Sci-fi Military Tactics and Strategy

Having looked at various Google maps satellite images of the ocean and in particular ports, boats and ships below a certain size are all but invisible. You can see their wakes if caught moving in the pic but the vessel itself is very hard to distinguish.

Buoys are even harder, most aren’t really visible at all even zoomed all the way in. Only the really large stuff is conceivably visible.

And that’s on open water. If a vessel is in shadow from cliffs or clouds it’s even harder. Or is near shore and blends in with nearby features.

I’m sure magical IR cameras can spot them easily because apparently IR can do anything but if you using the old fashioned image way it’s easy to miss something on the water from orbit.

Submarines are the most viable.

TEL even if they can hide in forests, still give off heat and any launch from them would give a rough estimate where they are at. Besides, they would be pretty big and you would still need several of them.

Just look at what a THAAD, S-300/400 or Patriot battery look like and you will see that they are fairly large formations and would run into magazine size issues pretty quick and a formation wouldn't be something that easy to hide.

Yeah, the practical limitations of a surface-based anti-space weapon depends entirely on the tech base of the folks trying to use it. Nowadays it'd be pretty difficult to engage anything in orbit, but fifty years ago it was probably impossible. During WWII, the idea of taking down a low-flying airplane with a rocket launcher would be laughable, even though a bazooka probably would do a number on a Stuka if it could actually connect with it, but now it's folly to assume that a supersonic fighter jet is immune to such threats.

As soon as any system launches a surface-to-space weapon, it can be detected and counterfire brought to bear. That's literally how current defense technology works: major nations have dozens of satellites, if not more, tasked specifically to spot whenever a ballistic missile or orbital rocket is launched. Just last week the US deployed one meant to detect and track hypersonic missiles. (We don't have space-based counterbattery weapons for a variety of reasons, but they're well within our current capabilities.)

Once one has dominance of orbit, and assuming one has look-down/shoot-down capability, any surface-to-space weapons will be seen and their platforms targeted for attack. At that point it comes down to relative tech levels and supply lines. The orbital forces could run out of ammunition or suffer attritive losses that are difficult to replace, but the surface forces have to build, assemble, and deploy their weaponry, all of which could be observed and targeted.

After all, these submarines and their weapons have to be manufactured somewhere. Any attacker who isn't utterly brain-dead will destroy shipyards and weapons factories as one of their first priorities. If you're in for a protracted siege, Strategy 101 says to degrade the enemy's capability to resupply its forces.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 23rd 2024 at 1:19:15 PM

Curious as to why we are looking for a fool-proof invisible surface to orbit system? That's not how warfare works. If all the invading force wants to do is put the planet under siege and pick off specific targets one at a time, they don't need to be in LEO to do that anyway. The moon would be close enough. That means a planet-wide industrial society may never surrender, though.

Generalizing a bit, people very much want the Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion to be a real thing instead of a fantasy.

It's not terribly hard to hide surface-to-space weapons until you use them. At that point, detection is inevitable.

Fliegerfaust has joined the chat. Also that Soviet anti aircraft rocket launcher that was developed postwar and was about to be adopted but then the SA-7 Grail man portable surface to air missile launcher was made.

A lot less laughable than thinking you could fend off aircraft with submachine guns and light mortars or bolt action rifles.

Well there is how absurd this is.

Not only a shoulder fired missile has enough fuel to reach high earth orbit, can track shuttles that far and are so fast that they can shoot them down while they are already on route to the space station.

It basically works on space magic.

Surface-to-orbit is hard. Surface-to-space is an order of magnitude easier. To hit an object in low Earth orbit, you don't need to catch up to it; you just need to lob something high enough (and accurately enough) that its trajectory intersects the target's. The relative velocity (many kilometers per second) will do the remainder of the work for you.

A shoulder-fired missile as an anti-space weapon is pretty unlikely, regardless. There's no way it would have enough delta-V to get up to the 300-500 km regime where something like the Shuttle operates. It would need multiple stages or a hyper-advanced propulsion system, and I wouldn't want to be standing behind something like that lest I get my entire body burned off.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 23rd 2024 at 5:52:49 AM

You could try using underwater cables to feed the subs targeting data and resupply them using artificial underwater caves as submarine pens. All this might be enough to rationalize ground forces.

If it were all prepared ahead of time, maybe. Not sure how one could put together the industrial and engineering capability to do something like that while under attack.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 24th 2024 at 10:49:59 AM

Regarding A-SAT subs... does anyone else envision what's basically a bigger-than-usual ballistic missile sub except the launch tubes are replaced with a railgun stowed inside the hull while underwater?

[Grumbles that firing a railgun at sea level subjects it to the highest possible total atmospheric drag and dynamic forces.]

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 24th 2024 at 9:11:37 AM

It also means you have to surface.

Just use a missile.

I know I spend a lot of time in this thread being contrarian, but a fleet of submarines with ballistic nuclear missiles would indeed be a pretty effective tool against an orbital attacker, since they have the advantages of mobility and stealth. Once they launch, they can duck back underwater and try to evade counterfire.

Those missiles would normally target things on the ground, thousands of kilometers away, but a little fiddling with the software and they'd be ideal surface-to-space weapons. ICBMs can reach up to 4,500 km in altitude, which is more than enough to hit any hypothetical attacker.

^note Historical note: early orbital rockets were adapted from ICBMs, since many of the latter could get fairly close to orbital velocity.

There are a lot of variables of course, such as accuracy and their vulnerability to being shot down, but it's the best tool we've got... until we run out of missiles, at which point we fall back to the problem of resupply if all the shipyards and manufacturing plants have been cratered.

I remain skeptical in the sense that any hypothetical space-based attacker should anticipate the use of surface-launched weapons and be prepared to defeat them, or else they won't be doing much conquering this year. This is where we get into more abstract questions like relative tech levels, psychology, and supply lines.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 24th 2024 at 10:40:03 AM

Underground submarine pens and deep sea bases?

I mean, if we are dealing with deep space and interstellar travel, we might as well have deep sea mining and manufacturing facilities and distributed networked buoys for surveillance.

It would be expensive as hell though.

Regarding being able to target the launchers, sure, that's true of basically any weapons system that you use within line-of-sight of the enemy. It even applies to stealth aircraft as soon as they open their weapons bays. Tracers work both ways, after all.

Of course, the network of pre-placed satellites would require a bit of prep work if the attacker isn't from the same planet. And if they are from the same planet, attackers from orbit aren't your only concern anyways as anyone capable of putting weapons platforms in orbit or on spaceships capable of Casual Interplanetary Travel are absolutely capable of launching devastating attacks from planetside. In fact, we've been able to do that in Real Life for many decades now.

Someone who needs to travel to the planet could place observation platforms in orbit ahead of time to have eyes on the planet for when the launches happen. Of course, if your doctrine assumes that launchers are single-use, that might not matter to anyone other than the crews who have to work the equipment anyways. Ultimately any ground-based launcher that can't be quickly replaced with a spare squirreled away elsewhere is only as permanent as any other stationary defense. Barbed wire can be cut, trenches taken, rivers and moats bridged, walls scaled or broken, but it all costs the attacker something to accomplish if they can't bypass the defenses instead, so such defenses can serve as part of a deterrent to attack, by ensuring that any such attacks are expensive, especially if the home team has its own fleet of ships for the attacker to take into consideration.

I'm kind of visualizing something akin to WWII bombing missions where one or more factions are sending fleets of ships to do fly-by attacks, attempting to whittle down planetary defenses or strike targets despite them while having to fight their way past the incoming defensive fire (knocking down anti-space missiles with their own ECM and interceptors, for example, or dealing with enemy ships intercepting them on the way, etc.)

EDIT: "It would be expensive" is the understatement of the genre when it comes to interplanetary or interstellar warfare. I remember watching Revenge of the Sith and being boggled by how much it must have cost just to build the ships fighting in orbit over Coruscant at the beginning of the film, especially with the implication that the Republic's fleet just plain didn't exist a few years prior.

Edited by AFP on Feb 24th 2024 at 1:04:15 AM

Yes but this takes time. Anything shot from space will take a couple of minutes to hit any designated place. Lasers are all but impossible to use when you not only have to account for atmosphere, water spray, but also potentially a couple of dozen meters of water. A sub will have to get close to the water surface, but it doesnt necessarily have to fully surface to fire. And even a few meters of water are going to ruin the day of kinetic and energy weapons alike, at least anything you can fire from orbit.

So there is no instantaneous firing solution, and that means a sub can absolutely do a hit-and-run.

The problem is that it's effectively impossible to instantaneously take control of the entire planetary surface, let alone stragglers. By the time the last gun falls silent, resistance will have towed their missile systems into forests, nuclear subs are opening their final order letters, and there's plenty of firepower left to attack anyone in orbit.

Better missile technology, which we are seeing more and more of, will only make this easier for the defender. Modern long-range missiles are anti-space weapons too, all it has taken for a few past anti-satellite weapons tests were some software guidance updates.

Which means that, even when you are occupying a planet, orbit isn't the ultimate highground - it's the ultimate shooting gallery. Line of sight works both ways, and highground is powerful precisely because a hill or mountain is also a physical object. But forces on the ground have plenty of physical matter to stop enemy attacks - earth, water- while in Orbit, the only thing defending you is a potential well.

Edited by devak on Feb 24th 2024 at 10:25:09 AM

In orbit your only real defenses are either evasion, interception or resilience. Don’t be there when that laser, missile, railgun slug or what have you gets there. Shoot it down or away from you before it gets there. Or just be a tough enough son of a bitch with armor, mass or Deflector Shields to simply take it and survive.

Any other possibility is an extraneous and unusual add on.

At this point it's worth chiming in with some fun statistics on aerial bombing over heavily defended targets, going back to my analogy of WWII heavy bombers. The casualty rates those bombers took was substantial, and a lot of it came down to the bombers not being able to get in and out fast enough to avoid interception, thanks to ground-based radars tracking them and a pretty well-developed air defense network. Between the ground-based Anti-Air artillery defenses and air-based interceptors, the bomber formations would get routinely mauled on their way to and from the target.

There were various tactics they could use at the time to try and mitigate this. Flying at lower altitude would make it harder to detect the bombers in a big-picture sense, but exposed them to a much wider variety of ground-based air defenses ranging from smaller guns to things like barrage balloons, or just regular navigational hazards like trees, power lines, radio towers, hills, etc. Another option was to make the route of the bombers as unpredictable as possible by doing things like "Shuttle" missions, taking off from one base and landing at a different base, often in a different country. Then you had stuff like Electronic Countermeasures.

There's also the option of targeting the defense system itself, which we've been discussing here already. For a space-based attack, I could see the first wave or two focusing on this while follow-on waves take advantage of the hopefully-weakened defenses to hit their other targets.

You’d probably be having combinations of that, fleet raids or actions and maybe set up to look like SEAD campaigns.

Possibly even diversionary attacks to bring their guns or ships elsewhere. Like the Japanese tried with Dutch Harbor in June 1942.

I dont think WW 2 is a good comparison point here. Missiles have become too good, so the elevation thing isn't relevant: air defenses are perfectly capable of shooting down basically any kind of plane at basically any elevation.

There's a reason the major nations are investing gobsmacking amounts of money in stealth: just about the only way to ensure your airforce can operate in contested air space is by not being seen.

In terms of capturing a planet, you'd probably want a limited advance force to do sabotage (assuming this isn't a first-contact invasion). Following that, you'd want long-range bombardment to destroy the biggest known threats such as missile silos. After that, you'd want to capture orbit (which, coincidentally, you'd also want to clean up by sabotage and long-range bombardment) before going to the actual capturing of the planet, which is going to be by far the most complicated part of the attack.

And, as we have seen numerous times in world history: capturing a place is easy. Holding a place is very, very hard. The USA, the worlds' strongest military by far, lost way more people and material trying to hold territory than trying to capture it.

I feel like we've covered this before. Attacking a mature, developed planet in an effort to capture it with its population more or less intact is a terrible idea. It's possibly the least practical thing you can do in all of space warfare.

The only way you can expect to attempt it and succeed is with overwhelming technological and logistical superiority. Consider the Seven Hour War described in the Half-Life franchise. The Combine didn't invade with fleets of spacecraft; it opened portals to basically everywhere and hit every major military and government center simultaneously.

The lore states that this took an enormous investment in energy and resources, which the Combine has since it's a Type 2 civilization (at least) and impressing worlds into its galactic empire is something it does routinely, like walking the dog or going shopping. The only reason the resistance is able to strike a counter-blow is that the invasion forces move out and the occupying forces are caught being complacent. It's made amply clear that if the Combine does reinvade, we're fucked.

Earlier, I talked about the Human-Pitar war in the Humanx Commonwealth series. The purpose of the war was not to capture and occupy the Pitar homeworlds (which were all in the same solar system), but to contain and remove them as a threat. Humans had greater resources and were able to fully blockade their worlds, but the planetary defenses forced a stalemate until human and thranx scientists invented a new superweapon to break it. Even then, as soon as it was clear that they had lost, the Pitar committed mass suicide rather than fight to the last individual.

V presents another way to conquer a planet: arrive "peacefully", make First Contact with the less-developed native civilization, then assimilate into their society. Once you've got enough agents in place, decapitate its power structure and seize control. Of course, the aliens in that show are really freaking stupid, so I don't recommend following their example precisely.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 25th 2024 at 2:07:43 PM

For an interstellar empire though that would be standard conquest fare. If you’re that, you’re not trying to rule an empty cosmos.

The old industrialist warfare of the late 19th to 20th century such as the Scramble for Africa isn’t going to be repeated unless a settled world somehow miraculously has a mineral or resource that can neither by synthesized nor found in great abundance in more “dead” environs such as asteroids.

Capturing a world for conquest is a very valid and practical thing for space warfare to be about. Rarely would space warfare have a reason at all otherwise. The primary alternatives to that are either ideological (we don’t like them or how they think and the inverse), genocidal (we/they view them/us as pests or vermin), survivalist (we/they are the last chance of an entire species and there might not be enough time to solve the issue for both) or strictly economic (e.g. they have more money than us and we don’t like that).

Of those four scenarios, three of them have a likelihood (ideological, genocidal, survivalist) of happening. Strictly economic warfare is basically Space Pirates on meth and is by far the least practical of any given it’s a Silly Reason for War.

It's not. It's useless and futile to conquer a "homeworld". Anyone attempting it without overwhelmingly superior technology should have their brain checked. (Colony worlds without thousands of years of infrastructure, sure. Go nuts.)

If you want to enslave or coerce the native population, attacking them directly is the worst possible way to go about it. If you want the biosphere without any pesky sapients around to resist you, send bioweapons or sterilize it with gamma rays or something. If you want the resources, there are quadrillions of uninhabited bodies that you can go to.

The Humanx Commonwealth case I cited above is an example of a defensive invasion — undertaken not to conquer but to eliminate the species' ability to inflict further harm.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 25th 2024 at 11:20:46 AM