter ops. I'd say the carrier might serve as a backstop for those ships, dashing back and forth replenishing their wings and taking on damaged craft for repairs and refits, and it could also be used to ferry and deliver fighters for various bases and outposts, much as carriers have traditionally done in Real Life).

Fun trivia, the Royal Navy used to operate a type of aircraft carrier specifically to serve as rear-area depot ships, taking on worn out or damaged planes to do refits and repairs while delivering replacements to the front-line carriers. They basically had more workshop space and less hangar space but were otherwise similar to the front-line carriers.

Edited by AFP on Mar 29th 2019 at 8:07:42 AM

Right. The whole idea is that this carrier has to hold out until the fleet can either completely rebuild the carrier fleet or repair the ones that were catastrophically damaged but not completely destroyed

I was somewhat envisioning the last carrier never staying in one sector for too long, regardless of its number of escorts and performing hit and run fighter ops

Would keep that carrier at home base personally. Unless, absolutely necessary.

Yeah, hold it in reserve and only commit it to “sure thing” actions, or ones where an air wing is desperately needed. If the rest of the fleet is just fine they can handle defensive action for a while, no sense in risking a valuable asset.

If you’ve only got one carrier and it gets sunk in avoidable day to day combat somewhere, and then two months later you run into a situation where you absolutely require a carrier, you’re gonna be kicking yourself.

Hmm would the calculus change if it were 3-4 carriers that survived?

My narrative intent is to add an element of desperation, high tension, where the reader might not know if the crew and thus the fleet will be okay if they are sunk.

Having them sit at home doesn’t serve that purpose

Carrier engagements snowball fast, as a general rule even adding one more carrier over the enemy is a guaranteed win.

The basic math idea behind this is that if you have 250 aircraft, and the enemy has 200, you might think this is a simple 25% advantage, but the reality is that it is much more, because your spares can gang up on enemies.... which at a small scale turns a number of fights into 2 on 1, being much more likely to win... at which point, those allies are also freed to go gang up on other enemies, which free up those allies to go gang up on yet more enemies.

And due to this snowballing, even a couple more airplanes over the enemy is a huge advantage.

One good example of the "slight advantage becomes a big one" is the Battle of Midway. The Japanese had four carrier decks and a plan that would have them piling on against a small American air station at Midway. What they didn't count on was the Americans learning of their plans thanks to the hard work of Navy crypto-analysts, and some hasty American reinforcements, including men and planes being deployed to Midway itself and the American carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown being rushed to meet the Japanese force.

Due to the loss of the element of surprise, an overwhelming Japanese advantage became a significant American one, especially with the Japanese officers expecting the carriers to be elsewhere entirely. The Americans didn't have quite as much time as they'd hoped to spot the Japanese fleet and prepare their strike, and so instead decided on a series of small piecemeal attacks that kept the Japanese on the defensive, and despite heavy American losses in the first attacks, the balance shifted further in the American's support once three dive bomber squadrons showed up at once and hit three of the Japanese carriers while their defending fighters were low on fuel and ammo, having just responded to a torpedo bomber attack from the Yorktown a few minutes prior.

So now the Japanese have one flight deck, the Americans still have three decks and the air station at Midway. Even the loss of Yorktown later in the battle wasn't enough to shift the balance, although the Americans had taken enough losses of their own to decide against pressing the attack on the retreating Japanese forces.

Actually, if you want to see how someone does with a carrier force limited by heavy losses, you could look at both the US Navy in 1942-43 and the Japanese Navy in 43-45. Either side had to be very cautious with how they used their flattops, and found various creative ways to try and make up the difference. 1942-43 was also when the Civil Air Patrol's Coastal Patrol was carrying out anti-sub patrols along the coastlines of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and the US also carried out the Doolittle Raids, which served as a potent psychological operation as the Japanese ended up redeploying a lot of their combat capability to defend the home islands and their claims in China rather than pressing the attack while the Allied forces were at their most vulnerable.

The Japanese, meanwhile, tried various things but ultimately couldn't overcome the American capability to mass-produce fighting material and men to use it. One noteworthy bit was modifying a new battleship in construction (the third Yamato-class battleship) into a new aircraft carrier, which would ultimately prove fruitless as this ship, the Shinano, had the misfortune to run across an American submarine on her maiden voyage and was sunk less than 24 hours after leaving port, before she even had a chance to take on an air wing or, more relevant to her swift fate, have her water-tight doors installed. To add insult to injury, the Americans didn't know Shinano existed yet until she appeared in the sub skipper's periscope, it was just plain shitty luck for her crew complicated by some poor decisions leading up to leaving port.

Down to one carrier, and the enemy has several, holding back is a passive strategy that leads to defeat. Nor did the US Navy do that. You use it to attack the enemy in unexpected areas, so that their more numerous carrier fleet has to redeploy in an attempt to protect the rear areas. Lightning raids deep into enemy territory is one way of keeping a superior force off balance.

If you only have one carrier, and you hold it back because your afraid you might loose it.

You might as well already have no carriers.

In a strategic sense, one carrier pretty much is no carriers. No weapon’s availability is 100%.

If they're truly desperate, they can maybe have the carrier jump in-system to where the battlefield is, and launch fighters, immediately punch out. With pilots being supported by smaller starships. Not sure how the pilots would feel about that, though.

And of course, there's plenty of middle ground between the Doolittle Raid and keeping the carrier in port, such as using it to ferry fighters to different bases.

I’m of the opinion that you would end up with some fusion of WW 1/2 commerce raiding and the hunt for the Bismarck. The carrier in question would have to pick its targets with extreme care, smash whatever ship/merchant/ supply base it can and then retreat before any sort of dedicated opposition could be delivered against it. Unless your carriers are up armoured your not going to do anything much in direct combat

A space carrier Shouldnt be doing direct combat anyway. That defeats the entire purpose

Any carrier designs I have in settings with Starfighters have Point Defense and a few cannons just in case, but they never go out into direct combat.

Well, consider that “direct combat” is a different concept for a carrier than a destroyer. Also consider that “direct combat” is a very loose term in a naval sense.

A carrier will still operate in FEBA, but with different positioning than a surface combatant. FEBA in naval combat is a very large area to begin with.

my apologies, I don’t mean direct combat as anything to possibly get the carrier range of anything else, I’m just pointing out that much like the Bismarck you’d have task forces shadowing this ship, waiting for it to make a mistake.

That said, some of the WWII carriers could have done a number on any smaller surface warships unfortunate enough to get within range of their defensive batteries. The Lexington and Saratoga carried eight inch guns for the first part of their careers (they were removed because they took up a lot of space and frankly never saw any use).

Still hardly ideal, obviously, and I'd be surprised if the Lady Lex would have been mission-capable after a gun duel.

What if the carrier is more of The Battlestar?

Hiryu carried similar armament and I think so did initially some of the other carriers pre-Midway such as Kaga, Soryu and Akagi. Shokaku and Zuikaku and the rest never carried anything heavier than 127mm.

Then we have Hyuga and Ise who were packing BATTLESHIP armament and armor in addition to planes. (Unfortunately, they didn't fare very well.)

Edited by MajorTom on Apr 2nd 2019 at 6:48:32 AM

IIRC some new software has allowed modern carriers to bring their RIM-7s and RIM-116s to bear against surface combatants. Considering their relative short range though, that’s likely a desperation move.

See the issues with running a carrier as the battlestar begs the question if all carriers are As tough as said carrier how were they all destroyed, if it is a battlestar then why can’t it take part in the fleets likes etc.

And that kind of defeats the purpose of the kind of story Jas is going for anyhow.

Rather than altering the nature of the Carrier, why not modify the Fighters? Let's say the Last Carrier was out doing tests on a new kind of Fighter and ended missing the entire first strike a la Pearl Harbor?