This is part two of my post about how comedians and entertainers don’t seem to have a clue about how the military functions in the real world, and how they don’t understand how armed civilians can fight that military. They seem to feel that any advanced weapon that the military possesses is powerful in all situations. I discussed the use of Drones, Aircraft and Artillery, and how they are of limited use against an insurgent force, and also have their own weaknesses. And how the use of weapons of mass destruction might backfire on those who use them, not only driving more people to revolt, but also probably many regulars and guardsmen as well. Maybe even whole units of them. But let’s say that the government can keep most of the troops in line. The strength of our Army and Marine Corps is in their discipline and ability to proficiently use weapons. Now the strength of the civilian gun owners, especially the hunters, is their knowledge of the area they are operating in, and the ability to proficiently use weapons. Most hunters, and many of those who aren’t, can consistently hit a target within the effective range of their weapon, whether it is a pistol or a scope mounted deer rifle. Many civilians are also veterans, who with a minimal amount of retraining, could effectively use machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers, etc. Where would they get these weapons? From the people that are using them against the populace. Supply convoys, warehouses, trains, all kinds of places. Whenever a military unit loses a firefight there will be weapons to pick up.
The strength of the rebels is their familiarity with their area of operations. A soldier from New York State may also have been a hunter, but he is not going to be as familiar with the Ozarks as someone raised in Arkansas. The rebels will be able to choose where they fight. As a relative of mine pointed out to me, this will not be a recreation of the civil war, where regiment fought regiment in open battle. Rebels will strike at the best place and time for them to strike, bringing their forces together to hit a smaller and weaker Federal force. Sure, there will be times when the soldiers gain the advantage, moving troops into position by APC or helicopter. Even if they win a thousand of these battles they will still lose the war. In a battle of attrition the side with the most troops is almost sure to win. And the strength of the military, its discipline, will become diluted as they lose well trained men and have to replace them with new conscripts who may not be the most motivated to put their lives on the line for the government against their friends and neighbors. I figure the desertion rate would continue to grow throughout the fighting. In John Ringo’s book Live Free or Die, the US sends troops into Vermont to take away the maple syrup that aliens want because it acts as a valuable intoxicant for other aliens. The men of Vermont don’t want to give up their syrup, which can eventually be sold to the aliens that really want it for the technology to raise the Earth up to a status where they can defend themselves. The soldiers don’t fair too well in the woods of Vermont against experienced deer hunters, many of whom are good enough shots to wound instead of kill. I think Ringo was spot on in developing this scenario. Sure, hunters would die, but the soldeirs wouild also be run through a meat grinder.
The strength of the rebels will be in their anonimity. When not on operations they will be indistinguishable from the rest of the population, while a soldier will look like a soldier, whether while in battle or in garrison at a base. The rebels could not be found while they were not pursuing their non-rebel tasks. Leaving the military to either depend on catching enough of them, or on using reprisals to stop people from fighting as rebels or supporting the rebel cause. History has shown that such a tactic is unlikely to work. Rounding up and hanging innocent civilians might cause some people to give up their neighbors, but most would become really pissed, and the ranks of the rebellion would swell. History has also shown that colaborators normally don’t last very long either. And again, except in limited situations, the rebels will be dictating the time and place of battle, and many of them will be men and women with military experience, some with a great deal of experience. They will know how to cammoflauge and use terrain to their advantage. What about the militias, said to be the target of the government forces? Coming to target the militias would also mean that the militias would target them. I doubt these paranoid people would just hand over their weapons and allow themselves to be led to detainment centers, which would also become targets of the rebels.
The military has tanks and armored vehicles, you might say. Yes, they do, and such weapon systems are formidable. They are also very vulnerable in a number of ways, especiaily when deployed in urban or forested terrain. Modern tanks are very hard to kill, but fire can still do the job, and insurgents have been using fire against tanks since WW2 and the Molotov Cocktail. Most verterans know how to make jellied gasoline that sticks to tanks (and people). Many Americans have some expertise with explosives, either from military training or civilian demolitions work. A seventy ton tank dropped into the river is dead. Tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters will still inflict severe casualties in some fights, In others they will helplessly patrol the edge of a battlefield in frustration. My brother told me of a situation in Vietnam where paratroopers on a training jump were trapped in a swamp. Their armored cav company was called in to bail them out, and after the one culverted bridge into the area was taken out by a rocket, all they could do was fire their cannon on a high arc and hope they hit something. They weren’t very successful. The Afghanies learned how to shoot down heavily armored Soviet helicopters with fifty caliber machine guns fired down from the heights. There are quite a number of fifty caliber rifles out there, with more to be gathered by the rebels after a battle.
Another area in which the rebels might have some success is in the world of industry. Weapons need to be built and transported to where they are going to be used. This includes spare parts, ammunition and fuel. The rebels can interdict these in the factory through sabatoge of production lines, then stop the transport by rail or truck on the transportation arteries. The military could try to compensate for this by transporting equipment by air, an expensive propostion in fuel and time. And of course the airbases themselves could be attacked. Any way you look at it, the US Military would face a daunting task trying to supress a population in revolt. Just about anything they do would just cause the revolt to widen and the rebel forces to increase, while their own strength was whittled away. I believe that not only could the American civilian population stand up to an attempt at military control, they would eat the military alive within a very short time. A year on the outside. Even if they achieve a nine to one kill rate they lose. So all the rhetoric about how civilians don’t have a chance against the military is a bunch of crap. If their firearms are taken away their chances are really reduced. This is waht happened in the Soviet Union and NAzi Germany, where only the authorities had weapons. That is not the America I want to see.
Strategy
All posts tagged Strategy
This is the fifth installment in this blog entry. Early entries can be found at:
Trafalgar in Space, Part 1: Beam Weapons.
Trafalgar in Space, Part 2: Missiles.
Trafalgar in Space, Part 3: Defensive Fields.
Trafalgar in Space, Part 4: Other Defenses.
Now how will ships maneuver in space, especially when they are shooting at each other? Will it be like Star Trek where, though moving at an appreciable fraction of light speed, they will run through each others positions firing away? Or will they go broadside to broadside as in Star Wars? I think if they are going an appreciable fraction of light speed they will not get too close to each other, not within a thousand kilometers, since one mistake could slam ships together. I think that even ships in the same fleet will have some spread both for safety and so a heavy warhead weapon won’t get more than one of them. That still does not answer the question of how they will maneuver. I guess it depends on several factors, the first being the type of engine they have. A fusion engine and even some types of ion devices might be deadly downstream of the engine. Fusion plasma and radiation might cause all kinds of problems to a ship that is hit. So maneuvers would have to be planned so that this radiation doesn’t hit the friendlies. Conversely, it might be advantageous to play fusion flame over an enemy. In the Exodus series I use a device I call grabbers, with a slang name of Ether Paddles. They work on the fabric of space itself to move the ship. There is no exhaust, and no need to carry exhaust mass. It would still take a lot of engine to operate, but also allows the ship to thrust in any direction without a change in orientation. I just believe that along the way we will find a better way of propelling our ships through space than sending matter out the back.
Another factor is how fast we can decelerate/accelerate. In Star Trek they go to light speed in an instant and to a stop in another instant. They use the invention of inertial compensators to accomplish this, and while I like the idea, I don’t think in the reasonable future we will be able to accel/decel at such incredible rates. But let’s say that they can accelerate at high levels, and we don’t have compensators. It still limits the abilities of a manned vessel. At three gees the crew is going to be very uncomfortable. Above that they will only be able to move around in mobile couches, which takes human damage control out of the equation. Robots could still do the job though. To accelerate at higher rates humans would have to use fluid filled acceleration tanks that would allow them to survive at thirty gees and maybe a bit more. But they still wouldn’t be able to work the ship, meaning get their hands on things to fix or repair. So we add in inertial compensators to give them the ability to accelerate at hundreds of gravities (I use over four hundred for most warships in Exodus). It still takes time to build up to high velocities. And if the compensators go down and the engines don’t we have a crew of jam on the ship, as they are crushed out of existence. So we have a warship accelerating at hundreds of gravities, heading into a system. At some point, unless they intend to just fly past the target or destination, they have to start to decelerate at around the halfway point. And it takes just as long to decel as it did to acel up to speed. If something gets in the way that something gets hit. And if it is even a moderate mass it might go deep into the vessel causing all kinds of damage. Something really heavy like a bog rock (asteroid sized) and the ship is gone. There’s also the problem of radiation while traveling fast through matter filled solar systems. At high velocity just about anything coming at you can be called radiation, and it’s all harmful. So ships will have to have strong screens to shed charged particles. Uncharged particles are another matter and can only be stopped by heavy pieces of matter.
So how would ships approach each other in battle? I can think of three most likely scenarios. One would be that they stay at maximum effective missile range at let loose at each other. They would be boosting in about the same orientation and maintain distance. The second would be a fast boost toward each other, firing missiles, then beam weapons when the range got into about five light minutes. The fleets would pass, then start to decel, which might take days, until they could head at each other again. Poul Anderson called this the day of boredom, followed by an hour of intense activity and tension, followed by days of boredom. The third would be the most unlikely, where the fleets decel at each other so they could spend the maximum time pounding the crap out of each other at close range. It would take two to adopt this strategy, and I wouldn’t want to give up my ability to maneuver at speed just to get in some extra licks, and take them. Only in a situation where I had to defend something, like a planet or stationary base, would I ever contemplate such an insane tactic. But it does happen in Exodus.
I recently read an ebook on fighting, everything from hand to hand to pitched battles. The author did a very good job on it, and even though I consider myself a novice expert on military tactics and strategy, I learned some things. However, in one part she was very off the mark. The author stated that all battles are planned, and an obvious mistake was when a writer had two armies fighting it out by accident. It seemed that she had never heard of a meeting engagement, where two opponents blunder into each other and a battle is joined without prior planning. Now granted, many battles through history were planned affairs where two armies took the field at a predetermined time. In more modern settings, including the Napoleonic Wars, one side tended to plan an attack and would attack the side that wasn’t prepared. But we could still say that the battle was planned. The meeting engagement is planned by no one, but a fierce battle can still develop.
The most famous meeting engagement in American history is Gettysburg. Both armies were hoping to get into a fight, just not where they met. The vanguards of both armies ran into each other and a fight developed. The Union cavalry commander wanted to hold the ground, so he dug in. The rest of the armies came up in bits and pieces and were set out to turn the flanks that kept expanding, until, by the second day, there were two lines of troops facing each other. The story goes that Longstreet kept asking Lee to retreat and make the Union army attack him at a place of his choosing, in a planned battle. But Lee, a very aggressive general, decided that he couldn’t retreat, and so attacked an opponent that was superior to him in numbers and position.
There have been many meeting engagements in modern history, including multiple battle of maneuver on the Russian Front and North Africa during World War 2. Mobile forces are well suited to meeting engagements as they move across unfamiliar terrain and bump into each other in an oh shit moment of recognition. Then it’s a race to get the most to the developing battlefront before the enemy. I also think that most of the naval battles I have heard of were meeting engagements. Fleets normally blunder into each other before they’re ready. Some ships are hunting others, it is night, foggy, rainstorm, whatever, and they come out of the fog bank and there is the enemy fleet.
I plan to use several meeting engagements in Refuge: The Legions, when I have the force of NATO and the forces of the Empire marching toward each other with only a general idea where the other force is. Armies on the march, if they are well led, always have forces out ahead and to either side, both to scout out the enemy and to keep the enemy from scouting them. Often scout forces will try to route the other side’s scouts, fighting to gain information, and many meeting engagements occur this way. Now in fantasy there may be other ways of getting information on the enemy, such as aerial forces and magic. If using aerial forces like dragons or large birds, many of the things that caused consternation on mid twentieth century battlefields will also occur there. People may be hard to spot from the air under the cover of trees, or only can be seen when they are at river crossings. If an army is spread over an area of march a spotting may only give the most rudimentary location for the total force, and give very little information about their destination. And if magic is used the other side may use counter magic to give a false impression and a false location. So again the chances of a meeting engagement increase.
As said earlier, I plan to use several meeting engagements in the Refuge series because I think there is nothing more exiting in warfare than a complete fog of war situation in which both sides rush whatever they have into a fight with a force of unknown composition. The stakes are high, decisions have to be made in an instant, and reinforcements are not always sent to the right place. Sometimes the reinforcements are not sent to the right place but it turns out, with the direction of a good commander on the spot, to be the best place for them to go to. Battles have been turned on men going to the wrong place at the right time and rolling up an enemy flank. And they have been turned on regiments uncovering vital parts of the line like a blocker in football moving to the wrong place and allowing a sacker through. Like I said, exciting stuff and just the kind of series of scenes I like to write.
Coming soon will be a five part blog on what I think far future space warfare will look like.