You're going to turn the survivors into a massive guerrilla force: even if you win, the ruins left behind aren't going to be anywhere near profitable or useful enough to justify the cost in blood and gold. If your standard approach to warfare is to blast apart all opposition from orbit, you will be killing a lot of civilians along with the soldiers. I already touched on this with how bombardment will tend to pulverize the very resources you're trying to claim, but it goes beyond that.
#ARMIES IN SPACE WARFARE FULL#
Those valuable mines on Planet Minertown, full of fragile unobtanium that's worth twenty million credits a kilogram, collapsed by your nuclear bombs? Great job denying the enemy that resource, but you're cutting off your nose to spite your face at that point, since you've now destroyed your reason for trying to take the planet over in the first place. Those wide fertile fields of Planet Farmerville aren't going to grow any crops after they've been reduced to wastelands by bombardment.
Reason number two: in a war of conquest, you want to acquire something the other side has, typically territory and/or resources. in other words, you don't actually control the territory at all. If you stick to just orbital surveillance, you are guaranteed to miss most dissident action, subterfuge, etc. You need to enforce curfews and martial law and so on, whatever policies are necessary to maintain order, and you need boots on the ground to do that. You can't effectively govern a city entirely from orbit, even if you get them to surrender somehow. One reason for ground forces is that you need them to, well, hold ground. Usually, though, you're not fighting a war of extermination: I'm going to be running on the assumption that you're referring predominantly to wars of conquest, with somewhat more nuanced objectives than "kill them all". Why are you making war in the first place? Your reasons dictate your methods, because the costs aren't always acceptable. Thanks so much to you both, your answers were super helpful and really struck at what I was looking for. Why would this strategy be ineffective, even against a technologically inferior foe?ĮDIT: Man, I wish I could “accept” multiple answers, cuz both DWKraus and Palarran deserve it. But it still seems pretty hard to counter pods of men smashing right into the middle of your lines at high speeds. The main thing I’m thinking of is that troop transports would still need to slow down so as not to kill the passengers, since magic would have a hard time mass producing enough equipment to counter that due to the physical toll.
#ARMIES IN SPACE WARFARE FREE#
With all this in mind, when capturing a planet, what would cause the formula of “acquire a beachhead, then push with land forces” to need to be followed? Why couldn’t you just drop troop transports in free fall (sorta like in Starship Troopers) from the atmosphere onto enemy defenses and negate their lines? Much of the time there will be a technology imbalance between foes, too. Magic is also a thing, but I haven’t made strict rules yet, so you can be flexible with that (The only major rule is that using magic takes a toll, usually physical damage to your own body). Problem: In a space-age war (with magic), why would ground troops be used, rather than just dropping orbital marines onto problem areas?Įlaboration: So to set the stage, we’re dealing with wars spanning many planets.
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