Also, if the enemy knows that they have only orbital bombardment to look foward to, they might well see no point in surrender. And desperate people can do desperate things. Also, even despite that, it's no fun being king of a wasteland.
Next, can you cover boarding action (including sweeping disabled ships and protecting prize crews), occupying space stations and orbital infrastructure, and especially combat in micro gravity/zero-g?
Nice Marine quote, perfect guys to hit planetary beaches and open up beach heads. Guaranteed we are just waiting for that epic day, to drop from space on a hostile target. So far, Amy thoughts I had on what you were saying, you got to shortly after you said, said thought provoking thing. Soo…why aren’t you also trying to convince us on the merits of ladders? They are damn handy, coming from a guy that use to use them a lot, I mean they are a pain in the ass, even though so useful….you should definitely do a vid on the merits of ladders, just saying, I’d watch it, and you know go over the history of em, they do involve a lot with warfare, especially early stuff when we still sucked at big wars, like world wars, and had piddly cannon, and garbage arquebuses. Definitely were used in a strategic way, to take castles and later forts.
Lol imagine some alien general or strategist from an advanced alien civilization watching a video made by primitive hairless apes on planetary invasion lol
Your discussion on Orbital Bombardment is one of the reason I love Halo so much, because they go down the checklist of reasons why not to bombard. Do you require the planets resources? No. Do you have to worry about military consequences? No. Do you have to worry about Diplomatic consequences? No. The Covenant only deployed ground troops when there was something on the planet they wanted. Otherwise they just glassed it.
Ah yes The Shadow of Intent... Rtas's solution for Wiping out Flood to Retrieve a Message from a Human kind AI for ending the infestation... Literally Glassed Half a Continent
Covenant vs brazil would be a decisive victory for Brazil. The covenant decided to go to Brazil, and now they’re stuck in Brazil. They cannot leave and therefore have lost.
This is why Halo still does interstellar war really well. The Covenant only invaded planets that had relics they wanted. Otherwise, they just sat in orbit and glassed the planet.
I mean it makes sense. Covenant main goal was eradication of humanity and collecting Forerunner relics. Once the orbital battle is won unless the world has something of interest just bomb it from space.
I find that the "escalation ladder" metaphor works even better if the order is turned upside down: Peacetime at the top, annihilation at the bottom. It illustrates the danger of what happens when some steps are missing, and how easy it is to slip into escalation vs. the effort of deescalation.
Man, imagine having to launch a planetary invasion of an ocean world. Full-sized battleships and aircraft carriers being deployed from orbit... Majestic
There was a series of Star Wars: Clone Wars episodes about that. Both the Republic and Separatists both deployed water suited infantry/droids and vehicles to help secure victory.
If we're talking about advanced civilizations, then they could easily do much better than full size, and in invading an ocean world, they might very well prioritize massive submarines instead. Which might just end up looking like a bomb dropping from the sky, before engaging a thruster or some kind of descent mechanism to keep from killing everyone on impact with the surface of the water. Regardless the thing could be massive, possibly on the scale of kilometers if they don't intend to return it to orbit in one piece, since there's really no building limit in space other than that of resources and function.
@@gesus6613 Not necessarily. 1. Spaceships can't really hit naval ships without slowing down their weapon reentry due to plasma blackout. You need to decelerate to low hypersonic speeds to guide a weapon to target. 2. Naval ships CAN hit spaceships, especially anything in low orbit. 3. Any projectile weapon at sensible muzzle velocity or delta-V will have to overfly huge amounts of territory for several minutes before impacting its target. A naval ship can receive plenty of warning and a submarine may even have sufficient time to dive before the weapon impacts. 4. From high or elliptical orbit, while the spaceship is safer and has more operational freedom, it's attacks are arguably even more telegraphed and ASATs can be deployed by the planetary defenders against incoming missiles. 5. Aircraft are highly mobile but can't be targeted with anti-ground or anti-space weaponry. The threat posed by an F-15 with an ASAT is probably sufficient that you would at minimum want some kind of air defenses near your operations. Historically, the defense against aircraft has involved air superiority fighters, which need somewhere to land, refuel and take off again, as integrating SSTO capability into a fighter would probably get it killed if it ever saw combat. This necessitates the construction, seizure, or landing of such places on the ground or in the sea.
"In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Ch. III "Attack By Stratagem", §1). If it works for countries, it surely works for planets.
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 Amazing indeed. I think it's because Sun Tzu based his book on researches he made during his lifetime and tried to keep situations he's describing as broadly as possible (sometimes it's almost "war epistemology" or Polemology).
Its actually common sense depends on your war goal. Stopping an expansionist empire? Capture its planets for resources Full-on Genocidal mode? Exterminatus Helping a rebellion or ideology war? Capture it whole and make a puppet gov Lower their morale? Bomb civilians Lower their output? Strategic bombardment
17:32 All points on the escalation ladder - Unrestricted use of WMDs - Unrestricted orbital bombardment - Limited use of orbital bombardment, WMDs - Mass use of conventional forces against military/economic targets - Mass use of precision strikes against military/economic targets - Grounded use of precision strikes against military/economic targets - Grounded use of precision strikes against military targets - Assembly and transfer of WMDs - Complete mobilization of all forces - Precautionary WMD alert - Complete infliction of damage on immaterial targets - Limited infliction of damage on immaterial targets - Military blockade - Reinforce key military units and stockpiles - Partial mobilization of military forces - Unconventional convert offense campaign in core territories - Unconventional overt offense campaign in outlying territories - Unconventional convert retaliation - Selective mobilization of military forces - Military signaling, test exercises - Pre-crisis maneuvering, gestures, diplomacy
One of the other things we can learn from World War 2 is that having a fleet of ships in a location known to the enemy for any significant length of time would be INCREDIBLY dangerous in any situation where the enemy has ships that can respond: one of the hardest things to do to even have a battle at all (space or sea,) is to find the other ships, but if you know where your enemy is (like, say, in orbit,) and they don't know where you are, you can launch a massive first strike against their fleet and gain a solid upper-hand. If the planet has its own defenses as well, the attacking fleet would also be immediately flanked, and usually with no means of retreat. As such, many planetary assaults would need to move *fast*, so the most valuable ships involved can retreat to a safer location, and the ships you would leave behind to support the invasion would likely be weaker and expendable, and thus unlikely to be able to support each army beyond wherever the planetary defenders might have a dead spot in their defenses.
Also worth noting IMO, that when it comes to a interstellar civilisation's planet vs a fleet, the planet almost always has the upper hand. They have the material resources of the entire planet to throw at the fleet, they have bigger and more numerous reactors with which to power better shields, and they have the ability to construct bunkers and so on. Unless the planet in question is severely underdeveloped, the fleet manages to annihilate much of the planet in a matter of hours, or the fleet has absurdly powerful weapons that are unavailable to the planet, a planet will ultimately win the exchange, ignoring morale. Though, even if you do include morale, that's still likely to tip in the planet's favour IMO: the civilians are trying to defend their homes from invasion. When they see New New York has been obliterated by the fleet in orbit, its likely to make them go "do I really want the people who obliterated New New York to be my rulers?". Meanwhile, if the crew of the fleet see that the space battleship USS Iowa has just been blown to bits, they're likely to say "do I really want to suffocate or be burnt to death, in order to take this planet?". Up the chain from them, you can't imagine many admirals being happy to see one of their fleets take heavy losses in order to destroy a planet that might not even be particularly strategically useful.
Finding spaceships is actually very easy. Since they radiate heat one would be able to see the position of absolutely everyone all the time. If you wanted to have a battle, you would just need to catch up to the other spaceship before it moves away from you until one of the two doesn't have enough inertial mass or fuel to continue moving around (at that point, said side has lost the battle too, as it probably will be stranded there infinetly).
@@1967sluggy It does depend as well , if you can denie via raids , power and food to the population the population may force them to surrender again though factoring int hey are some form of democracy, even if they dont cede it does push the planet closer towards defeat without a full scale assualt
Planetary bombardment is going to be phase 2 of the planetary invasion. Phase 1 is the orbital battle. When you win you bomb all orbital and anti-drop defences. Blow up military emplacements that won't ruin civilian/industrial infrastructure. Then you drop and need to disarm the remaining defenders with orbital support replacing modern air strikes
You can move in the ships, disembark the troops, and retire the ships, leaving in place highly automated, space fortresses, etc, but the best is to kill the enemy Navy first.
My favorite dropship example was "Project Meteor" from Gundam Wing, in which space colonies, wishing to declare independence from the United Earth Federation, secretly developed an advanced type of mobile suit using a metallic alloy that could only be produced in zero gravity. They plant the trajectories alongside meteor showers so that the units could safely make landfall without being shot out of the sky. Then, once on the earth, the pilots would hide in plain sight during the day and take out key military targets at night. The overall objective was to diminish the Earth's capacity to exercise military control over the colonies, while at the same time obfuscating which colonies which actually involved in the attack against the Earth. Aside from the fact that this was a giant robot anime, I thought that the entire premise was extremely realistic.
It's a brilliant example of a revised plan which is more sane than the original. Since the original Operation Meteor was 'destabilize a colony so it will drop onto the Earth, while this prospect causes chaos on Earth, use the Gundams to hit key targets so that when the colony hits, no coherent government/military response can happen, then land forces to pick up the pieces/occupy the Earth.' which, while potentially effective, is pretty damn insane in terms of collateral damage. (Of course, they didn't care about owning the Earth, just the Earth not being able to control them so it still meets their objective.) Edit: It's also worth mentioning that the original Operation Meteor wouldn't necessarily achieve the political objective the colonies wanted. It could easily have been counter productive. Meanwhile, targeted strikes in secret against the OZ membership inside the Alliance Military was a much more viable way to get the job done. It didn't end up working out, but that's in large part do to a counter intelligence coup by Oz turning their targeting onto the _exact_ wrong targets. The operation's execution was quite well done for the time it lasted at least.
Turn A was also pretty good about being more about the war than the robots. The moon people also did a similar thing with using mobile suits as dropships for child scouts who would blend into society and grow up while feeding the Lunarians info.
The siege of Terra in 40K is proof that purely orbital attacks aren’t enough if the enemy has shields, orbital attacks are extremely useful strategically eg localised lance attacks etc the issue is with bombarding a world to dust you lose its resources and at the extreme ends you lose a planet strategically
40K is the poster child for why planetary invasions work and generally have the logistics to make it work. Certainly everyone always says exterminatus all the time, but that is always a last resort, even by the exterminatus trigger happy inquisition.
@@tyrannicfool2503 yep, the astartes went in expecting light to medium resistance from known forces and instead were attacked by traitors, and it's actually a great example of why planatery bombardments don't always work, the traitors deployed a virus that ate all organic matter, and the astartes still survived and forced the traitors to deploy ground troops to elimanate them
I think the video makes the best comparison up front: It's not a new suggestion, and despite what bomber harris and others insisted, they already had their proof that bombing alone couldn't force a surrender in the form of the blitz. If it didn't work in London, only hubris would lead them to believe it would work everywhere that wasn't London.
Battle-tech during the age of war shows how effective orbital bombardment is,but also how ineffective it is when you actually want a planet and not a burning and radioactive waste land.
In Starship Troopers (the book) the navy has weapons which can blow planets in half. They aren't allowed to use them because that would mean the habitable planet humans could spread to in the future is gone. There is also a third alien race in the series which is, more or less, neutral because they need a different environment to live in (both humans and bugs want the same type of worlds).
@@cp1cupcake I had a similar situation in a 4x game, Space Empires 4, where I encountered a friendly alien race that could only inhabit gas giants. Meaning we had essentially no real reason to wage war on one another.... yet anyway. So instead we colonies each others space and I became imminently paranoid of all these potential footholds in every system. Scary, but safe!
Pretty much after the Tanetenvel incident, it pretty much forced all nations to sign a convention treaty that outlawed thr use of WMDs indiscriminate action. (Unless your Capellians picking a fight with Space West Virgina...then you're going to end up with lots of dead Capellians and one planet to show for using nukes.) However that did make war more of a sport until the rise of the Battlemech. Then in the first two succession wars... pretty much all the noble houses regressed to what would amount 2000 Era of technology with smoldering ruins of the 30th century of advance tech....that yes it is possible to bomb humanity back to the stoneage.
Good thing that Halo's Covenant didn't care about preserving human planets, just killing humans and occasionally taking some Forerunner relics before the glassing.
While on an individual level the Imperium is trigger-happy, a recurring theme in a lot of the fiction is how slow to act and how much redundancy of command there is in the Adeptus Terra due to internal distrust and memories of large scale rebellion.
There is an entire departement in the Inquistion, the Ordo Excorium, whose entire job is to analyse the various usages of Exterminatus to judge wether or not it was necessary. If they find a case that they judge to have been unnecessary they will then have the person who ordered it executed.
Extermanatus is the tool of last resort, however, it is often the first proposed solution to a planet-wide issue. But, as anyone who has played Space Marine (2011) can see, it's often shot down quite rapidly. They weren't even willing to use heavy capital-ship class weaponry on the planet. The options are whittled to one advance SQUAD of ultramarines, and their whole job was simply to secure one manufactory while a proper fleet response got underway. That's what makes Inquisitor Kryptman get excommunicated from the Inquisition (right or wrong is still hotly debated), his unabashed use of exterminatus as a firebreak was seen as heinous by imperium of man standards. Let that sink in.
More specifically, Kryptmann's actions were horrifying because not only was his use of exterminatus at an unprecedented scale, it was also used against planets that were perfectly fine at the time - and worse, carried out so fast that almost none of the world's personnel, resources, and relics could be taken off. Exterminatus when a world is effectively lost makes sense; you lose the world for thousands of years or forever, but you had already lost it and get to deny it to the enemy. Exterminatus on a world that is perfectly intact and has done nothing wrong is a huge line to step over, let alone on this scale.
Xenos Invasion In Progress Designation: Forge World Priority Assets: Warlord Class Titan Manufacturing Strategic Value: Absolute Recommended Course Of Action? Orbital Stike? Negative. Estimated Reduction In Manufacturing Output Unacceptable. Exterminatus? Negative, Strategic Value Absolute. But... Negative, Strategic Value ABSOLUTE!
@@UnreasonableOpinions This also became more troublesome once Chaos started inciting exterminatus for a variety of their plots. Being overly exterminatus button pushing may indicate corruption, as well as zeal. This is part of the plot of both Dawn of War 1 and 2 games.
Let's not forget that W40K is somewhat a parody of itself, and that by the moral standards of almost any other reality, the fact alone of someone being so quick to nonchalantly suggest exterminating an entire planet could get them court-martialed.
I love the Maginot Worlds in stellaris. A whole planet gets converted into a sprawling defensive platform with all districts dedicated to planetary defense and basically every citizen exists solely to defend the planet. And, if somehow the planet falls, the planet acts as an antimatter bomb and annihilates the whole solar system
While mods should not be counted the reality is that those word are a pain in a playthrough. The core of the empire accessible by only one hyper-line and at the end is a 30K star base that debuff your fleet follow by a planet full of fortress, a planet shield and a ftl inhibitor that you need to take to progress in the war
Sadly, in the case of dealing with Tyranids, it proved to be easier to declare Exterminatus on a world where the Hive Fleet was already committed to the digestion of that world, depriving it of nutrients and the ability to recycle what it sent down.
@@cardinalvarsen5781that doesn't mean he is not right. He is just unlucky. Were it the ICOG, they will be more than happy to go through with his tactic if it mean denying their enemy an advantage, no matter how slight.
The main problem with the Exterminatus of Tyranid infested worlds is that you can't (or rarely can) destroy a planet once the Hive-Fleet is there, because you would have to break through hundreds of bio-ships to reach the orbit. It's what happens in the Tyranid ending of Dawn of War II : the Exterminatus fleet is forced to retreat because it can't oppose the returning Hive-Fleet. Kryptman's plan was to bombard worlds before the Tyranids would get to them, which is why he was ultimately excommunicate. He destroyed Imperial assets and lives before anyone (but himself) was sure they were really in-danger.
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 i think a lot of people noted in the comment thread for that one ,that sure....if all you sought was the short term genocide of what ever species or faction you where arbitary at war with... yes. but a lot of people pointed out various reasons one might want to invade a planet...from reasons of dogma ,culture , to the 'garden' state of it being the commodity sought to simple reasons of resources , sure if its one giant megapolis breding hive bunker fortress maby..but if its only sparly populated or an industrial center , capturing it and putting things to..your.. use instead might be a valid tactical reason. still was fun to listen to the reasoning.
An example of a planetary (well, starbase) demonstration: In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "By Inferno's Light", the Dominion made a lot of noise about retaking DS9 from Starfleet and the Bajorans, even faking warp signatures to suggest an inbound fleet, prompting Starfleet, the Klingons, and even the Romulans to deploy a huge task force to defend the station. Turns out the real plan was to trigger a supernova in the Bajoran sun, which would have destroyed the entire fleet, along with the station and Bajor.
@@swanky_yuropean7514 I mean, a photon torpedo is already a WMD. Even in the 2150s, a single torpedo could wipe out a city with ease at maximum yield. Presumably the 23rd and 24th century torpedoes are even more powerful, and deflector shields have improved to compensate.
@@swanky_yuropean7514 Also the Federation was kinda morally above that, like covert Ops and espionage to bring Romulus into the war seemed wrong at evil at least portrayed by Sisko. The nearest widely deployed WMD was probably and advanced ship type like Sovereign Class
The problem is we might start at the top of the ladder by default, ie; the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox. The hypothesis is that the Galaxy is silent of alien life because any alien civilisation that reveals itself will be nuked by silent alien civilisations.
@@caad5258 You should read the Three Body Problem trilogy, it combines Dark Forrest Theory and intergalactic invasion fleets quite well on a hard sci fi writing
@@caad5258 The probability of that goes down the farther into the future we go though, because we have already been shooting signals into space revealing ourselves like crazy pretty much since the discovery of radio waves, and we're still here, for now.
Another problem with orbital bombardment is that you're assuming that the enemy will never challenge your space superiority, and that your fleet will be able to stay over the enemy planet forever. You should never assume that your opponent is passive.
Big problem here is that you are assuming that you would have to keep your fleet in orbit. If you hit all the space ports from space, not only have you crippled your enemies ability to strike back quickly but you cause enough environmental damage that the enemy will be trying to stay alive, or will have to simply leave the base/planet in question. Your fleet moves on to the next target knowing they have dealt a serious blow to the enemy. Your enemy doesn't have to be passive, you just need to be quick and accurate in your attacks.
Relying entirely on orbital bombardment also fails to account for the possibility of an enemy that simply refuses to surrender, despite being in a hopeless situation. Or the possibility of an enemy building weapons that can destroy anything in orbit from the planets surface, even as they are being blockaded.
That's what I was thinking. First, getting all your slow, heavy guns on the only angle an enemy WONT be coming from is a bad idea, second, why should the ground force surrender when help is on its way? Why give up if you know you just need to hold out a little longer?
surface weaponry could afford to be much stronger than spaceship mounted one because you don't have to worry about weight or recoil and if they have bunkers say 2 km deep in the crust you definitely aren't destroying it from orbit plus they have an entire planet to turn into ammo... so yeah a defenceless planet is a stupid idea
@@yjlom yeah, fortifications are always a pain for the attackers. It's been that way since the dawn of war itself. "You can't build fortifications in space" sure if you say so, but you can fortify a planet and then you aren't getting through that. And if it's reach is far enough you have to attack that fort if you want to move through the system without being just shelled into submission
I'd like to point out the Siege of Vraks, where orbital bombardment would have destroyed the armories the Imperium needed to capture. Orbital bombardment is not a possible solution when irreplaceable resources cover the target zone.
Those armories were buried deep beneath the bedrock, orbital bombardment would have done nothing Either way the Imperial Navy couldn't even get close enough to the Vraks citadel to bombard it, when ships did get within range of the Orbital Laser Silos, they were instantly attacked and damaged
In my own personal worldbuilding project, which is on a massive extra-galactic scope, the notion of full planetary bombardment is still highly controversial. One of the main reasons is that it is ludicrously wasteful. The vast majority of planets within the universe I'm working on are completely uninhabitable, which makes terraformable planets extremely rare, and beyond that, finding a naturally inhabitable planet is like finding a needle in a mountain range. The more you bomb a perfectly livable planet, the more effort and resources you're going to require in order to make it livable again. Not to mention, you'd be destroying most, if not all of the highly refined resources and technologies already established on the planet by your enemy. Why destroy absolutely everything your enemy has built, when you can capture and repurpose it for yourself? Obviously, this is just one reason among thousands, but I feel as though it is a strong argument against orbital bombardment.
@@johnclinnick3969 I've been off and on world building for a while now, and I actually want your thoughts on how to conceptually justify a common sci-fi trope. I want to have a type 3 civilization that evolved from an apex predator species, physiologically similar to Turians from mass effect. The key difference being that culturally they not highly militarized, (until a certain incident) to go with a theory of mine that a species evolved from predators would actually be less preemptively violent than herbivores, since genetically they never needed to keep tabs on other creatures unless they needed food. (Zebras always having to watch lions, lions not caring to watch zebras, etc.) The only problem is, and (I haven't known anyone else to think this through either) why would a species at or near the top of the food chain evolve intelligence at all? Why wouldn't they just cruise around in their optimized predatorial form for millions of years like sharks or crocodiles? I need to come up with a planetary history that caused predators to develop intelligence, build tools, culture and civilization without having to develop the same paranoia of a species more often preyed upon... I know this is a complicated question, but I never get to talk to anyone else even remotely into this stuff. What do you think?
@@morgatron4639 You know, that's a good question. I'm actually in a similar boat myself with one of the species I've created; an incredibly dangerous hyper-carnivore with full-on sapience. Albeit, I haven't yet dedicated the time to come up with a solution regarding their evolution. A few things have come to mind though, so I suppose I can offer up some suggestions. For one, evolution is a highly randomized non-linear process, sometimes resulting in organisms with odd or just downright inefficient adaptations that stick around far longer than they otherwise should. Perhaps the precursors of your species experienced a random mutation which helped to increase brain size, despite the fact that an apex predator wouldn't necessarily need such a thing. Brains are energy hungry organs, so paired with a resource rich environment, an apex predator could theoretically develop higher and higher levels of intelligence while also being able to maintain their predatory traits (claws, teeth, sharp eyesight, high endurance, etc). Alternatively, one of these precursor species might not have been apex predators at all, and simply experienced a series of mutations/environmental changes which promoted the development of intelligence. However, before true sapience could be achieved, the environment could make a turn for the worse, limiting resources and "forcing" these precursors to develop predatory traits to maintain their developing nervous system. Afterall, meat tends to be great brain fuel. This pairing of rising intelligence and increase in predatory traits could reasonably accelerate each other's development. You could also go with a slightly convoluted reversal of the previous situation: reduction in predatory traits resulting in an increase to intelligence, followed by an environmental change/mutation which promotes the re-evolution of predatory traits before sapience develops. Once more, this could lead to a situation where both sets of traits accelerate each other's development. The truth is, evolution and "why" things happen the way they do is very complex and potentially self-contradicting. I mean, there are SO many things that went into the evolution of our own intelligence; the development of bipedalism, reduction in jaw size, loss of hair, the ability to sweat, a developing taste for meat, and so much more lead to what our species became. I would suggest analyzing the biological features of your species, and brainstorm ways in which those traits could have influenced one another over the course of your species' evolution, and how those traits could promote a rise in intelligence. Sorry if my reply is a bit long; I am kind of passionate about this sort of thing.
The most important factor of a planetary invasion, or ANY exertion of force, is to know beforehand what your goal is. Do you want to own all the territory? Do you want to wreck the other side's stuff? Do you want to kill or kidnap the opposing leadership? Do you want to rescue someone? Do you want to simply prove that you CAN do something, so other future enemies think twice about confronting you? So many options.
There's a really good reason why the old series 'Battleplan' had 'Clarity of Objective' as the first requirement for all but one battleplan. (That one being Naval Engagement, where 'Preservation of Forces' took over because of just how valuable ships are.)
Thare was a larger landing a year later on Okinawa D day was the largest in history when it happened but Okinawa was larger Also thare were marines on d day just look it up
@@Enterprise6126 there were a few pulled from the Pacific to help plan the assault but overwhelmingly army. Fun fact though many of the landing craft were operated by us coast guard
This is a superb video, not just because of the content, but also to drill in the fact that reality is almost infinitely, fractally complex. Simple answers are always wrong and even complex answers are necessarily incomplete, yet we can each handle only so much complexity. The universe is full of patterns - intelligent thought would be impossible if it wasn't - but they interact in such infinite combinations that every historical event is a special case. All we can do is strive to understand as much as we can, prioritise our mental effort and maintain awareness of just how much we don't know and are forced to gloss over. A great aspect of the Templin Institute is how they strive endlessly for classification, systemisation and pattern recognition - whether they're dealing with mundane pieces of military materiel or whole pantheons of mind-breaking horrors - yet also acknowledge the limits of that approach. It really feels like the kind of applied scholarship you'd get out RAND or a similar high-end think-tank; briefings prepared for heads of states by experts who understand both the frustrating imprecision and the vital necessity of their work.
One example of an interstellar crisis response was when the Republic showed up on Aleen in the Clone Wars after a bunch of earthquakes. They deployed troops and fixed up a bunch of stuff, and provided humanitarian relief, and then packed up and left.
In Battletech, warships became obsolete when the the great houses finally realized that using indiscriminate orbital bombardment as a standard procedure against an entrenched opponent might be counterproductive to their objective of actually taking over a planet. you dont steal a car by setting it on fire.
@@Ishlacorrin I'm fairly certain the only people who get away with that stunt in battletech is the taurians and that's cause they nuke there own planets out of spite and have been wmd'ed so hard I think it's grandfathered in it's okay against them just kinda stupid
Well, interstellar invasion is....a laughable idea to begin with. Why land on a world that is actively hostile to you, when there are literally millions of other worlds with the same ores, minerals and resources all around you uncontested. Especially when regardless of your intents the biosphere is likely to be incompatible with your biology due to divergent evolution and ecology... and no 'slave labor' is not an acceptable answer, nor is 'industry infrastructure etc'. All of that is more easily acquired through negotiation, subterfuge, and mechanical automation....especially for a civilization that makes travelling across light years as trivial as going to Hawaii for a vacation. If you're looking for 'home 2.0' have the tech to bend space and time, don't give a shit about the inhabitants.....why bother with a military invasion. Glass the planet from orbit, fix it to your standards in post production. Mine resources from uninhabited rocks strewn about the universe. IF you have ethical compunctions about casual genocide of sapient life, you look somewhere else, where the moral 'umbrage' won't be so high for your biocide...it's not like the universe isn't literally pregnant with planets....and moons and other such....conveniences.
It's interesting to see how to escalation ladder of violence depicted at 17:24 can be easily applied to the current conflict in Ukraine. It really is easy to climb it, and hard to come back down.
It's also intresting to see how he mentioned that some groups can't climb the ladder as successfully as others, and what were seeing from Russia is that they thought they could climb the ladder to way higher way quicker than Ukraine could,/would, and boy were they wrong.
eh~ not quite to me it seems more that they aren't willing to escalate it vertically or horizontally, whereas NATO is practically tripping over itself to do so if it doesn't get reined in to be clear, I'm not implying any kind of moral supremacy, just that both sides have come to wildly diverging risk assesments and the world is a good deal more miserable for it
@@sabotabby3372 The escalation ladder didn't delved deep into horizontal aspect of it. It's one thing to have a war in puppet state or exploited colony and other thing entirely - ethnic conflict in former part of your country, targeting your nafionality. - For Russia this conflict is already very high on escalation ladder and western leaders don't understand that at all.
A massive fleet in orbit cannot occupy a city, a bombardment of hypersonic projectiles cannot capture a mine intact and ready to use, and a giant death laser isn't going to help you retake your own territory from an enemy power. Only personnel on the ground can do that.
@@tntproductions1996 I'll do you one better. If the enemy just hides underground for a few days chemical and bioweapons are rendered ineffective. Chemical weapons can't crack open a bunker or neutralize shields. Also I think its reasonable to assume most factions aren't hellbent on exterminating the civilian populace (40k being a whole other discussion).
One thing I like in the Warhammer 40k universe is that the attacker almost never waits to gain space supremacy to land ground forces. Meaning that orbital bombardment is a factor, but not an automatic win button
You even see it in Star Wars ! Clone wars era had many battles where Clones would be put into drop ships way before exiting hyper space and the entire landing force and fighter bomber support is ready the very moment the ships exit hyper space !
40k also has an unfortunately accurate idea of how long space wars will take, and a better idea than most fiction than most scifi does, but even 40k lowballs the likely scale of how many people will be involved. Not hundreds of thousands or millions like in 40k, but billions, trillions or even more. A truly mind boggling number of people, likely so many that your soldiers outnumber the original inhabitants and form a population of their own
Part of the reason for that is that ships in 40K, especially among the Imperium and Chaos are expensive. A ship that is lost is something that is felt, especially the bigger it is. And that is not including ancient, unreplaceable ships. The end result is you have ships that usually avoid fighting one another unless they are confident they can come out of the fight relatively intact or they have no choice but to fight. Hence how planetary ships via orbital insertion can occur without difficulty. It's easy to see this considering that that there have been more land battles compared to space battles.
40k has right idea about planetary invasions, and such operations surely would require millions of people involved based on defences, but to be fair if it ever happens those millions probably will be replaced by machine combatants. Even now they started to take over on battlefields, drone usage in latest wars is an example.
@@randomdude8202 effectively to invade a planet you'll have to be making more soldiers and food and weapons on site, so there may be humans still involved but theyll likely be overseeing self replicating arms factories and armies of drones if at all. Also millions is lowballing a bit. Itll be more like billions, maybe tens or hundreds of billions of combatants
For an aspiring author, videos like this are a godsend. Thanks for the breakdown. We are a long way away from an event like this occurring, but this explanation's focus on precedents brings believability to the concept.
'Orbital bombardment renders invasion obsolete' is an argument that's rooted in the idea that collateral damage doesn't matter and a sledgehammer is the tool for every job. I'm reminded of this little saying from the 19th century, when machine guns were the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete: "whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not." That lasted about 25 years.
@@imperialamerican8209 Habitable planets does not translate to inhabited planets. Won't matter if there are 100s of liveable worlds in a war if your enemy has 3 worlds with Industry on them then they are all that matter.
@@notoriouswhitemoth did Russia have intergalactic space ships capable of glassing planets? If you can get resources from planets that don’t house your enemy then just glass your enemy and move on.
@@imperialamerican8209 they had trains, artillery, and chemical weapons, which were the World War 1 equivalents. As wars get faster, they also get bigger. Again, "whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not" lasted about 25 years. In the 1880's, people thought the machine gun would render all previous military technologies obsolete, but by 1915 it was cannons - which had been around for centuries - that soldiers were having nightmares about.
Grand Admiral Thrawn pulled off a couple of operations that were pretty close to what you're describing as "planetary demonstrations." There were a number of times where he redirected the New Republic's resources by threatening a raid or assault against a particular target, thus keeping them off balance and allowing his smaller force to strike devastating blows wherever the Republic's forces were redirected away from.
@@thalgrond A bunch of stuff. It was mentioned in an offhand comment in ROTJ, it’s in a few novels, the first mission of Bf2 2017 is to blow up a ship that discovered the Empire knew that Sullust was a diversion, etc.
This is an exquisite video, bringing out many thoughts shared by myself and a great many other individuals into deep detail. While orbital bombardment will be a game changer with it uses, depending on the actually tactical/strategic goals, there will be some situations will orbital bombardment is not possible and planetary invasions are necessary. Examples of such as shown in the video are; 1.) capturing enemies which are needed alive (dead men give no intel nor can order surrenders), 2.) acquiring resources (the pristine farmland or rarelementium mine you wanted to conquer being reduced to a barren wastes makes your war of conquest pointless), 3.) cultural or religious reasons (the Holy Relic/World must be preserved at all costs), 4.) economic reasons (that world possess a fifth of the nation's industry, destroying it will cripple your further efforts to win the war), 5.) retrieving friendly forces (you don't have the resources to waste a million well trained troops with years of experiences, oh and your top leaders and strategists need to be alive to lead forces to victory), 6.) avoid civilian non-combatant casualties, especially if they are citizens of your nation (hearts and minds need to be won to avoid a coup; or if one of your worlds is under occupation and needs to be liberated for post-war reconstruction [this is particularly true for civil wars]), and many more various scenarios and technologies. Quite intriguing standardize classification of landing craft. It is something that I think would work well in development in future sci-fi works. The design and process of the escalation ladder was also fascinating. It takes a lots to go very seriously deadly for a military situation to go to a Total War, hence why the last one was over 75 years ago. Even in the modern day, there are still reasons as to there being healthy infantry with combat knives rather than swarm drone icbms. Overall, again, a rather fascinating video exploring the concept of planetary invasions and providing a one video essay to show others the importance of such tactical/strategic in potential interstellar conflicts. 46:28 ; Some Antares self-inserting there, clever Marc.
Planetary bombardment is not why planetary invasions would be a bad idea or obsolete. Your points 1, 4 and 6 can be done with a simple blockade of the planet by your space navy (in most cases 3 too, but I grant you particularly strange cultural reasons would provoke this). Point 5 is better done by a specialized force for that task instead of a planetary invasion force. Finally, point 2 is absurd and not realistic, if you want resources planets are the last area you will look, they are huge gravity wells and getting stuff from a planetary surface is also expensive. If for some reason the resources you look are in a planet, even in one you own, what you would want is to blow it up into a million pieces, unless the thing is biological, in that case you want to create space farms or something similar in bodies with less gravity for the purposes of take-off (like a space station with rotational gravity or artificial gravity, heck if the organism itself doesn't care about gravity microgravity is even better) and care little for the actual planet (you want examples to study and replicate, if the planet has sentient life trading information about the biosphere is going to be relatively easy, which would allow for bioweapons too, but that's a diferent can of worms). Of course, not having any kind of army is a problem. But you need one whose purpose would be to stop coupes and terrorism, maybe have occasional skirmishes against rebel forces, but a planetary invasion is just expensive and innecesary. Well, I guess it might make sense as a defensive move, but only if your enemy also does planetary invasions which isn't that effective from an offensive standpoint (coups and rebellions would be the one case were this situation could happen). All that said, handwavium can nulify these things and make planetary invasions feasible, but that's the "a wizard did it option", is always there for the taking if you really want that happening.
The big issue I have with the "Religious site/relic" argument is that any space faring race that is able to travel between stars would most likely have dropped its religious long ago. After all, they would have been exposed to other cultures and races along the way. Or at least seen evolution take similar paths on different worlds. Also the "Resources" argument seems weak at best. If you can mine a moon or asteroid why worry about a planet's resources (although the farmland lost would be the only downside here - armies move on their stomachs) if you have easier, more accessible alternatives?
@@robertwilson973 While I agree with your second point. I doubt the first one, religion and spirituality doesn't seem to really go down as a whole despite conection and the encounter of multiple cultures. And while is true that some religions and spiritual beliefs go inherently against an advanced spacefaring civilizations other ones do the opposite and usually given enough time new beliefs appear that accounts for the new normal.
@@Ditidos ; When it comes to navel blockades, they don't help with capturing enemies if you need their intel, though I'll give you the fact a smaller incursion force can do that. 4 only works for NBs if you yourself don't need the economic output, if you do then you would need conqueror it. For 6, if you have one of your own worlds attempting to violently seceded or alien forces have occupied one of your planets a blockade may likely to be in their advantaged. Also an NB only works only if 1A.) you have enough ships to set up a blockade in the first place, 1B.) you have enough ships that you can maintain a blockage for a prolonged period of time rather then send them to face enemies ships, and 2.) the planet in question is not self-sufficient, otherwise they can build up both blockage runners and anti-ships weapons to strike at your ships there. A historical example of this is when Germany tried to blockade Britian twice, but failed both times due to a numerical lacking of vessels. For point 5, a spec ops can extract 1, 2 or even a dozen, but what about 100, 1000, or a million, sometimes mass evacuations need to be taken place; be it a military evac or just disaster relief. For 2, in the case of resources like Hydrogen and Iron then yes, going to war over those do not make much sense, hence I said "rare-element-ium", for things like iridium and lutetium, or hand-waviums like dilithium and eezo, in which significant deposits are well, rarer; and if the planet is also habitable/inhabited most factions wouldn't just blow it up and strip-mine it. For more biological resources recall that even though planes are faster that water-going going ships, most trade is still done my more traditional oceanic-shipping. You have been discussing costs at lot, but while yes moving supplies out of a gravity well is expensive, so is the creation and maintaining of massive space instillations, and if the materials are sensitive having go trough gravity wells than just across a planet is also an expense in itself. So whether doing that or acquiring planets through war, which is cheaper is an answer that varies between Sci-Fi universes and is something we cannot as of yet provide a definitive answer on IRL until we actually have the ability to do such things giving the untested variables. Plus while as you said some organisms don't care about space microgravity, there are just as many others that are the exact opposite; of which a significant portion of the Human population is included, hence the commonality of the saying "cabin fever". While some of us could and would likely enjoy being in such an environment, a great many others could only bare it for so long, be it Human, non-Human sapients, pets, livestock, crops, or medicinal biological organisms. Then going to 3, a great many are not going to take cultural of religious sites being 'desecrated' be they a 'Holy region' or something more mundane like a natural wild-life preserve.
I would think that glassing a planet would be the exception rather than the rule, because doing so inevitably destroys biological, economic, and even cultural resources worth preserving. And with sufficiently high mountains or deep enough tunnels, there is no guarantee that you will wipe out the enemy either. You might just eliminate all their restraint, and open up new resources for them to exploit that wouldn't be economical otherwise, that they can use to exact their revenge decades down the line. The interesting thing about planetary invasions that really wasn't touched upon is that they, theoretically, truly happen in three dimensions. Unlike amphibious assaults, which are limited to chokepoints by waterways and suitable beaches, or airborne assaults, which are limited by the volume of material that can be moved and the airspace you have access to, once you get to the planetary level, you can land anywhere. And flying into the teeth of the enemy defenses, for all it's cinematic glory, actually makes less sense. It actually makes more sense to land in the most isolated, or geographically inaccessible regions as possible to the defenders. Those easily defensible bastions that we all hate in Risk, like Australia, and Madagascar. Take your time, build up your forces, your logistics, even local production, so the locals will have a hard time striking back and ultimately dislodging you. All the while, surgical strikes can work on a global level to whittle down the locals ability to move to your position, and strike back in any capacity, and build up for the fight ahead with minimal collateral damage. Military bases, air and naval ports, military production and active units can be struck early and often to keep them off balance and isolated, unable to congregate into a force large enough to threaten your stronghold. While such a methodical approach might give the locals more time to mobilized militia units, and provide you with more targets when you finally do break out, these tend to be nearly as dangerous to the natives as they are to the invaders, and can only seriously threaten you on a strategic level with a great deal of plot armor.
Unless of course you are more concerned with speed than casualties, in which case you just land commando teams to disable as many defenses as possible, then attack with as much power as you can muster and take out the remaining defenses as quickly as you can.
People put lots of stock into cultural/biological/economic resources in these sorts of topics. But that suggests those things matter in an interstellar conflict between two alien species. Space is large, and resources plentiful, most species capable of breaching the interstellar void will have the technology to acquire a vast treasure of resources from interplanetary mining of uncontested uninhabited rocks that litter the place like egg shells in a omelet factory, making economic needs less...important. Most biospheres will be alien to one another, making it unlikely that one species would value another's 'biological assets' as they would largely be worthless to the other species. That only is exaggerated with culture 'resources'. EVen the idea of colonizing another world as a 'homeworld 2.0' is also kinda questionable as again the ecology and bio-compatibility would be at best imperfect and would require some kind of 'terraforming' and if you're going to terraform something several light years away you may as well do it the whole way....a real bottom up renovation....which would include biospheric sterilization and re-innoculation with a species own fauna and flora.
@@clomiancalcifer While that is true, its not taking into account a wide variety of things. Does a species see orbital annihilation as dishonorable and prefer to fight its foes face to face? Is orbital bombardment ostracized or even a war crime to the galaxy? Is it a MAD situation where if one faction wipes out another's planet it is seen as an equivalent of declaring nuclear war? You have left out a lot variables and presumed sentient organisms would act purely on logic, when in fact just looking out a window would prove they do not.
slight correction at ~ 44:00 : most astartes drop pods have an integrated automated sentry gun in addition to the astartes payload it carries. these are used to clear the area in addition to the explosive release of the pod doors in order to give the astartes within a bit of room to maneuver in the case of a hot battlefield drop as well as to give supporting fire during initial ground operations.
If anything, an orbital invasion should be a combination of D-Day and the landings at Okinawa. A heavy bombardment on a target location, small teams of airborne, fast-attack troops targeting orbital/ AA installations followed by the proper landings and seizure of roads and pathways near the beachhead. Get as much men and equipment on the ground as possible and spread out as much as possible
I agree completely with the point about orbital bombardment. Now if I ever hear anyone say “don’t have an army when you can just bombard from orbit”, I’ll just point to any recent war and ask “so we should just nuke the enemy into oblivion?”
When using weapon of mass destruction vs using massive invasion force you first have to ask if the location you are attacking has something you want... Or do you just want to deny the enemy that location and whether or not it is useful to you is unimportant... Then you should also ask if we are talking about a single planet war or a war across multiple planets (or even solar systems and/or galaxies) ... If it's a single planet... Probably should hesitate before using weapons of mass destruction wether they be nukes or large rocks dropped from space at extremely high speed, because they will more than likely have lasting effects on you even if you keep it limited and don't need to be able to use the location... But if you are dealing with multiple planets and don't need the planet to remain habitable... Well turn it to ash and glass
@@robertwilson973 If they are technologically so far behind that they can't fight back, why bother bombing them from orbit? Would be like bringing a .50 Cal to kill a fly, massive overkill, and your neighbors, and your population, might not respond all that well to such an overreaction. Like, what would be the point in killing primitives with orbital fire if they are no threat to you?
So far we've gotten Starships, Ground Vehicles and Invasion Craft. I would really like to see an Incoming dedicated towards Starfighter/Interceptors, as well as one reguarding firearms that militaries would use in the future.
Star fighters don't make logical sense in the era of space combat. Think like in the expanse, but everything should actually have better point defense capability. Railguns could fire projectiles that burst into micro particles at certain distances, something like that can hit incoming torpedoes kilometers away. Torpedoes/missiles in space are naturally way smaller, faster and agile than a manned fighter/interceptor could every be. When point defense is optimized enough to hit something like that, what the hell could a manned fighter/bomber do? They would be instantly destroyed before entering visual range of a larger craft.
@@morgatron4639 *Glances up at the video* Didn't this video just describe how predictions like that often are proved to be horribly inaccurate? They thought invasions were a thing of the past - then Korea happened. They thought Dogfighting was a thing of the past - then Vietnam happened. Also, you are too busy thinking about Expanse logic - while it is a fine show and an accurate depiction of IRL space combat as we predict it will be like today, the fact of the matter is we have no idea how technology will advance. As far as we know we'll create fighter-sized energy shields or some crazy tech between now and then. I for one doubt that craft like fighters and bombers will ever truly be rendered obsolete. Their role may change, but they will always have a place.
@@117Jorn I get that, I just think that in space the rules are different. Everything has more effective range, there's no cover or a horizon to be behind. Ballistic weapons have no air resistance and lasers have less blooming. I very much believe atmospheric fighters will still be viable for the same reason templin explains that planetary invasions still are. Aircraft excel in that environment, but I don't see star fighters ever being developed fully. The purpose of fighters in space can be achieved by missiles, the laws of physics favor that. By the time shielding tech is developed enough to protect a small craft from railguns or continuous beam lasers from a large ship, imagine the kind of shielding the larger ship would have, plus thick armor. What does a fighter do to that? I will concede that there may be a specific era of technology where fighters will have a purpose, something like in battlestar galactica where railgun tech isn't sufficiently miniturized to target smaller things and fighters are equipped with nuclear weapons. Although it's still hard to imagine that the vipers would've been nearly as important if the galactica hard a good array of AA guns similar to the CWIS that we have on navy ships in the real world, which already function better than how PDCs are shown in the expanse. Not a jab at the expanse or BSG for that matter, those are my two all time favorite shows.
@@morgatron4639 Perhaps. Personally, I do somewhat agree that space fighters won't be the best option in the future. However I do believe in the application of single-occupant space combat weapons because as effective as missiles and whatnot may be - there are ways to counter missiles, and there are parts of Space that aren't as empty as you might think. I think we may see the rise of more... humanoid-looking weapons - think Mobile Suits from Gundam. Unlike a space fighter, its guns aren't fixed and it is capable of operating in a more three dimensional space - plus it can be used for more than just combat, and can just as easily be used for repairing space stations and ships. The big critique then however is that the more moving parts are involved, the more expensive maintenance will be. This may be true, but if the rewards exceed the costs then it all sorta balances out. A lot of times when armies build weapons of war, it is kinda of a net loss for the economy because a tank can only be used for warfare until its stripped for parts to be melted down and built into something else. But something like a mech suit has usage outside of combat - making them more economically friendly to civilian, industrial and military use.
I want to say you could count operations on Ryloth both in Clone Wars and Rebels as crisis response. Especially the latter, where there was blockade running entirely focused on delivering humanitarian aid to the population of an occupied world.
I like two things the most in this video: Orbital bombardment might not be an unbeatable tactic, with sufficient shielding and anti space weapons, it might turn into a siege, or require ground troops to demolish planetary defences. Planets are big, and it might be possible to raid or attack one city because enemy forces need time to move.
Depends on the sci-fi universe in question and the planet. For example, in the Foundation series (The novels, not the Apple+ show), the Imperial Throneworld of Trantor is a colossal city world with a vast population. Storming the planet would be nearly impossible, but it's noted that you wouldn't need to actually invade. The planet's vast population and being totally covered in cities, means that Trantor is completely dependent on external shipments of food and water. All one would have to do is park their fleet in a cordon and blockade the planet and you could starve out Trantor without ever landing troops or firing a single shot.
Here's the thing: There is no advantage to the high ground in space in most sci-fi settings. If you have the tech to bombard a planet with lasers, then ground based laser cannons can also bombard you. And ground based installations can install thicker armor, stronger shields, bigger power plants, etc, for a lot less cost than a starship can, so the ground forces are going to outgun you. Same is true for railguns/rod from the gods style weapons. the extra 10km/s or so the gravity well gives you are simply insignificant compared to the bigger arrays you can build on a planet. Any weapon you can mount of a ship can be used for cheaper to a planet. Any defensive system you have is going to be used on planets, and at a larger scale. Attackers are going to stay out of weapons range, only darting in for brief fire runs when they think they can catch a vulnerable target, facing flak and fighter assaults whenever they do. Think the battle of Britain during WW2. However, this also applies to planetary invasions. Two similar sized powers with similar tech simply cannot manage to take each other's planets. Simply put, the attacker has to transport his army, and the defenders don't. That means the defenders can field more and heavier units, on top of which they are already fortified with stockpiled supplies. On top of that, the attackers have to expect heavy losses during landing operations, and whatever support they can get from orbital artillery is nothing compared to the firepower at the local's disposal. Which means that aggressors are likely limited to either technologically advanced civilizations picking on low tech ones, or massive empires going up against single world nations.
Ironically Lightspeed lag is a spacecraft's only saving grace, by doing frequent maneuvers while keeping at extreme range they are less likely to get hit with retaliation strikes
I was gonna argue with you, but goddamnit, I think you're right. Less about the defenders' ground-forces being superior (because the invaders could have their own supply lines, bringing in their own heavies), and more about just how impenetrable the combo of planetside shields and anti-orbital guns would be. I genuinely can't think of any way round such a defensive arrangement. You're suggesting that planets would effectively become gigantic 3D battleships, and I can't see how any fleet of lesser ships could possibly hope to overcome such a vessel. Well, other than expending so much time, manpower and materiel that conquering the planet just wouldn't be worth it. In such a setting, I could foresee planets becoming *less* well-defended over time, not more. Because first, fleets of warships would gradually be downsized, as it became obvious to all the nations involved that attempting to invade each other's planets (and thereby end wars) would just lead to an intractable stalemate, WW1-style. Followed by the planets themselves dismantling their defences, because there would be less to defend against. With everyone being well-aware that, should war loom, every planet will rapidly start fortifying again.
Attackers can use mass drivers. i.e. large asteroids propelled by exhaust from ships engines, or attaching engines to the asteroids themselves. You don't need many, 2 or 3, and can launch them from massive distances with precise accuracy. A 25km across asteroid of mostly iron and nickel moving at high speed, would just turn into the mother of all shotgun shells when targeted with defense systems. 2 or 3 of those and nothing bigger than a mouse would be alive on the surface.
@@andytol1976 the locals aren't going to shatter a mass driver, they're going disable the engine and redirect it. It doesn't take much of a push for it to miss the planet all together. Nor are most of the planetary defenses going to be on the surface. As we're clearly assuming the defenders can't effortlessly vaporize the incoming rock, we have to assume that being a kilometer or so below ground is a cheap and effective form of armor. But, yeah, if you aren't trying to capture the world and are willing to commit genocide, the equation changes. At that point you have access to several cheap and effective superweapons that are almost impossible to defeat. But that isn't a planetary invasion, so it's not what we're talking about.
@@gnaskar Unfortunately; if it's conflict with an alien species, genocide may end up the only option unless some kind of plot device like a universal translator is created. There are so many different ways to communicate though, that common ground would be almost impossible. Human on human I agree with you though; genocide isn't the goal, just the most common threat at that point in history. It would take lots of work to make other worlds habitable for us, would be a waste to start over. And mass drivers don't really need an engine. Super large warships with the capability to travel interstellar space within human lifespans (way faster than light), would produce more than enough energy to get a really big rock moving so fast its momentum wouldn't notice attempts at a redirect. Overkill: a 100m across iron/nickel asteroid moving at 1/10th C would have enough kinetic energy to probably smash the planet to pierogi sized lumps. Could do those by the hundreds with Enterprise D for example. Attaching the engines would be from crazy far away for strategic launches, and the engine only needs to get your mass up to lethal speed.
The thing with orbital bombardment is quite the same for naval bombardments, there will be a planet that just won't die until you go there and shoot everyone. Famously, Iwo Jima was so shelled that the soldiers initially thought that they had killed all the Japanese only for them to spring out and start firing when the Americans were exposed
Same with Tarawa And iirc the shelling/bombing of the Normandy coast didn't go well either Inclimate weather and poor visibility definitely played a part in Normandy's case though
An SF novel “Crest of the Stars” depicts a space-dwelling civilization called Abh Empire. This civilization’s main species is a type of engineered human, Abriel human, which has higher adaptations to space environment than on land, and they culturally do not like surface life. They have basically every resource produced on ships so they don’t necessarily need land, either. ( I don’t remember why they capture planets if they are so nomadic, probably because they are copying their creators, which they destroyed with their own hands) The way they capture a planet is to totally eliminate this planet’s space travel abilities and than diplomatically persuade this planet to let the empire run the space port for them. The planet surface government will remain kinda independent besides taxes or other specific orders from the empire. If the people on planet want to fly again, they can apply to be the pilots of the Abh fleet or own short-ranged transportation ships. Surface human can join the ruling class of Abh Empire if they served and get rewarded in the fleet, but their offspring must be engineered to be Abriel human instead of original species. The title they earned will pass on to Abriel offsprings. I didn’t finish the novel, so a lot of their culture is not explained clearly here. But I wonder if this “twisted” kind of civilization will actually plan to drop on to ground for a full-scale planet invasion. (They do have landing marines in their fleet, though, since surface mission like rescue crashed ships and personnel is always possible.)
From my understanding, Crest of the Stars doesn't really do invasions, you either surrender the moment you can't fight _or_ get bombed back to the stone age.
@@nulnoh219 ocean civilization to be more precise. Oh and you remind me one thing that Abh empire’s creators were island cultured people on earth. They were against the globalization and thus abandoned by the progression of technology. They managed to colonize astral belts and build their home there, while the main strain of world already started light year migration. Abh engineered super humans and send them to explore univers, using old school rocket-propelled ships (which is like send them to death).
Planetary Demonstration: Mobile Suit Gundam: Stardust Memory. The Earth Federation fleet was holding a Naval Review as a means to showcase how much of the fleet they rebuilt after the One Year War and to act as a warning against Zeon splinter factions. One such splinter faction stole a nuclear armed, Federation Gundam and used to to wreck two thirds of the fleet.
I think that's a solid example. The entire point was to say 'We could invade you with this, and you can't stop us.' Which was rather solidly counterpointed with a nuclear exclamation point by the Zeon splinter faction involved. It's also a solid example of why you need to have tight controls on your WMD's, because the amount of egg on your face if they are turned on you can be truly exceptional.
Many factors can go into a planetary invasion and they can also go wrong. But either way, if you want to invade a world the thing you need to do, is eliminate your enemy’s fighting strength or deplete it enough to force them to surrender. But you also need to consider what you need to do once you’ve established a beachhead.
The "corporation" Star Force in the book series of the same name covers planetary relief in a few parts of the books. Truly massive scale but the Archons are ageless and have the time to implement these relief efforts slowly.
Starfleet actually does a lot of crisis response operations, come to think of it. One example is in TNG S6E19 "Lessons" where the Enterprise D evacuates the settlers on Bersallis III from the firestorms
For an interstellar Army I’ve envisioned, a planetary invasion only begins when Void Supremacy has been achieved (80% of void space must be achieved). The Army and Navy are two separate entities. With the navies sole role is to win the battle in space, as well as provided additional support (planetary bombardment) along with holding the space. The Navy does not fight on the ground, unless the marines have been deployed. The Army have their own ships, they act has their bases and transport. They are the exact same class of ships that is used in the navy, just much fewer in number and are unlikely able to hold and win the space battle by themselves. Anyway, once void supremacy has been achieved, the invasion will commence. The invasion is split into 3 phases. Those being: Phase 1. “The Softening”. This is where multiple points on the planet or area will be “softened” by light orbital bombardment (with light being a relative term here. It’s best that a target or point is destroyed but even if it isn’t, it’s likely to be decimated). After a set period of time , drop pods will be shot into the atmosphere and to other key areas, as well as to sweep up any points that haven’t been knocked out. The drop pods will contain combat droids. This will tie up any local forces within the area, forcing them to commit men, and ammunition to contain the attack. Even if the initial droid attacks fail to truly do any damage, it will still soften up the enemy garrison/forces. Up next is the 2nd phase. Phase 2. “Take and Hold”. From here, the invasion begins. Dropships and fighters will descend from their home ships and enter the atmosphere to begin an attack. The fighters will strife any defensive position to lockdown the troops or lockup any reinforcements coming to bolster the defenders. And here the drop ships will disembark the Heavy Assault Infantry (My version of the stormtrooper) to create and take a beachhead. Once a beachhead has been secured. The invasion moves onto the next and final phases. Phase 3. “The Sweeping”. With a beachhead secured, a Forward Base can be established. There tanks, artillery, troops, supplies and equipment can be deployed on the ground. Note that the troops here are different from the HAI (Heavy Assault Infantry) to the regular army. The HAI is a part of the wider Army. The Infantry is to conquer the rest of the planet.
one thing that is often overlooked in the scale issue is that a conquest doesn't have to be total, there are multiple levels of conquest : -"soft" conquest, similar to UK and india, India was officially UK territory, but outside of political power, the everyday life of citizens was virtually unscathed, very few UK citizens moved to India so the population didn't mix, didn't had to adapt to UK custom, or anything like that at all. the conquest was essentially just on paper and India was more or less just a heavily bounded vassal. this requires virtually no troops beyond the initial war (whish may or may not happen at all), and is how the mongols managed to invade 20% of the world, despite having no fast mean to communicate, the winner is recognized as an official leader, but as little influence over the conquered territory. -"mild" conquest, spares troops are left in the conquered territories, just enough to be able to enforce your own laws, however little to no civilians move in, and the cultural identity of the territory is largely unchanged, this can lead to rebellions, but is relatively cheap to maintain. (might be hard to do for a full planet tho) -"hard" conquest, the conquered territory becomes undifferentiated to the rest of the winner state, populations move in and may be moved out, breaking any sort of strong cultural identity. in the short run, this is extremely expensive, and requires a lot of diplomacy before things start being stable. (essentially impossible on a heavily populated world)
I feel like MAD is the best argument for the use of landing forces. If you bomb the shit out of your enemy's planets just to achieve strategic objectives, why shouldn't they do the same to you?
The old TV serious Babylon 5 had the Shadow Cities deep underground (which would indicate orbital bombardment occurring). As the show progressed they even had the Shadow's and Vorlon's resorting to orbital bombardment against each other's allied worlds. They never attacked each other directly however.
But also if you want to conquer the planet the last thing you want to do is make it a lifeless wasteland. Cause if you get the planet everything destroyed is something that will cost you money to rebuild. Also the more angry the native people are at you the costlier it's going to be to integrate them.
@@marijnvanbennekom3652 This assumes the desire to conquer and integrate. Which considering some situations would be inefficient. Especially in settings where technology makes 'fixing it in post production' easy. Better off destroying the biosphere and fixing it later... Yes, what if someone does it to you, that's why you don't let someone else do it to you...
@@clomiancalcifer I suppose if your a genocidal state that has no need of more territory then orbital bombardments work, in any scenario where the parties involved are not that then Orbital bombardments are not exactly game winning.
"If this thing needs to shoot its guns, somebody screwed up" Meanwhile me, using Acclamators as frontline warships in Empire at War I love these types of videos, they're why I found this channel.
Also, screen canon shows that they were the only warships the Republic had at the time. Made sense for them to be armed. The first appearance of the Venator was not the RotS or the CGI Clone Wars no matter what fanboys want to believe. It was actually in a later episode of the Genndy Clone Wars which predates the movie by months.
@@darwinxavier3516 It was somewhere before the Battle of Christophsis that the Venator Class was introduced, but really the Republic wasn't without actual warships at the start of the war. They had the Dreadnaught Class, and those larger warships that have never been seen outside of background books and such.
Well if I remember correctly if you remove the passengers from the ship. It runs with a crew of like 300ish. Which given its punching power is very efficient.
In the Lost Fleet book series, a fleet launched an orbital bombardment, but planned it to bounce of the atmosphere, to create streaks in atmosphere, to shock the planet leaders into giving up planet bound prisoners. Would that count as a demonstration? Or something else?
Threat of force that compelled the enemy to do that they wanted. Sometimes people need to be shown the stinger to imagine what it might feel like to actually get stung.
@@randomdude2386 there really aren't I only just finished the last book in the series a few months ago and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone else know of the series
Regarding the "demonstration" of a planetary invasion, I could point to Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior as an example. In this, the Imperium had abducted a T'au Ethereal, slaughtering any witnesses to the abduction (again, an example of something that can't be done with orbital bombardment alone.) This provoked a military response from the T'au, who sent a retrieval force. The initial T'au strategy here involved two things: first, to convince the Imperials that the T'au were going to commit in force to landing and destroying a few strategically important parts of the planetary infrastructure, and second, to deploy a smaller force elsewhere to locate and recover the Ethereal once the bulk of the Imperial forces were committed to repelling the other attack, which would fall back before their advance. That first operation was a demonstration attack, a feign trying to bait the Imperial defenders into engaging to repel the T'au from establishing a beachhead that the T'au never actually intended to secure, but they had to make it look like that's what they were trying to do for the feign to be successful. So they did actually land forces (and accept that those forces would take some losses) but not enough to imperil their other efforts, and those forces were ordered to fall back when the Imperial resistance became too fierce since that intensity meant the deceptive assault was working.
You don't reference the show anywhere in your video, so I would highly recommend watching the 90's animated series Exosquad. The entire show is built around more or less what WWII would look like if played out across multiple planets using futuristic technology. They show all of the types of combat scenarios you list and do a great job of showing how much work goes on in preparation for a large scale space military campaign... from recon and intel to rehearsal and execution. One of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time it is definitely something any sci-fi nerd has to watch.
In Legend of Galactic Heroes, the forces of Reinhard von Lohengramm deliberately allowed a planetary bombardment by their opponent the Lippstadt League to proceed despite being in a position to prevent the massacre. The grotesque aftermath was then used as propaganda against the League, causing desertions and loss of popular support, thus hastening their eventual defeat.
If anything, clean up would be a nightmare if you had to retake a planet destroyed by orbital bombardment. Just like a surgeon with a scalpel, precision is key when needed. Just like the escalation ladder and key assets you explained.
Taking a different angle on this, I think it's also fair to say that the difficulty of an invasion is directly proportional to how much you *don't* want to destroy. If you're keen to scour the entire planet, ecosystems be damned, all you need is a suitably large asteroid and an engine to push it. Conversely, if you want to retain critical infrastructure, planet-side resources, some degree of the local population, or the capacity for longer-term diplomatic relations the requisite manpower and resource investment increases accordingly. Thus, the more granulated the target profile, the more precise and specialized the equipment you'll need to actually achieve your objectives. Another factor not necessarily discussed here, is time - or rather, efficiency vs effectiveness. Logistical limitations might prevent you from amassing a large invasion force for a given planet. You might only be able to spare a large fleet to secure orbital superiority before they're needed elsewhere, or the sheer size of force required might not even be within your reach. In any case, even if you could, the wholesale bombardment or invasion of a planet is inefficient and wasteful of your resources, as is the opposed landing of troops on the surface in less-than-ideal conditions. Assuming you're not losing on other fronts, if you have orbital superiority, you can choose when and where to fight and dictate the cadence of the operation through 'energy superiority' to use air combat terminology - that being a higher altitude where the enemy must expend great energy to reach you, but you need do a lot less to reach them. Let's think of an example with Earth; a successful invasion that removes our capacity to resist, with minimal resource expenditure relative to planet-side defensive assets. We'll also be trying to retain as much planetary infrastructure as we can. Stage 1 of such an invasion begins years in advance, with reconnaissance efforts, passive and active, and depending on the timeline may even include sabotage and destabilizing the local political landscape. Sowing dissent or even emboldening local populations who might be supportive to your efforts could even be in the cards, depending on who it is doing the invading, or even the deployment of seemingly natural diseases, the covert triggering of something like a supervolcano, and other disruptive acts might also factor in. For the rest of this invasion, let's assume we stopped at reconnaissance, since we're trying to retain local infrastructure in a usable state. Stage 2 begins with the insertion of first-strike capable craft into planetary orbit. Ideally, this would be done undetected, allowing such craft to seed Earth's orbit with different warheads on a variety of orbits, prior to simultaneous activation at the beginning of stage three. Stage 3, the first overt military action, is to render the planet's detection and communication systems inert. Nuclear warheads previously left in synchronized orbits descend and detonate in the upper atmosphere, too high to cause damage on the ground, but more than potent enough to fry military tracking and targeting radar, disrupt radio communications, civilian power grids, and other electronic infrastructure. Concurrently, planetary satellite networks will be targeted, as will known connection points for major underwater cables and communication infrastructure such as internet server hubs. Now that the planet is in the dark, if everything went well, many portions of the world may be under the assumption they're experiencing a local event, and not understand the true ramifications of it, nor be able to effectively coordinate a response and mobilize as quickly as they should. Stage 4 begins with the selection of military targets and certain points of critical infrastructure. Runways, missile silos, command centres, armories, motor pools, naval yards, warships currently at sea, and anything else that might otherwise pose future resistance or be more difficult to hit if given time to move off-site. By this point, the time period of states are determined mostly by the orbital period of the ships engaging in limited bombardment - so it could be anywhere from one to several hours, based upon how high an orbit they choose to take either to avoid detection or provide a security buffer space in which to shoot down any planet-launched missiles that do make it out of the atmosphere. Stage 5 next shifts from military targets, to *parts* of logistical targets. For instance, you might not want to destroy the power grid, or the power plants themselves (unless you have better ones you mean to install later, and don't care) so instead all you need to do is take out the accumulators at each power facility, or strike local transformers. By comparison, they'll be much easier for you to fix later. For targets like New York, there's no need to hit the city directly when you can just hit the bridges. Elsewhere mountain passes, rivers, ports, canals, and any singular points which, if destroyed, would inhibit travel are being struck. Stage 6 shifts into more opportunistic operations, with the selection of new priority targets as they appear to eliminate future opposition, and is also the transition into planetary operations in an isolated scale. Taking advantage of the isolation of local groups through selective infrastructure destruction, a comparatively small landing force can undertake a defeat-in-detail style operation of the planet. That being; If you only have say 100 thousand troops to land, you segment and isolate the enemy so that you fight them in blocks of no more than 5-10 thousand at a time. Better yet, don't fight them at all; destroy their logistical chains with special operations or raiding parties and force them to disband without giving them the chance to fire back at you. Stage 7 is now the long game. Even a single warship in orbit could be all that's necessary. Once the fighting capacity of the local population has been broken, you can invade regional areas one at a time in order of importance. You don't even necessarily *need* to take the whole planet, just the parts of importance to you. If a later diplomatic resolution is attained, this stage might never be necessary, but it should at very least wait until after the food and consumables of nuclear missile submarines and other hostile assets that may still be present have been expended. From here, the process is only limited by the means and goals of subjugation or victory goals of the invaders. A decent fictional depiction of this, though a more rushed equivalent, I think is The Universal Union, or 'The Combine', who took advantage of Earth's ongoing disruption before dividing, conquering, and seeking to control key infrastructure while being largely ambivalent with regards to rural areas and humans outside their aura of influence. 7 Hours to secure a planetary surrender is impressive, though they also had Xen portal storms effectively do the first half of the process for them. Still, I think they at least qualify due to the end result of their invasion, with limited and precise retention of infrastructure and population - though they did land ground forces almost immediately, so it's not a perfect analogue. PS: The Kuwaiti amphibious landings I don't think could be considered a 'ruse' as they were in fact, a plan B. If the land invasion from the West had failed, then it would have gone ahead. Alas, the use of GPS and superiority of American armoured units proved more than effective enough to carry the initial invasion.
I remember something close to a demonstration in Earth: Above and Beyond. Episode 21. You actually used footage from it at 35:19 ☺ They abandoned the invasion after troops had landed. The enemy had used critical forces to counterattack, opening a very critical planet. So the fleets moved there. They explicitly referenced Guadalcanal twice. The Starship Trooper movie, "Planet P" initial operation might also qualify. The goal was to verify the presence of a brain bug.
with stellaris, time is the most important factor, as such anything that makes an invasion quicker must be used, orbital bombardment is necessary to weaken defensive armies, which if built properly cant be beat by conventional means
If one is fighting a small rebel group soon to become an Galactic wide revolution a full scale Orbital Bombardment might be seen by your populace as too far. Also think of the kind of intelligence you might lose or Civilian casualties. You absolutely need to have a fully capable force prepared to invade what could be an entire section of a world.
The death star blowing up Allderran in Star Wars is arguably one of the worst ideas in sci-fi history. The main idea of the attack was to demonstrate what they can achieve so why blow up an entire planet full of loyal imperial citizens when you could blow up a rebel inhabited or just un-inhabited planet and most likely it would still install fear to everyone in the galaxy. Also the only rebels on Allderran we’re the royal family which could’ve been easily dealt with using a small special forces squad.
34:05 I remember an episode of star wars the clone wars where clones where dispatched to send medical supplies and technical aid to civilians in a planet after catastrophic earthquakes. The episode was about R2D2 and C3PO going with them, falling into a cavern, finding out what caused the earth quacks and solving the problems and then none of the clones beleaves them but that isn't the point. If anyone can remember the name of the episode, it could make for a good example of crisis response landings.
This video expertly explains something I learned in business school, the trough of expectation. Every new invention many military, brings high hopes that are cut down to size when it’s limits are discovered.
Though I feel you overlooked one kind of orbital bombardment, the precision strike. One meant to take out key targets, either to weaken the opposition or make way for an eventual landing. Though I am glad we are finally seeing some Gundam representation here, or even Eastern media in general. Might I suggest Legend of Galactic Heroes as well? It is a real Sci-Fi classic in the space (no pun intended).
One thing I would add to orbital bombardment. The planet you’re invading will be just as capable as a ship of building weapons just as big (if not bigger as they don’t need to be mobile) as any ship and likely at similar or longer range. Why would they just sit back and let you bomb them?
And there's a matter of what kind of planet you're invading. If the world is like Mercury or Europa, surface level bombardment is pointless since the defenders don't need to worry about silly things like 'the environment' or 'radiation'. It's even more pointless for Europa since the 3 closest of Jupiter's largest moons are bathed in horrific radiation and there's an enormous underwater ocean that can be colonized under those tens of kilometers of ice.
There no such thing as out of range in space the navy in space would just need to be far enough away to stop or move out of the way of any return fire and shoot back on a trajectory that will hit those stationary targets
@@whyjustwhy2887 Technically you are both correct and incorrect there on "there is no out of range in space". At least when it comes to solid projectiles. But I completely understand what you're saying. You're correct because, an object in motion will stay in motion until it hits something. However there is an effective range. If you're far enough and can detect the incoming projectile in time, the object can be intercepted or even dodged. (Unless the object travels at light speed meaning its undetectable until its too late.)
The attacking fleet has several advantages over planetary defenses 1. Gravity... It's a lot easier to drop things on to a planet (and probably able to do it accurately from quite a distance as long as one has the time to wait and is willing to spend a little extra on control systems on the weapon.. could be just a hunk of tungsten with some rocket engines added for fine tune control) 2. A (space) ship can adjust it's position relatively easily and in 3 dimensions while a planet is on a predictable path and it takes a lot longer to change positions to one that is outside the area of effect of obrital bombardment weapons even assuming it is a "dumb" (not able to change course after launch) rock 3. A ship can see all of a planet (assuming that they launch drones or other forms of recon for the area not directly in the view of the ship) and therefore react to any counter attack much easier 4. The ship can also probably be undetected very easily in space
@@snspartan714al2 1. Gravity for Earth, as an example, is ONLY 9.8m/s. Which means if your projectile is traveling at 0.1c, well, you do the math. The Exosphere of Earth is 12km above surface and 0.1c is 299km/s. So, how long does that 0.1c projectile actually stay in Earth's atmosphere? My point being: all projectiles affected by gravity, in a scifi universe, will at MOST lose 20m/s in velocity (and I'm being extraordinarily generous by saying that the ships are being targeted at very high orbit). That is so trivial this stupid myth should never be repeated again. BTW; a planet can launch 0.1c projectiles no problem- if a fleet does that to a planet... What happens to the planet? Seriously. 2. You're thinking about hitting the planet; the planet is NOT the target: the highly mobile anti-orbital gun is that just might have naval capabilities providing it with a massive nearly free-of-charge shield that also provides an extreme level of stealth. Again; if you just want to orbital bombard the planet you're already at the point in the war where outright extermination of yourself is already a consideration or else you're just being a complete retard who should absolutely never have access to such decisions. Diplomacy is a good thing, even in war. 3. You're forgetting about weather, stealth capabilities, submersables, and subterrainian crafts. 4. Actually, the ship 100% will give off very noticeable heat, radiation, reflection, gravimetric, or energy readings. Unlike ground targets which have an entire forest of noise to hide in, ships do not enjoy such luxuries. Technologies which make ships less noticeable equally work for ground or naval forces.
It drives me mad every time someone suggests that instead of invading a planet, you'd simply level every major population center until the resistance stops, so I'm glad you covered this topic. Destroying cities from orbit and massacring millions (or billions) of civilians in the process... why do that? Unless genocide is your war goal (see: Earth-Mimbari War and Human-Covenant War) it's contrary to your interests. If the planet has no value, why are you attacking it? If it does have value, why are you destroying it? But more so than the utilitarian question, I'm glad you also highlighted the moral question. Today we regard nuclear ICBMs as our most terrible weapons, an absolute last-resort because of the dire costs involved (human, political, economic, etc.). I see no reason for equally (or more!) devastating weapons to become normalized just because everyone's in space now... unless the setting presents an utterly depraved empire ruled by monsters. I feel like even in such setting, the mass deployment of WMDs would be a horrifying event that shows the danger of the aggressor, not just a casual thing that happens every day in wars.
There is another argument against orbital bombardment: environmental effects No matter what universe you're in, any sort of substantial orbital bombardment would render a planet nearly uninhabitable Case and point, it was discovered that it would only take 100 nuclear bombs the size of Little Boy (15 kilotonnes) would be enough to send Earth into a nuclear winter. And most of that isn't from the fallout, it's from the soot and ash from the burning cities. So if it only takes a hundred low-yeild nuclear bombs to send a planet into a nuclear winter, imagine the effects of a full on orbital bombardment. The hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of tones of ordinates entering the atmosphere alone would severely damage the ozone layer and could even begin to raise global temperatures if there is enough mass being thrown at the planet Then there's the devastation on the ground with the burning cities, not to mention a defending force would absolutely dig into mountains and deep bunkers, so that's even more power weapons needed to up root them. So any significant bombardment outside of limited tactical strikes would leave the planet uninhabitable. So if you want to utilize the planet as a base or if there is a friendly/innocent civilian population present that you don't wish to harm for whatever reason, full scale orbital bombardment is out of the question right then and there
I would disagree. Physics tell us that 1 nuke of 15 Megatons will do so much damage. If you are orbiting a planet and in a surprise attack drop 3 bombs (Washington, Bejing and Moscow) you basically take out the leadership of the 3 most powerful countries on the plant. All with minimal damage. Then you make it perfectly clear that you have no issue dropping additional weapons unless your demands are met. You may meet your goals without ever having to put boots on the ground.
@@robertwilson973 Yes and no. For one, Napoleon and Hitler thought the same thing when they both took Moscow but still lost. Like he mentioned in the video, terror bombings never really worked and they could easily call your bluff. But this really only applies to "righteous" factions where collateral damage is a real concern. Now if we're talking about a tyrannical/predatory faction like the Goa'uld, who do exactly this, the yes this argument is absolutely sound. It really depends on what your objective is and the political environment you reside in.
@@James-ho5te I will agree with that. In my mind, what would be the easiest way to obtain your goal with minimal loss on your side. As the video stated, if you have two equally matched powers then such events don't make much sense. In my thinking, if you have the superiority to travel light years your probably not thinking about war anyway. Nukes would not work in 1970's Nam or Afghanistan due to the civilizations in place there. However dropping a bomb on DC would only help your war effort (and America in general but that's another conversation).
@@James-ho5te if you are in a verse where orbital bombardment is possible then presumably you have the tech to explore and find habitable planets. In that case nobody who would consider orbital bombardment would care about the environment, imo.
@@imperialamerican8209 There's also the fact that planets and moons thought to be "Uninhabitable" are fully colonized. Nuclear radiation won't do much to hurt your enemy because they had to take that into account when they made the journey to that world and to make sure they survive on that world. Or the species you're nuking can resist or even thrive on such radiation.
If you want to leave infrastructure and other resources intact than orbital bombardment is a bad ideal because you're likely to destroy what you want to capture intact. Yes you can try precision targeting but there's still the chance you will hit something you don't want to or your enemy will take advantage of the time your giving them to destroy said resources and infrastructure to prevent you from gaining control of them.
Generally speaking though, if you are that advanced to do orbital bombardment then you should have weapons that can pinpoint exactly what you want to hit. I'm sure that you would take things like atmosphere, difference's in gravity and so forth into effect. I do see a time and place for it.
@@robertwilson973 I wonder if a future tech for ships and ground vehicles would be some kind of sensor scrambler? That would force you to get within visual range for precision targeting or you'd have to issue a general bombardment.
@@JakeBaldwin1 I know it's been 8 days since you posted this but that scrambler you mentioned is supposedly the reason fleet battles are fought at close ranges in star wars.
@@robertwilson973 If you're that advanced, the enemy's infrastructure should be irrelevant to your goals. It's easier to build infrastructure in uncontested territory than to engage in belligerence to begin with. IE any war that devolves into 'taking worlds' is not going to be about 'ruling the defeated'. Slave labor or thralls are inefficient resources in a world where automated mining is easy and prevalent and can go places bio-miners can't. Even a 'real-estate' war isn't likely going to end with the winning civ wanting to live peacibly with the inhabitants of that world, more likely they want to terraform it....which usually comes with purging the extant biosphere.... I see few wars that result in feet on ground being that necessary, most interstellar conflicts will be political with the focus being denying worlds access to interstellar infrastructure; or destroying fleets... With the 'serious wars' where 'more than denial is necessary' being something that kinda makes invading and holding irrelevant....the only landings I see as being viable would be small scale political assassinations or tech theft or some very specific infrastructure destruction.....
Let's say your entire interplanetary military doctrine revolved around bombing planets into submission. And now let's say that your capital world, the crown jewel of your empire, is captured in a surprise rebellion. This was possible, because you have no real army. Your nation has perfect orbital superiority, the rebels have no ships, just ground forces dug in in the cities. In this situation, you have 2 options: Let the rebels have the planet (which was your former capital, home to a significant portion of your population and industrial power) or Bomb your own capital until these fanatical rebels surrender (which they won't). Congratulations. In both cases, your capital is gone.
Well i would keep an okayish ground force so thats you cant just do that but using orbital bombardment to nation you dont want them to be alive or its too difficult to invade is still a great plan the alternative is putting costly siege if you dont have the ways to invade it
@@gulliverdeboer5836 Infiite air support - entire districts and tens of thousands of your own citizens glassed. Well done on giving the rebellions media arm endless propaganda fodder against your regime.
@@davidshea6272 Why do you assume it has to be so destructive? Depending on the in-universe tech it can be pin-point accurate or warships can hover at a very low altitude and if not they can just use smaller fighters, gunships, shuttlecraft, etc...
@@gulliverdeboer5836 Because every advancement of technology in our world has been heralded as opening the way for accurate, pinpoint bombardment that does away with the need for boots on the ground, and every time that has been proved laughably wrong. Lets say your lasers are perfectly accurate. How will you be sure that you got all the rebels? As soon as your fleet hovers into orbit, they can seamlessly disperse into the population and resort to guerilla warfare. Your tiny elite force of Hoplite XIs or whatever won't be able to track and find them all, not even close. The only solution then starts looking a lot like Vietnam (which America lost despite dropping more ordinance with higher accuracy than world war 2, against an opponent that had no-where near tech parity.) And remember this scenario is your own capital. Are you willing to blow up the seat of the Plutotairiment or the Ancestral Halls of Qu'va from orbit to get a handful of armed dissidents? Also, a warship hovering at very low altitude is not providing orbital bombardment. Its just providing close air support. and that means it can be shot down. If the rebels have access to anti-ship weapons, or even just some desperate partisans with a commercial transport plane packed with C-10, then they can potentially cripple or kill a warship at tiny cost to themselves. And a warship dropping as a blazing wreck into a city center sends a powerful message.
The main reason I could see for them having given the Aclamators guns was that they were just a stop gap ship meant to fill all roles. By the end of the war I could only see them being used for planetary invasions, possibly even having their weaponry canabalized for other more nessessary weapons craft.
Those medium turbos would be decent in orbital support and heavy torpedoes might crack planetary shield if fired in coordinated manner from whole fleet. It was assault ship not a troop transport after all.
Regarding the threat of naval invasion during the gulf war, during an Interview General Schwarzkopf mentioned, that if the Iraqi forces had redeployed from the coast the US forces might have used the opportunity to launch a naval landing. Military plans are not set in stone and are adapted to the situation. In this specific case, the iraqi army had two choices: 1) commit large forces to coastal defence to prevent/oppose a military landing or 2) redeploy their forces and allow the enemy to land a large force in th rear of their army. Edit: Regarding 40k Drop Pods, there is a version which can deploy a single dreadnought (armoured walker). Just a minor correction
Something that does interest me the most is how a metaphysical extra dimensional war between higher metaphysical factions would be like? There is one sci fi called Manifold by Stephen Baxter that delves into the near almighty Downstreamers but I never heard of a huge hyper dimensional war they have been through that was described in great detail. So a metaphysical conflict is quite a unknown yet fascinating concept to me. It would help a group like say the SCP Foundation alot in their universe which is full of metaphysical dangers and factions.
@@loreman2803 Yep. I heard of it and read a little bits of descriptions of the Downstreamers. Some people say there are evil Downstreamers out there but the articles I read imply no such thing.
You know. the "prelude" could be skiped by quoting drill instructor fleet sarge Charles Zim... "If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how-or why-he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people-'older and wiser heads,' as they say-supply the control. Which is as it should be." SGT Charles Zim
@@TemplinInstitute Well I wasnt that far in the video :D but in fact the movie Zim was quite a good guy... their medics can fix that hand in minutes :D
Excellent dissertation! Lines up pretty on par with my own project. Orbital landings are defined as Objective Raids, Planetary Assaults, or Planetary Occupations and follow can follow the escalation ladder in order to reach the end goal. Raids to knock out AA and/or Orbital Defenses, neutralize key targets etc. Assaults to land a sizable force in order to achieve a more expansive goal ie seize locations, destroy infrastructure, combat enemy forces or secure a beachhead, etc. Lastly, Occupation would be make use of an existing beachhead to land a substantial force with the intent of engaging in a prolonged operations...
On the subject of orbital bombardment, you really have to take into account the setting as you mentioned, for example, in the book series: We are Legion (We are Bob), there is a species called the Others, who are basically human intelligent but with ant like levels of agression and social cohesion, they view the entire universe as one giant 0-sum game, to the point where they dont even bother colonising other systems as that would just create a rival down the line, so thier method is to just show up, gamma-blast the surface killing all life, then mine the system for all metals. The primary reason for those statements about war paradigms shifting always being wrong is the ladder, as you said, but if one side just views the universe as a constant battle, then you can skip the ladder and go straight to the unrestricted option, Incidentally, the only solution to the Others was the 'last resort' they blew their home star up.
@@paulmahoney7619 The thing is, interstellar governments have access to resources and technology that make almost all 'justifications for wars resulting in terrestrial invasion' irrelevant, other than 'that person/thing/society is an existential threat', or 'I want to terraform that planet for me, but it's inhabited by X....guess we're getting rid of X'....which leads to 'Y is an existential threat'....both of which kinda make invasions inefficient as the goal is to eliminate X or Y or at least deny one or the other further unfettered access to interstellar infrastructure. Any other wars that are more political in nature would largely circle around denying one side the ability to access interstellar infrastructure or at least provide terms for the access...and this can be done largely by non-terrestrial means.
One day, hundreds of years from now, space combat military academy’s will be using these videos for educational purposes, and that’s weirdly comforting....
On the Dropship section, I was wondering whether you would talk about tackling the delta v requirements to lift back out of the atmosphere in a way that Earth 1 science and capabilities currently understand things.
That will wholy depend on where technology has reached at the point in time we're executing planetary invasions. Many books I've read had magnetic field manipulation for surface to orbit/orbit to surface craft. Others just the vague anti gravity/gravity manipulation concept. Several more just had hyper efficient, high output engines that still followed physics as we know them currently, but diminished the limitations they presented.
“Planning before an operation is, after all, very different from planning it as it’s underway.” Here we see the Kenobi school and the Skywalker school.
31:54 In Gundam SEED, Zaft prepared for a massive assault on the Earth Alliance's Panama base where their mass driver spaceport was located. Even the invading forces thought that was the target. But at the last moment, the target was changed to the EA Alaska base which was their central military headquarters. Leaks about the Panama attack were allowed and even encouraged in order to fool the EA into diverting much of their forces away from Alaska. Though this was a double ruse. Certain elements in Zaft hoping to escalate the war into mutual annihilation had leaked the real target of the invasion. The EA leadership evacuated Alaska, leaving all the undesirable parts of their military to give the illusion of the EA's presence. Once the Zaft forces were close enough to the base, a massive network of microwave radiation devices that had been set up ahead of time would be activated, disintegrating all organics and leveling everything else.
So... You mentioned in the video that there was; military escalation (as you covered extensively), diplomatic, and economic escalation. Perhaps in the future you can cover how an interstellar empire can use the other two escalations?
Another point that I don’t think that was covered, is that if the planet that’s being invaded is advanced enough your focus could be key services, take and hold these for long enough and even the most ardent force will be worn down.
Since Halo has recently been in the collective mind, where might you put the Pelican? I think it is somewhere between light and medium dropships. Mostly for its ability to carry vehicles for why it might a bit above a light dropship. There could be an argument for it being a gunship too, since it can use its nose gun or be equipped with missile hardpoints or be made into a gunship variant entirely.
medium transport for just the chain-gun armed version (Medium cause it can carry armoured vehicles, albeit not from orbit realistically) Partly cause it can carry 10 marines sitting alongside 2 mongeese in the enclosed bay. Prolly medium gunship if armed with the missile pods, chain-gun, and the extra bonus of a rear facing turret when the ramp opens. MTOW probably would restrict it to not being able to carry heavier vehicles as easily from all the extra munitions.
One thing you forgot about the LAAT is that it can carry an AT-RT along with the Infantry if need be. AT-RT being an All Terrain Reconnaissance Transport. This capabilty was shown in the Republics Planetary Assault of Umbara when the 501st gunships descended to drop off all the AT-RTs so they could soften Umbaran defenses for the Infantry
Gundam, Aldnoah Zero, and Space Battleship Yamato references. I love to see anime sci-fi being finally given the attention it deserves. I really wish that the Temple Institute, Spacedock, and other scifi channels would look at anime alternate worlds too :)
I think there are good examples of all of these planetary invasions in Craig Alanson's Expeditionary Force series. I do want to highlight 2 of the operations. First is the Ruhar invasion of Earth that takes place in the first book Columbus Day. The Ruhar perform a planetary raid. They land a minimal amount of troops in strategic locations to destroy industrial areas on Earth. The point of this was to stall another species the Kristang from using earth as a jumping off point. The second is the Kristang using Humans for garrison duty on a conquered planet. This fits with humanitarian aid sort off. The Humans were simply on the planet to keep the peace so the Ruhar could evacuate their citizens.
Aw, now I'm sad there haven't been more large scale invasions in at least a handful of the sequels. Expeditionary Force both sides mostly adhere to the "Rules of Engagement" which aim to preserve planets and resources, which does limit options to invasion or targeted attacks. Although they blew up a moon or something in a pretty cool way as a punitive measure.
@@Arashmickey in the spin off Mavericks series there are large scale invasions of planets. I agree though most actions in the series are smaller in scale.
I absolutely adore that you featured the Raven from Elysium, i love that craft so much, it's ridiculous, but that's what I'd want to arrive in. It's just too damn cool.
*Come on you apes! Do you want to pledge forever?! **www.patreon.com/templininstitute*
"HA HA ORBITAL BOMBARDM--"
*Surface-To-Orbit weapon go boom, byebye expensive warship*
Also, good luck holding the planet from orbit.
It's like living in the attic whilst rats run amock and all you have is a bunch of WP grenades.
Also, if the enemy knows that they have only orbital bombardment to look foward to, they might well see no point in surrender. And desperate people can do desperate things.
Also, even despite that, it's no fun being king of a wasteland.
Next, can you cover boarding action (including sweeping disabled ships and protecting prize crews), occupying space stations and orbital infrastructure, and especially combat in micro gravity/zero-g?
Nice Marine quote, perfect guys to hit planetary beaches and open up beach heads. Guaranteed we are just waiting for that epic day, to drop from space on a hostile target. So far, Amy thoughts I had on what you were saying, you got to shortly after you said, said thought provoking thing. Soo…why aren’t you also trying to convince us on the merits of ladders? They are damn handy, coming from a guy that use to use them a lot, I mean they are a pain in the ass, even though so useful….you should definitely do a vid on the merits of ladders, just saying, I’d watch it, and you know go over the history of em, they do involve a lot with warfare, especially early stuff when we still sucked at big wars, like world wars, and had piddly cannon, and garbage arquebuses. Definitely were used in a strategic way, to take castles and later forts.
Because of this I was able to successfully pull off a planetary invasion with minimal casualties. Thank you so much!
OH commander C.I.A.B i will get my revenge for that bombardment on my planet!Just you wait because im watching it to °)
I have a trade federation type empire like from star wars on my Stellaris game and it's fun
Lol imagine some alien general or strategist from an advanced alien civilization watching a video made by primitive hairless apes on planetary invasion lol
Minimal casualties on which side 🤨
@@svijj_ lol
Your discussion on Orbital Bombardment is one of the reason I love Halo so much, because they go down the checklist of reasons why not to bombard. Do you require the planets resources? No. Do you have to worry about military consequences? No. Do you have to worry about Diplomatic consequences? No. The Covenant only deployed ground troops when there was something on the planet they wanted. Otherwise they just glassed it.
The covenant also had ideological reasons for orbital bombardment.
Or to obtain religiously significant forerunner artefacts.
@@WhatIsThatThingDoing goes under diplomatic consequences and planetary resources
Ah yes The Shadow of Intent... Rtas's solution for Wiping out Flood to Retrieve a Message from a Human kind AI for ending the infestation...
Literally Glassed Half a Continent
Is everyone OK if and when Rtas Glasses a part of Africa to contain the flood?
I'm on board
Covenant vs brazil would be a decisive victory for Brazil. The covenant decided to go to Brazil, and now they’re stuck in Brazil. They cannot leave and therefore have lost.
Double jumping Brazillians are Elite's worst nightmare.
the brazilians will be stuck with the jackal snipers though
Funny enough there are former covenant species living in Rio.
Gundams, the only people to succesfully escape Brazil.
@@awddfgThe Jackals become part of the Brazilian wildlife🗿
Damn, first ships, then tanks, now orbital bombardment? This guy is going to be the reason an Interstellar empire conquers us
Or we conquer an interstellar empire. I give it 25/25 odds of either one. Other 50 go to us wiping ourselves out before the other two can happen.
The Stellaris RP is going too far
All we need now is the infantry, Air Force, high command and maybe more exotic units like pionics, mechs or whatever and we’re good.
@@hanzzel6086 at the rate that we're going I'm banking for more than 50 that we will wipe ourselves out
The Templin Institute WILL be the interstellar Empire that conquers us
This is why Halo still does interstellar war really well. The Covenant only invaded planets that had relics they wanted. Otherwise, they just sat in orbit and glassed the planet.
@UC2Tx01niEuzR2VMVwOIsVGg they didn’t really care about resources when the goal of their was the extinction of humanity.
I mean it makes sense. Covenant main goal was eradication of humanity and collecting Forerunner relics. Once the orbital battle is won unless the world has something of interest just bomb it from space.
Star Wars have shields that stops that.
@@randomusernameCallin what do you mean? When has a shield stopped an orbital bombardment in star wars?
@@Sollapoke the battle of hoth
I find that the "escalation ladder" metaphor works even better if the order is turned upside down: Peacetime at the top, annihilation at the bottom. It illustrates the danger of what happens when some steps are missing, and how easy it is to slip into escalation vs. the effort of deescalation.
given the DEFCON levels go from 5 (peacetime) to 1 (Thermo-nuclear war), I have to agree
Man, imagine having to launch a planetary invasion of an ocean world. Full-sized battleships and aircraft carriers being deployed from orbit... Majestic
There was a series of Star Wars: Clone Wars episodes about that. Both the Republic and Separatists both deployed water suited infantry/droids and vehicles to help secure victory.
It would definitely be a sight to see
If we're talking about advanced civilizations, then they could easily do much better than full size, and in invading an ocean world, they might very well prioritize massive submarines instead. Which might just end up looking like a bomb dropping from the sky, before engaging a thruster or some kind of descent mechanism to keep from killing everyone on impact with the surface of the water. Regardless the thing could be massive, possibly on the scale of kilometers if they don't intend to return it to orbit in one piece, since there's really no building limit in space other than that of resources and function.
Deploying navel ships would be pointless. Space ships in orbit could preform all there functions from space.
@@gesus6613 Not necessarily.
1. Spaceships can't really hit naval ships without slowing down their weapon reentry due to plasma blackout. You need to decelerate to low hypersonic speeds to guide a weapon to target.
2. Naval ships CAN hit spaceships, especially anything in low orbit.
3. Any projectile weapon at sensible muzzle velocity or delta-V will have to overfly huge amounts of territory for several minutes before impacting its target. A naval ship can receive plenty of warning and a submarine may even have sufficient time to dive before the weapon impacts.
4. From high or elliptical orbit, while the spaceship is safer and has more operational freedom, it's attacks are arguably even more telegraphed and ASATs can be deployed by the planetary defenders against incoming missiles.
5. Aircraft are highly mobile but can't be targeted with anti-ground or anti-space weaponry. The threat posed by an F-15 with an ASAT is probably sufficient that you would at minimum want some kind of air defenses near your operations. Historically, the defense against aircraft has involved air superiority fighters, which need somewhere to land, refuel and take off again, as integrating SSTO capability into a fighter would probably get it killed if it ever saw combat. This necessitates the construction, seizure, or landing of such places on the ground or in the sea.
"In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good."
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Ch. III "Attack By Stratagem", §1).
If it works for countries, it surely works for planets.
It's amazing how the Art of War applies to almost everything, even sci-fi
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 Amazing indeed.
I think it's because Sun Tzu based his book on researches he made during his lifetime and tried to keep situations he's describing as broadly as possible (sometimes it's almost "war epistemology" or Polemology).
Its actually common sense depends on your war goal.
Stopping an expansionist empire? Capture its planets for resources
Full-on Genocidal mode?
Exterminatus
Helping a rebellion or ideology war?
Capture it whole and make a puppet gov
Lower their morale?
Bomb civilians
Lower their output?
Strategic bombardment
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 Art of War is pretty much the most basic of war so, in term of human war, is (mostly) timeless
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 Well it better seeing as Sun Tzu invented fighting!
For reference: excessive use of exterminatus is one of the few things that can get an inquisitor reliably excommunicated.
Yup. There's a whole Ordo that makes sure Exterminatus only happen for a valid reason.
17:32 All points on the escalation ladder
- Unrestricted use of WMDs
- Unrestricted orbital bombardment
- Limited use of orbital bombardment, WMDs
- Mass use of conventional forces against military/economic targets
- Mass use of precision strikes against military/economic targets
- Grounded use of precision strikes against military/economic targets
- Grounded use of precision strikes against military targets
- Assembly and transfer of WMDs
- Complete mobilization of all forces
- Precautionary WMD alert
- Complete infliction of damage on immaterial targets
- Limited infliction of damage on immaterial targets
- Military blockade
- Reinforce key military units and stockpiles
- Partial mobilization of military forces
- Unconventional convert offense campaign in core territories
- Unconventional overt offense campaign in outlying territories
- Unconventional convert retaliation
- Selective mobilization of military forces
- Military signaling, test exercises
- Pre-crisis maneuvering, gestures, diplomacy
I see "gestures" and now I can't stop thinking of Pakistan 's delegate in the US flipping off India's delegate across the UN council chambers.
the war in Ukraine is now at: "- Mass use of conventional forces against military/economic targets "
@@UnreasonableOpinions They both have plenty of experience from family gatherings. I would know.
One of the other things we can learn from World War 2 is that having a fleet of ships in a location known to the enemy for any significant length of time would be INCREDIBLY dangerous in any situation where the enemy has ships that can respond: one of the hardest things to do to even have a battle at all (space or sea,) is to find the other ships, but if you know where your enemy is (like, say, in orbit,) and they don't know where you are, you can launch a massive first strike against their fleet and gain a solid upper-hand. If the planet has its own defenses as well, the attacking fleet would also be immediately flanked, and usually with no means of retreat.
As such, many planetary assaults would need to move *fast*, so the most valuable ships involved can retreat to a safer location, and the ships you would leave behind to support the invasion would likely be weaker and expendable, and thus unlikely to be able to support each army beyond wherever the planetary defenders might have a dead spot in their defenses.
Also worth noting IMO, that when it comes to a interstellar civilisation's planet vs a fleet, the planet almost always has the upper hand. They have the material resources of the entire planet to throw at the fleet, they have bigger and more numerous reactors with which to power better shields, and they have the ability to construct bunkers and so on. Unless the planet in question is severely underdeveloped, the fleet manages to annihilate much of the planet in a matter of hours, or the fleet has absurdly powerful weapons that are unavailable to the planet, a planet will ultimately win the exchange, ignoring morale.
Though, even if you do include morale, that's still likely to tip in the planet's favour IMO: the civilians are trying to defend their homes from invasion. When they see New New York has been obliterated by the fleet in orbit, its likely to make them go "do I really want the people who obliterated New New York to be my rulers?". Meanwhile, if the crew of the fleet see that the space battleship USS Iowa has just been blown to bits, they're likely to say "do I really want to suffocate or be burnt to death, in order to take this planet?". Up the chain from them, you can't imagine many admirals being happy to see one of their fleets take heavy losses in order to destroy a planet that might not even be particularly strategically useful.
Finding spaceships is actually very easy. Since they radiate heat one would be able to see the position of absolutely everyone all the time. If you wanted to have a battle, you would just need to catch up to the other spaceship before it moves away from you until one of the two doesn't have enough inertial mass or fuel to continue moving around (at that point, said side has lost the battle too, as it probably will be stranded there infinetly).
@@1967sluggy It does depend as well , if you can denie via raids , power and food to the population the population may force them to surrender again though factoring int hey are some form of democracy, even if they dont cede it does push the planet closer towards defeat without a full scale assualt
Planetary bombardment is going to be phase 2 of the planetary invasion. Phase 1 is the orbital battle. When you win you bomb all orbital and anti-drop defences. Blow up military emplacements that won't ruin civilian/industrial infrastructure. Then you drop and need to disarm the remaining defenders with orbital support replacing modern air strikes
You can move in the ships, disembark the troops, and retire the ships, leaving in place highly automated, space fortresses, etc, but the best is to kill the enemy Navy first.
My favorite dropship example was "Project Meteor" from Gundam Wing, in which space colonies, wishing to declare independence from the United Earth Federation, secretly developed an advanced type of mobile suit using a metallic alloy that could only be produced in zero gravity. They plant the trajectories alongside meteor showers so that the units could safely make landfall without being shot out of the sky. Then, once on the earth, the pilots would hide in plain sight during the day and take out key military targets at night. The overall objective was to diminish the Earth's capacity to exercise military control over the colonies, while at the same time obfuscating which colonies which actually involved in the attack against the Earth.
Aside from the fact that this was a giant robot anime, I thought that the entire premise was extremely realistic.
ITS A GUNDAM! **explodes**
It's a brilliant example of a revised plan which is more sane than the original. Since the original Operation Meteor was 'destabilize a colony so it will drop onto the Earth, while this prospect causes chaos on Earth, use the Gundams to hit key targets so that when the colony hits, no coherent government/military response can happen, then land forces to pick up the pieces/occupy the Earth.' which, while potentially effective, is pretty damn insane in terms of collateral damage. (Of course, they didn't care about owning the Earth, just the Earth not being able to control them so it still meets their objective.)
Edit: It's also worth mentioning that the original Operation Meteor wouldn't necessarily achieve the political objective the colonies wanted. It could easily have been counter productive. Meanwhile, targeted strikes in secret against the OZ membership inside the Alliance Military was a much more viable way to get the job done. It didn't end up working out, but that's in large part do to a counter intelligence coup by Oz turning their targeting onto the _exact_ wrong targets. The operation's execution was quite well done for the time it lasted at least.
All who set eyes on those robots weren't allowed to live to tell, those were their orders....
Turn A was also pretty good about being more about the war than the robots. The moon people also did a similar thing with using mobile suits as dropships for child scouts who would blend into society and grow up while feeding the Lunarians info.
Gundam Wing is top
The siege of Terra in 40K is proof that purely orbital attacks aren’t enough if the enemy has shields, orbital attacks are extremely useful strategically eg localised lance attacks etc the issue is with bombarding a world to dust you lose its resources and at the extreme ends you lose a planet strategically
Drop site massacre
@@ThePowerthatbeMe To be fair wasn’t that an ambush by presumably friendly forces?
40K is the poster child for why planetary invasions work and generally have the logistics to make it work.
Certainly everyone always says exterminatus all the time, but that is always a last resort, even by the exterminatus trigger happy inquisition.
@@tyrannicfool2503 yep, the astartes went in expecting light to medium resistance from known forces and instead were attacked by traitors, and it's actually a great example of why planatery bombardments don't always work, the traitors deployed a virus that ate all organic matter, and the astartes still survived and forced the traitors to deploy ground troops to elimanate them
I think the video makes the best comparison up front: It's not a new suggestion, and despite what bomber harris and others insisted, they already had their proof that bombing alone couldn't force a surrender in the form of the blitz. If it didn't work in London, only hubris would lead them to believe it would work everywhere that wasn't London.
Battle-tech during the age of war shows how effective orbital bombardment is,but also how ineffective it is when you actually want a planet and not a burning and radioactive waste land.
In Starship Troopers (the book) the navy has weapons which can blow planets in half. They aren't allowed to use them because that would mean the habitable planet humans could spread to in the future is gone.
There is also a third alien race in the series which is, more or less, neutral because they need a different environment to live in (both humans and bugs want the same type of worlds).
@@cp1cupcake I had a similar situation in a 4x game, Space Empires 4, where I encountered a friendly alien race that could only inhabit gas giants. Meaning we had essentially no real reason to wage war on one another.... yet anyway. So instead we colonies each others space and I became imminently paranoid of all these potential footholds in every system.
Scary, but safe!
Pretty much after the Tanetenvel incident, it pretty much forced all nations to sign a convention treaty that outlawed thr use of WMDs indiscriminate action. (Unless your Capellians picking a fight with Space West Virgina...then you're going to end up with lots of dead Capellians and one planet to show for using nukes.)
However that did make war more of a sport until the rise of the Battlemech. Then in the first two succession wars... pretty much all the noble houses regressed to what would amount 2000 Era of technology with smoldering ruins of the 30th century of advance tech....that yes it is possible to bomb humanity back to the stoneage.
Good thing that Halo's Covenant didn't care about preserving human planets, just killing humans and occasionally taking some Forerunner relics before the glassing.
The fact that EVEN The trigger-happy Imperium of Man would consider Orbital Bombardment a last resort option is terrifying food for thought.
Chances are, the main reason why orbital bombardement isn't so widely used is simply because it would ruin the marketability of warhammer 40k for GW
@@supe4701indeed, imagine bombing chaos forces and bvr warfare in warhammer 40k.most of the factions are ded very fast
While on an individual level the Imperium is trigger-happy, a recurring theme in a lot of the fiction is how slow to act and how much redundancy of command there is in the Adeptus Terra due to internal distrust and memories of large scale rebellion.
There is an entire departement in the Inquistion, the Ordo Excorium, whose entire job is to analyse the various usages of Exterminatus to judge wether or not it was necessary. If they find a case that they judge to have been unnecessary they will then have the person who ordered it executed.
Many of the resources you would want from a planet risk being destroyed by orbital bombardment.
Extermanatus is the tool of last resort, however, it is often the first proposed solution to a planet-wide issue.
But, as anyone who has played Space Marine (2011) can see, it's often shot down quite rapidly. They weren't even willing to use heavy capital-ship class weaponry on the planet. The options are whittled to one advance SQUAD of ultramarines, and their whole job was simply to secure one manufactory while a proper fleet response got underway.
That's what makes Inquisitor Kryptman get excommunicated from the Inquisition (right or wrong is still hotly debated), his unabashed use of exterminatus as a firebreak was seen as heinous by imperium of man standards. Let that sink in.
Not to mention it was to slow down the advance of the Nids like they weren't anywhere near the systems atleast you know evacuate the damn people
More specifically, Kryptmann's actions were horrifying because not only was his use of exterminatus at an unprecedented scale, it was also used against planets that were perfectly fine at the time - and worse, carried out so fast that almost none of the world's personnel, resources, and relics could be taken off. Exterminatus when a world is effectively lost makes sense; you lose the world for thousands of years or forever, but you had already lost it and get to deny it to the enemy. Exterminatus on a world that is perfectly intact and has done nothing wrong is a huge line to step over, let alone on this scale.
Xenos Invasion In Progress
Designation: Forge World
Priority Assets: Warlord Class Titan Manufacturing
Strategic Value: Absolute
Recommended Course Of Action?
Orbital Stike?
Negative. Estimated Reduction In Manufacturing Output Unacceptable.
Exterminatus?
Negative, Strategic Value Absolute.
But...
Negative, Strategic Value ABSOLUTE!
@@UnreasonableOpinions This also became more troublesome once Chaos started inciting exterminatus for a variety of their plots. Being overly exterminatus button pushing may indicate corruption, as well as zeal. This is part of the plot of both Dawn of War 1 and 2 games.
Let's not forget that W40K is somewhat a parody of itself, and that by the moral standards of almost any other reality, the fact alone of someone being so quick to nonchalantly suggest exterminating an entire planet could get them court-martialed.
I love the Maginot Worlds in stellaris. A whole planet gets converted into a sprawling defensive platform with all districts dedicated to planetary defense and basically every citizen exists solely to defend the planet. And, if somehow the planet falls, the planet acts as an antimatter bomb and annihilates the whole solar system
So that's what Maginot worlds do
I did not put that apostrophe there
Apostrophe was placed on worlds edited 2 days before fireworks spam day
So basically it's a Cadia???
While mods should not be counted the reality is that those word are a pain in a playthrough.
The core of the empire accessible by only one hyper-line and at the end is a 30K star base that debuff your fleet follow by a planet full of fortress, a planet shield and a ftl inhibitor that you need to take to progress in the war
@@ZCid47 Gigaenginnering is basically a core part of the game from how my friends and I play lol
I love the calling out of the more impetuous among 40k fans, and how accurately they'd be regarded in-universe
Indeed. Such disregard shows a falling to the ruinous powers that cannot be tolerated.
Sadly, in the case of dealing with Tyranids, it proved to be easier to declare Exterminatus on a world where the Hive Fleet was already committed to the digestion of that world, depriving it of nutrients and the ability to recycle what it sent down.
Quicly reminder that the inquisitor that made that doctrine is considered a rouge inquisitor
@@cardinalvarsen5781that doesn't mean he is not right. He is just unlucky.
Were it the ICOG, they will be more than happy to go through with his tactic if it mean denying their enemy an advantage, no matter how slight.
The main problem with the Exterminatus of Tyranid infested worlds is that you can't (or rarely can) destroy a planet once the Hive-Fleet is there, because you would have to break through hundreds of bio-ships to reach the orbit. It's what happens in the Tyranid ending of Dawn of War II : the Exterminatus fleet is forced to retreat because it can't oppose the returning Hive-Fleet.
Kryptman's plan was to bombard worlds before the Tyranids would get to them, which is why he was ultimately excommunicate. He destroyed Imperial assets and lives before anyone (but himself) was sure they were really in-danger.
Spacedock: Planetary invasions are stupid! Just blockade and bomb the planet into submission.
The Templin Institute: ...and I took that personally.
Right, I forgot what YT cannel I heard that from. I disagreed with him heavily.
@@JeanLucCaptain And it turned near decade near two slug fest.
Spacedock is a fanatical purifyer
Templin is a filthy Free Haven
Oh, so that's why they kept using The Expanse for examples...
@@fieldmarshalbaltimore1329 i think a lot of people noted in the comment thread for that one ,that sure....if all you sought was the short term genocide of what ever species or faction you where arbitary at war with... yes.
but a lot of people pointed out various reasons one might want to invade a planet...from reasons of dogma ,culture , to the 'garden' state of it being the commodity sought to simple reasons of resources , sure if its one giant megapolis breding hive bunker fortress maby..but if its only sparly populated or an industrial center , capturing it and putting things to..your.. use instead might be a valid tactical reason.
still was fun to listen to the reasoning.
An example of a planetary (well, starbase) demonstration:
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "By Inferno's Light", the Dominion made a lot of noise about retaking DS9 from Starfleet and the Bajorans, even faking warp signatures to suggest an inbound fleet, prompting Starfleet, the Klingons, and even the Romulans to deploy a huge task force to defend the station. Turns out the real plan was to trigger a supernova in the Bajoran sun, which would have destroyed the entire fleet, along with the station and Bajor.
It is strange that in ST they never use WMD's directly against other ships always against planets or stars.
@@swanky_yuropean7514 I mean, a photon torpedo is already a WMD. Even in the 2150s, a single torpedo could wipe out a city with ease at maximum yield. Presumably the 23rd and 24th century torpedoes are even more powerful, and deflector shields have improved to compensate.
@@swanky_yuropean7514 But... but they have. Routinely.
@@Mitchz95 Voyager, "Omega Directive" - special torpedo to "blow up a small moon".
@@swanky_yuropean7514 Also the Federation was kinda morally above that, like covert Ops and espionage to bring Romulus into the war seemed wrong at evil at least portrayed by Sisko. The nearest widely deployed WMD was probably and advanced ship type like Sovereign Class
That opening with the speech to the soldiers about to depart for Normandy with all the scenes of the beach landings will never get old
"This is a goddamn dangerous ladder and it's very easy to fall up" is a brilliant metaphor.
The problem is we might start at the top of the ladder by default, ie; the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox.
The hypothesis is that the Galaxy is silent of alien life because any alien civilisation that reveals itself will be nuked by silent alien civilisations.
@@caad5258 Well, that's usually not a problem in sci-fi so really isn't relevant to the topic at hand.
@@caad5258 You should read the Three Body Problem trilogy, it combines Dark Forrest Theory and intergalactic invasion fleets quite well on a hard sci fi writing
@@lawrencesmeaton6930 I have yes.
@@caad5258 The probability of that goes down the farther into the future we go though, because we have already been shooting signals into space revealing ourselves like crazy pretty much since the discovery of radio waves, and we're still here, for now.
Another problem with orbital bombardment is that you're assuming that the enemy will never challenge your space superiority, and that your fleet will be able to stay over the enemy planet forever. You should never assume that your opponent is passive.
Big problem here is that you are assuming that you would have to keep your fleet in orbit. If you hit all the space ports from space, not only have you crippled your enemies ability to strike back quickly but you cause enough environmental damage that the enemy will be trying to stay alive, or will have to simply leave the base/planet in question.
Your fleet moves on to the next target knowing they have dealt a serious blow to the enemy. Your enemy doesn't have to be passive, you just need to be quick and accurate in your attacks.
Relying entirely on orbital bombardment also fails to account for the possibility of an enemy that simply refuses to surrender, despite being in a hopeless situation. Or the possibility of an enemy building weapons that can destroy anything in orbit from the planets surface, even as they are being blockaded.
That's what I was thinking. First, getting all your slow, heavy guns on the only angle an enemy WONT be coming from is a bad idea, second, why should the ground force surrender when help is on its way? Why give up if you know you just need to hold out a little longer?
surface weaponry could afford to be much stronger than spaceship mounted one because you don't have to worry about weight or recoil
and if they have bunkers say 2 km deep in the crust you definitely aren't destroying it from orbit
plus they have an entire planet to turn into ammo...
so yeah a defenceless planet is a stupid idea
@@yjlom yeah, fortifications are always a pain for the attackers. It's been that way since the dawn of war itself. "You can't build fortifications in space" sure if you say so, but you can fortify a planet and then you aren't getting through that. And if it's reach is far enough you have to attack that fort if you want to move through the system without being just shelled into submission
I'd like to point out the Siege of Vraks, where orbital bombardment would have destroyed the armories the Imperium needed to capture. Orbital bombardment is not a possible solution when irreplaceable resources cover the target zone.
Those armories were buried deep beneath the bedrock, orbital bombardment would have done nothing
Either way the Imperial Navy couldn't even get close enough to the Vraks citadel to bombard it, when ships did get within range of the Orbital Laser Silos, they were instantly attacked and damaged
In the end it was cheaper to exterminate planet than fighting for arsenal.
@@berkowk Mainly due to Demons, Heretic Space marines from the beginning of the Heresey, and a full traitor Titan Legion appearing.
@@dragonace119 and the armories being depleted
Cool, might learn how I could have beaten the Rebels faster on Hoth.
😔
Too late my lord... To late
Maybe not using a walker that would work better as an artillery piece?
Just saying Lord Vader,just saying...
@@unitedstatesofamerica4987 I’m not with him lord vader
Frag officers like Ozzel before they can do too much damage
In my own personal worldbuilding project, which is on a massive extra-galactic scope, the notion of full planetary bombardment is still highly controversial. One of the main reasons is that it is ludicrously wasteful. The vast majority of planets within the universe I'm working on are completely uninhabitable, which makes terraformable planets extremely rare, and beyond that, finding a naturally inhabitable planet is like finding a needle in a mountain range. The more you bomb a perfectly livable planet, the more effort and resources you're going to require in order to make it livable again. Not to mention, you'd be destroying most, if not all of the highly refined resources and technologies already established on the planet by your enemy. Why destroy absolutely everything your enemy has built, when you can capture and repurpose it for yourself? Obviously, this is just one reason among thousands, but I feel as though it is a strong argument against orbital bombardment.
I’m interested in trying some sci fi world building too. How’s your galaxy going?
@@Justin-cw7zf Awesome! My worldbuilding has been slow the past few weeks, but I’m starting to pick up the pace again.
@@johnclinnick3969 nice to hear. Your concept is really unique so I’m glad your moving along just fine
@@johnclinnick3969 I've been off and on world building for a while now, and I actually want your thoughts on how to conceptually justify a common sci-fi trope. I want to have a type 3 civilization that evolved from an apex predator species, physiologically similar to Turians from mass effect. The key difference being that culturally they not highly militarized, (until a certain incident) to go with a theory of mine that a species evolved from predators would actually be less preemptively violent than herbivores, since genetically they never needed to keep tabs on other creatures unless they needed food. (Zebras always having to watch lions, lions not caring to watch zebras, etc.)
The only problem is, and (I haven't known anyone else to think this through either) why would a species at or near the top of the food chain evolve intelligence at all? Why wouldn't they just cruise around in their optimized predatorial form for millions of years like sharks or crocodiles? I need to come up with a planetary history that caused predators to develop intelligence, build tools, culture and civilization without having to develop the same paranoia of a species more often preyed upon...
I know this is a complicated question, but I never get to talk to anyone else even remotely into this stuff. What do you think?
@@morgatron4639 You know, that's a good question. I'm actually in a similar boat myself with one of the species I've created; an incredibly dangerous hyper-carnivore with full-on sapience. Albeit, I haven't yet dedicated the time to come up with a solution regarding their evolution. A few things have come to mind though, so I suppose I can offer up some suggestions.
For one, evolution is a highly randomized non-linear process, sometimes resulting in organisms with odd or just downright inefficient adaptations that stick around far longer than they otherwise should. Perhaps the precursors of your species experienced a random mutation which helped to increase brain size, despite the fact that an apex predator wouldn't necessarily need such a thing. Brains are energy hungry organs, so paired with a resource rich environment, an apex predator could theoretically develop higher and higher levels of intelligence while also being able to maintain their predatory traits (claws, teeth, sharp eyesight, high endurance, etc).
Alternatively, one of these precursor species might not have been apex predators at all, and simply experienced a series of mutations/environmental changes which promoted the development of intelligence. However, before true sapience could be achieved, the environment could make a turn for the worse, limiting resources and "forcing" these precursors to develop predatory traits to maintain their developing nervous system. Afterall, meat tends to be great brain fuel. This pairing of rising intelligence and increase in predatory traits could reasonably accelerate each other's development.
You could also go with a slightly convoluted reversal of the previous situation: reduction in predatory traits resulting in an increase to intelligence, followed by an environmental change/mutation which promotes the re-evolution of predatory traits before sapience develops. Once more, this could lead to a situation where both sets of traits accelerate each other's development.
The truth is, evolution and "why" things happen the way they do is very complex and potentially self-contradicting. I mean, there are SO many things that went into the evolution of our own intelligence; the development of bipedalism, reduction in jaw size, loss of hair, the ability to sweat, a developing taste for meat, and so much more lead to what our species became. I would suggest analyzing the biological features of your species, and brainstorm ways in which those traits could have influenced one another over the course of your species' evolution, and how those traits could promote a rise in intelligence.
Sorry if my reply is a bit long; I am kind of passionate about this sort of thing.
I can imagine the institute taking note when someone a long time ago in a land far far away said "The Ballista. The weapon to end all wars!"
"Ah, the pointy rock. The weapon to end all wars!"
"What's a war?"
"Dunno."
@@tbotalpha8133 "What's a weapon?"
The most important factor of a planetary invasion, or ANY exertion of force, is to know beforehand what your goal is.
Do you want to own all the territory? Do you want to wreck the other side's stuff? Do you want to kill or kidnap the opposing leadership? Do you want to rescue someone? Do you want to simply prove that you CAN do something, so other future enemies think twice about confronting you?
So many options.
There's a really good reason why the old series 'Battleplan' had 'Clarity of Objective' as the first requirement for all but one battleplan. (That one being Naval Engagement, where 'Preservation of Forces' took over because of just how valuable ships are.)
@@Sorain1 "You won the battle, but lost a super carrier, so you're fired."
As we in the US Army are fond of saying, "Normandy. The greatest amphibious assault in the history of the world...
And not one Marine in sight."
Thare was a larger landing a year later on Okinawa
D day was the largest in history when it happened but Okinawa was larger
Also thare were marines on d day just look it up
As a Marine myself "ahem" 🖕
@@Enterprise6126 Op Husky was bigger than them both
@@Enterprise6126 there were a few pulled from the Pacific to help plan the assault but overwhelmingly army. Fun fact though many of the landing craft were operated by us coast guard
@@jeffbrewer1580 I know
I have studied ww2 sense I was 10
This is a superb video, not just because of the content, but also to drill in the fact that reality is almost infinitely, fractally complex. Simple answers are always wrong and even complex answers are necessarily incomplete, yet we can each handle only so much complexity. The universe is full of patterns - intelligent thought would be impossible if it wasn't - but they interact in such infinite combinations that every historical event is a special case. All we can do is strive to understand as much as we can, prioritise our mental effort and maintain awareness of just how much we don't know and are forced to gloss over. A great aspect of the Templin Institute is how they strive endlessly for classification, systemisation and pattern recognition - whether they're dealing with mundane pieces of military materiel or whole pantheons of mind-breaking horrors - yet also acknowledge the limits of that approach. It really feels like the kind of applied scholarship you'd get out RAND or a similar high-end think-tank; briefings prepared for heads of states by experts who understand both the frustrating imprecision and the vital necessity of their work.
One example of an interstellar crisis response was when the Republic showed up on Aleen in the Clone Wars after a bunch of earthquakes. They deployed troops and fixed up a bunch of stuff, and provided humanitarian relief, and then packed up and left.
Excellent example Steve.
In Battletech, warships became obsolete when the the great houses finally realized that using indiscriminate orbital bombardment as a standard procedure against an entrenched opponent might be counterproductive to their objective of actually taking over a planet. you dont steal a car by setting it on fire.
This, collateral damage ruins your prize for taking the planet in the first place.
@@Ishlacorrin and just makes your people think your a psycho
@@marley7868 Yeah turns public opinion against you something shocking as well. Great way to make MORE enemies though, if that is a part of your plan.
@@Ishlacorrin I'm fairly certain the only people who get away with that stunt in battletech is the taurians and that's cause they nuke there own planets out of spite and have been wmd'ed so hard I think it's grandfathered in it's okay against them just kinda stupid
Well, interstellar invasion is....a laughable idea to begin with. Why land on a world that is actively hostile to you, when there are literally millions of other worlds with the same ores, minerals and resources all around you uncontested. Especially when regardless of your intents the biosphere is likely to be incompatible with your biology due to divergent evolution and ecology... and no 'slave labor' is not an acceptable answer, nor is 'industry infrastructure etc'. All of that is more easily acquired through negotiation, subterfuge, and mechanical automation....especially for a civilization that makes travelling across light years as trivial as going to Hawaii for a vacation.
If you're looking for 'home 2.0' have the tech to bend space and time, don't give a shit about the inhabitants.....why bother with a military invasion. Glass the planet from orbit, fix it to your standards in post production. Mine resources from uninhabited rocks strewn about the universe. IF you have ethical compunctions about casual genocide of sapient life, you look somewhere else, where the moral 'umbrage' won't be so high for your biocide...it's not like the universe isn't literally pregnant with planets....and moons and other such....conveniences.
It's interesting to see how to escalation ladder of violence depicted at 17:24 can be easily applied to the current conflict in Ukraine. It really is easy to climb it, and hard to come back down.
I was thinking of that when I first heard about the situation
No fly zone they say
It's also intresting to see how he mentioned that some groups can't climb the ladder as successfully as others, and what were seeing from Russia is that they thought they could climb the ladder to way higher way quicker than Ukraine could,/would, and boy were they wrong.
eh~ not quite
to me it seems more that they aren't willing to escalate it vertically or horizontally, whereas NATO is practically tripping over itself to do so if it doesn't get reined in
to be clear, I'm not implying any kind of moral supremacy, just that both sides have come to wildly diverging risk assesments and the world is a good deal more miserable for it
@@sabotabby3372 The escalation ladder didn't delved deep into horizontal aspect of it. It's one thing to have a war in puppet state or exploited colony and other thing entirely - ethnic conflict in former part of your country, targeting your nafionality.
-
For Russia this conflict is already very high on escalation ladder and western leaders don't understand that at all.
A massive fleet in orbit cannot occupy a city, a bombardment of hypersonic projectiles cannot capture a mine intact and ready to use, and a giant death laser isn't going to help you retake your own territory from an enemy power. Only personnel on the ground can do that.
Exactly, everything and everyone exists to support the Infantry.
Lol, pathogens and chemical weapons exist.
@@s0ulshot And if the enemy has chemical suits, proper vaccines, and advanced medical equipment, chemical and bioweapons are rendered ineffective. :P
@@tntproductions1996 I'll do you one better. If the enemy just hides underground for a few days chemical and bioweapons are rendered ineffective. Chemical weapons can't crack open a bunker or neutralize shields. Also I think its reasonable to assume most factions aren't hellbent on exterminating the civilian populace (40k being a whole other discussion).
@@StarSage66 And even then 40K doesn't do that either.
One thing I like in the Warhammer 40k universe is that the attacker almost never waits to gain space supremacy to land ground forces. Meaning that orbital bombardment is a factor, but not an automatic win button
You even see it in Star Wars ! Clone wars era had many battles where Clones would be put into drop ships way before exiting hyper space and the entire landing force and fighter bomber support is ready the very moment the ships exit hyper space !
40k also has an unfortunately accurate idea of how long space wars will take, and a better idea than most fiction than most scifi does, but even 40k lowballs the likely scale of how many people will be involved. Not hundreds of thousands or millions like in 40k, but billions, trillions or even more. A truly mind boggling number of people, likely so many that your soldiers outnumber the original inhabitants and form a population of their own
Part of the reason for that is that ships in 40K, especially among the Imperium and Chaos are expensive. A ship that is lost is something that is felt, especially the bigger it is. And that is not including ancient, unreplaceable ships. The end result is you have ships that usually avoid fighting one another unless they are confident they can come out of the fight relatively intact or they have no choice but to fight. Hence how planetary ships via orbital insertion can occur without difficulty.
It's easy to see this considering that that there have been more land battles compared to space battles.
40k has right idea about planetary invasions, and such operations surely would require millions of people involved based on defences, but to be fair if it ever happens those millions probably will be replaced by machine combatants. Even now they started to take over on battlefields, drone usage in latest wars is an example.
@@randomdude8202 effectively to invade a planet you'll have to be making more soldiers and food and weapons on site, so there may be humans still involved but theyll likely be overseeing self replicating arms factories and armies of drones if at all. Also millions is lowballing a bit. Itll be more like billions, maybe tens or hundreds of billions of combatants
For an aspiring author, videos like this are a godsend. Thanks for the breakdown. We are a long way away from an event like this occurring, but this explanation's focus on precedents brings believability to the concept.
'Orbital bombardment renders invasion obsolete' is an argument that's rooted in the idea that collateral damage doesn't matter and a sledgehammer is the tool for every job. I'm reminded of this little saying from the 19th century, when machine guns were the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete: "whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not."
That lasted about 25 years.
In universes with near infinite habitable planets, collateral damage doesn’t really matter.
@@imperialamerican8209 Habitable planets does not translate to inhabited planets. Won't matter if there are 100s of liveable worlds in a war if your enemy has 3 worlds with Industry on them then they are all that matter.
@@imperialamerican8209 That exact way of thinking took Russia out of World War 1. Unlimited resources don't mean unlimited access to those resources.
@@notoriouswhitemoth did Russia have intergalactic space ships capable of glassing planets? If you can get resources from planets that don’t house your enemy then just glass your enemy and move on.
@@imperialamerican8209 they had trains, artillery, and chemical weapons, which were the World War 1 equivalents. As wars get faster, they also get bigger.
Again, "whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not" lasted about 25 years. In the 1880's, people thought the machine gun would render all previous military technologies obsolete, but by 1915 it was cannons - which had been around for centuries - that soldiers were having nightmares about.
Grand Admiral Thrawn pulled off a couple of operations that were pretty close to what you're describing as "planetary demonstrations." There were a number of times where he redirected the New Republic's resources by threatening a raid or assault against a particular target, thus keeping them off balance and allowing his smaller force to strike devastating blows wherever the Republic's forces were redirected away from.
Much more prevalent, the rebellion did pretty much the same thing described in the video over Sullust just before the Battle of Endor.
@@starmada105 I haven't seen/read this. What is it in?
@@thalgrond A bunch of stuff. It was mentioned in an offhand comment in ROTJ, it’s in a few novels, the first mission of Bf2 2017 is to blow up a ship that discovered the Empire knew that Sullust was a diversion, etc.
@@starmada105 Huh. Nice.
The orbital siege of coruscant with cloaked asteroids was particularly clever.
"We don't need swords! The bow and arrow has rendered them obsolete." Me in every medeval game.
“Bows and arrows are obsolete to my plate armour”
@@skepabbas9400 "plate armor are obsolete against my heavy mace"
@@betanovaneo4249 "Your heavy mace is obsolete to my horse archer"
@@vincediscombe7360Your horse is obsolete to my engine.
All of the comments above me are obsolete when it comes to the versatile usage of all of them
This is an exquisite video, bringing out many thoughts shared by myself and a great many other individuals into deep detail. While orbital bombardment will be a game changer with it uses, depending on the actually tactical/strategic goals, there will be some situations will orbital bombardment is not possible and planetary invasions are necessary.
Examples of such as shown in the video are; 1.) capturing enemies which are needed alive (dead men give no intel nor can order surrenders), 2.) acquiring resources (the pristine farmland or rarelementium mine you wanted to conquer being reduced to a barren wastes makes your war of conquest pointless), 3.) cultural or religious reasons (the Holy Relic/World must be preserved at all costs), 4.) economic reasons (that world possess a fifth of the nation's industry, destroying it will cripple your further efforts to win the war), 5.) retrieving friendly forces (you don't have the resources to waste a million well trained troops with years of experiences, oh and your top leaders and strategists need to be alive to lead forces to victory), 6.) avoid civilian non-combatant casualties, especially if they are citizens of your nation (hearts and minds need to be won to avoid a coup; or if one of your worlds is under occupation and needs to be liberated for post-war reconstruction [this is particularly true for civil wars]), and many more various scenarios and technologies.
Quite intriguing standardize classification of landing craft. It is something that I think would work well in development in future sci-fi works. The design and process of the escalation ladder was also fascinating. It takes a lots to go very seriously deadly for a military situation to go to a Total War, hence why the last one was over 75 years ago.
Even in the modern day, there are still reasons as to there being healthy infantry with combat knives rather than swarm drone icbms.
Overall, again, a rather fascinating video exploring the concept of planetary invasions and providing a one video essay to show others the importance of such tactical/strategic in potential interstellar conflicts.
46:28 ; Some Antares self-inserting there, clever Marc.
Planetary bombardment is not why planetary invasions would be a bad idea or obsolete.
Your points 1, 4 and 6 can be done with a simple blockade of the planet by your space navy (in most cases 3 too, but I grant you particularly strange cultural reasons would provoke this). Point 5 is better done by a specialized force for that task instead of a planetary invasion force. Finally, point 2 is absurd and not realistic, if you want resources planets are the last area you will look, they are huge gravity wells and getting stuff from a planetary surface is also expensive. If for some reason the resources you look are in a planet, even in one you own, what you would want is to blow it up into a million pieces, unless the thing is biological, in that case you want to create space farms or something similar in bodies with less gravity for the purposes of take-off (like a space station with rotational gravity or artificial gravity, heck if the organism itself doesn't care about gravity microgravity is even better) and care little for the actual planet (you want examples to study and replicate, if the planet has sentient life trading information about the biosphere is going to be relatively easy, which would allow for bioweapons too, but that's a diferent can of worms).
Of course, not having any kind of army is a problem. But you need one whose purpose would be to stop coupes and terrorism, maybe have occasional skirmishes against rebel forces, but a planetary invasion is just expensive and innecesary. Well, I guess it might make sense as a defensive move, but only if your enemy also does planetary invasions which isn't that effective from an offensive standpoint (coups and rebellions would be the one case were this situation could happen).
All that said, handwavium can nulify these things and make planetary invasions feasible, but that's the "a wizard did it option", is always there for the taking if you really want that happening.
rip the space in between paragraphs lol
The big issue I have with the "Religious site/relic" argument is that any space faring race that is able to travel between stars would most likely have dropped its religious long ago. After all, they would have been exposed to other cultures and races along the way. Or at least seen evolution take similar paths on different worlds.
Also the "Resources" argument seems weak at best. If you can mine a moon or asteroid why worry about a planet's resources (although the farmland lost would be the only downside here - armies move on their stomachs) if you have easier, more accessible alternatives?
@@robertwilson973 While I agree with your second point. I doubt the first one, religion and spirituality doesn't seem to really go down as a whole despite conection and the encounter of multiple cultures. And while is true that some religions and spiritual beliefs go inherently against an advanced spacefaring civilizations other ones do the opposite and usually given enough time new beliefs appear that accounts for the new normal.
@@Ditidos ; When it comes to navel blockades, they don't help with capturing enemies if you need their intel, though I'll give you the fact a smaller incursion force can do that. 4 only works for NBs if you yourself don't need the economic output, if you do then you would need conqueror it. For 6, if you have one of your own worlds attempting to violently seceded or alien forces have occupied one of your planets a blockade may likely to be in their advantaged.
Also an NB only works only if 1A.) you have enough ships to set up a blockade in the first place, 1B.) you have enough ships that you can maintain a blockage for a prolonged period of time rather then send them to face enemies ships, and 2.) the planet in question is not self-sufficient, otherwise they can build up both blockage runners and anti-ships weapons to strike at your ships there. A historical example of this is when Germany tried to blockade Britian twice, but failed both times due to a numerical lacking of vessels.
For point 5, a spec ops can extract 1, 2 or even a dozen, but what about 100, 1000, or a million, sometimes mass evacuations need to be taken place; be it a military evac or just disaster relief.
For 2, in the case of resources like Hydrogen and Iron then yes, going to war over those do not make much sense, hence I said "rare-element-ium", for things like iridium and lutetium, or hand-waviums like dilithium and eezo, in which significant deposits are well, rarer; and if the planet is also habitable/inhabited most factions wouldn't just blow it up and strip-mine it.
For more biological resources recall that even though planes are faster that water-going going ships, most trade is still done my more traditional oceanic-shipping. You have been discussing costs at lot, but while yes moving supplies out of a gravity well is expensive, so is the creation and maintaining of massive space instillations, and if the materials are sensitive having go trough gravity wells than just across a planet is also an expense in itself. So whether doing that or acquiring planets through war, which is cheaper is an answer that varies between Sci-Fi universes and is something we cannot as of yet provide a definitive answer on IRL until we actually have the ability to do such things giving the untested variables.
Plus while as you said some organisms don't care about space microgravity, there are just as many others that are the exact opposite; of which a significant portion of the Human population is included, hence the commonality of the saying "cabin fever". While some of us could and would likely enjoy being in such an environment, a great many others could only bare it for so long, be it Human, non-Human sapients, pets, livestock, crops, or medicinal biological organisms.
Then going to 3, a great many are not going to take cultural of religious sites being 'desecrated' be they a 'Holy region' or something more mundane like a natural wild-life preserve.
I would think that glassing a planet would be the exception rather than the rule, because doing so inevitably destroys biological, economic, and even cultural resources worth preserving. And with sufficiently high mountains or deep enough tunnels, there is no guarantee that you will wipe out the enemy either. You might just eliminate all their restraint, and open up new resources for them to exploit that wouldn't be economical otherwise, that they can use to exact their revenge decades down the line.
The interesting thing about planetary invasions that really wasn't touched upon is that they, theoretically, truly happen in three dimensions. Unlike amphibious assaults, which are limited to chokepoints by waterways and suitable beaches, or airborne assaults, which are limited by the volume of material that can be moved and the airspace you have access to, once you get to the planetary level, you can land anywhere. And flying into the teeth of the enemy defenses, for all it's cinematic glory, actually makes less sense. It actually makes more sense to land in the most isolated, or geographically inaccessible regions as possible to the defenders. Those easily defensible bastions that we all hate in Risk, like Australia, and Madagascar. Take your time, build up your forces, your logistics, even local production, so the locals will have a hard time striking back and ultimately dislodging you. All the while, surgical strikes can work on a global level to whittle down the locals ability to move to your position, and strike back in any capacity, and build up for the fight ahead with minimal collateral damage. Military bases, air and naval ports, military production and active units can be struck early and often to keep them off balance and isolated, unable to congregate into a force large enough to threaten your stronghold. While such a methodical approach might give the locals more time to mobilized militia units, and provide you with more targets when you finally do break out, these tend to be nearly as dangerous to the natives as they are to the invaders, and can only seriously threaten you on a strategic level with a great deal of plot armor.
Unless of course you are more concerned with speed than casualties, in which case you just land commando teams to disable as many defenses as possible, then attack with as much power as you can muster and take out the remaining defenses as quickly as you can.
People put lots of stock into cultural/biological/economic resources in these sorts of topics. But that suggests those things matter in an interstellar conflict between two alien species. Space is large, and resources plentiful, most species capable of breaching the interstellar void will have the technology to acquire a vast treasure of resources from interplanetary mining of uncontested uninhabited rocks that litter the place like egg shells in a omelet factory, making economic needs less...important. Most biospheres will be alien to one another, making it unlikely that one species would value another's 'biological assets' as they would largely be worthless to the other species. That only is exaggerated with culture 'resources'. EVen the idea of colonizing another world as a 'homeworld 2.0' is also kinda questionable as again the ecology and bio-compatibility would be at best imperfect and would require some kind of 'terraforming' and if you're going to terraform something several light years away you may as well do it the whole way....a real bottom up renovation....which would include biospheric sterilization and re-innoculation with a species own fauna and flora.
@@clomiancalcifer While that is true, its not taking into account a wide variety of things. Does a species see orbital annihilation as dishonorable and prefer to fight its foes face to face? Is orbital bombardment ostracized or even a war crime to the galaxy? Is it a MAD situation where if one faction wipes out another's planet it is seen as an equivalent of declaring nuclear war? You have left out a lot variables and presumed sentient organisms would act purely on logic, when in fact just looking out a window would prove they do not.
slight correction at ~ 44:00 :
most astartes drop pods have an integrated automated sentry gun in addition to the astartes payload it carries. these are used to clear the area in addition to the explosive release of the pod doors in order to give the astartes within a bit of room to maneuver in the case of a hot battlefield drop as well as to give supporting fire during initial ground operations.
If anything, an orbital invasion should be a combination of D-Day and the landings at Okinawa. A heavy bombardment on a target location, small teams of airborne, fast-attack troops targeting orbital/ AA installations followed by the proper landings and seizure of roads and pathways near the beachhead. Get as much men and equipment on the ground as possible and spread out as much as possible
I agree completely with the point about orbital bombardment. Now if I ever hear anyone say “don’t have an army when you can just bombard from orbit”, I’ll just point to any recent war and ask “so we should just nuke the enemy into oblivion?”
Well orbital bombardment isn’t nuking it’s raining artillery from a safe distance like we have been doing.
When using weapon of mass destruction vs using massive invasion force you first have to ask if the location you are attacking has something you want... Or do you just want to deny the enemy that location and whether or not it is useful to you is unimportant... Then you should also ask if we are talking about a single planet war or a war across multiple planets (or even solar systems and/or galaxies) ... If it's a single planet... Probably should hesitate before using weapons of mass destruction wether they be nukes or large rocks dropped from space at extremely high speed, because they will more than likely have lasting effects on you even if you keep it limited and don't need to be able to use the location... But if you are dealing with multiple planets and don't need the planet to remain habitable... Well turn it to ash and glass
@@snspartan714al2 But if you do that the enemy will do it as well.
Remember the ladder.
@@Servo_M That's assuming that the enemy is on the same level as you technologically. If they are not, then bombardment has it's place and time.
@@robertwilson973
If they are technologically so far behind that they can't fight back, why bother bombing them from orbit?
Would be like bringing a .50 Cal to kill a fly, massive overkill, and your neighbors, and your population, might not respond all that well to such an overreaction.
Like, what would be the point in killing primitives with orbital fire if they are no threat to you?
I would also like to add that there's two types of orbital bombardment. Strategic and Tactical.
So far we've gotten Starships, Ground Vehicles and Invasion Craft. I would really like to see an Incoming dedicated towards Starfighter/Interceptors, as well as one reguarding firearms that militaries would use in the future.
I would like to see the single infantryman's gear or something like that
Star fighters don't make logical sense in the era of space combat. Think like in the expanse, but everything should actually have better point defense capability. Railguns could fire projectiles that burst into micro particles at certain distances, something like that can hit incoming torpedoes kilometers away. Torpedoes/missiles in space are naturally way smaller, faster and agile than a manned fighter/interceptor could every be. When point defense is optimized enough to hit something like that, what the hell could a manned fighter/bomber do? They would be instantly destroyed before entering visual range of a larger craft.
@@morgatron4639 *Glances up at the video* Didn't this video just describe how predictions like that often are proved to be horribly inaccurate?
They thought invasions were a thing of the past - then Korea happened.
They thought Dogfighting was a thing of the past - then Vietnam happened.
Also, you are too busy thinking about Expanse logic - while it is a fine show and an accurate depiction of IRL space combat as we predict it will be like today, the fact of the matter is we have no idea how technology will advance. As far as we know we'll create fighter-sized energy shields or some crazy tech between now and then.
I for one doubt that craft like fighters and bombers will ever truly be rendered obsolete. Their role may change, but they will always have a place.
@@117Jorn I get that, I just think that in space the rules are different. Everything has more effective range, there's no cover or a horizon to be behind. Ballistic weapons have no air resistance and lasers have less blooming. I very much believe atmospheric fighters will still be viable for the same reason templin explains that planetary invasions still are. Aircraft excel in that environment, but I don't see star fighters ever being developed fully. The purpose of fighters in space can be achieved by missiles, the laws of physics favor that. By the time shielding tech is developed enough to protect a small craft from railguns or continuous beam lasers from a large ship, imagine the kind of shielding the larger ship would have, plus thick armor. What does a fighter do to that?
I will concede that there may be a specific era of technology where fighters will have a purpose, something like in battlestar galactica where railgun tech isn't sufficiently miniturized to target smaller things and fighters are equipped with nuclear weapons. Although it's still hard to imagine that the vipers would've been nearly as important if the galactica hard a good array of AA guns similar to the CWIS that we have on navy ships in the real world, which already function better than how PDCs are shown in the expanse.
Not a jab at the expanse or BSG for that matter, those are my two all time favorite shows.
@@morgatron4639 Perhaps. Personally, I do somewhat agree that space fighters won't be the best option in the future. However I do believe in the application of single-occupant space combat weapons because as effective as missiles and whatnot may be - there are ways to counter missiles, and there are parts of Space that aren't as empty as you might think.
I think we may see the rise of more... humanoid-looking weapons - think Mobile Suits from Gundam. Unlike a space fighter, its guns aren't fixed and it is capable of operating in a more three dimensional space - plus it can be used for more than just combat, and can just as easily be used for repairing space stations and ships.
The big critique then however is that the more moving parts are involved, the more expensive maintenance will be. This may be true, but if the rewards exceed the costs then it all sorta balances out. A lot of times when armies build weapons of war, it is kinda of a net loss for the economy because a tank can only be used for warfare until its stripped for parts to be melted down and built into something else. But something like a mech suit has usage outside of combat - making them more economically friendly to civilian, industrial and military use.
I want to say you could count operations on Ryloth both in Clone Wars and Rebels as crisis response. Especially the latter, where there was blockade running entirely focused on delivering humanitarian aid to the population of an occupied world.
I feel the sudden urge to start up Stellaris, glass enemy worlds and roach in fortress worlds.
"Sometimes nuking an enemy city makes as much sense as spanking a baby with an axe"
-Sergeant Zim, Starship Troopers
I like two things the most in this video:
Orbital bombardment might not be an unbeatable tactic, with sufficient shielding and anti space weapons, it might turn into a siege, or require ground troops to demolish planetary defences.
Planets are big, and it might be possible to raid or attack one city because enemy forces need time to move.
Depends on the sci-fi universe in question and the planet. For example, in the Foundation series (The novels, not the Apple+ show), the Imperial Throneworld of Trantor is a colossal city world with a vast population. Storming the planet would be nearly impossible, but it's noted that you wouldn't need to actually invade. The planet's vast population and being totally covered in cities, means that Trantor is completely dependent on external shipments of food and water. All one would have to do is park their fleet in a cordon and blockade the planet and you could starve out Trantor without ever landing troops or firing a single shot.
Here's the thing: There is no advantage to the high ground in space in most sci-fi settings. If you have the tech to bombard a planet with lasers, then ground based laser cannons can also bombard you. And ground based installations can install thicker armor, stronger shields, bigger power plants, etc, for a lot less cost than a starship can, so the ground forces are going to outgun you.
Same is true for railguns/rod from the gods style weapons. the extra 10km/s or so the gravity well gives you are simply insignificant compared to the bigger arrays you can build on a planet. Any weapon you can mount of a ship can be used for cheaper to a planet. Any defensive system you have is going to be used on planets, and at a larger scale.
Attackers are going to stay out of weapons range, only darting in for brief fire runs when they think they can catch a vulnerable target, facing flak and fighter assaults whenever they do. Think the battle of Britain during WW2.
However, this also applies to planetary invasions. Two similar sized powers with similar tech simply cannot manage to take each other's planets. Simply put, the attacker has to transport his army, and the defenders don't. That means the defenders can field more and heavier units, on top of which they are already fortified with stockpiled supplies. On top of that, the attackers have to expect heavy losses during landing operations, and whatever support they can get from orbital artillery is nothing compared to the firepower at the local's disposal.
Which means that aggressors are likely limited to either technologically advanced civilizations picking on low tech ones, or massive empires going up against single world nations.
Ironically Lightspeed lag is a spacecraft's only saving grace, by doing frequent maneuvers while keeping at extreme range they are less likely to get hit with retaliation strikes
I was gonna argue with you, but goddamnit, I think you're right. Less about the defenders' ground-forces being superior (because the invaders could have their own supply lines, bringing in their own heavies), and more about just how impenetrable the combo of planetside shields and anti-orbital guns would be. I genuinely can't think of any way round such a defensive arrangement. You're suggesting that planets would effectively become gigantic 3D battleships, and I can't see how any fleet of lesser ships could possibly hope to overcome such a vessel. Well, other than expending so much time, manpower and materiel that conquering the planet just wouldn't be worth it.
In such a setting, I could foresee planets becoming *less* well-defended over time, not more. Because first, fleets of warships would gradually be downsized, as it became obvious to all the nations involved that attempting to invade each other's planets (and thereby end wars) would just lead to an intractable stalemate, WW1-style. Followed by the planets themselves dismantling their defences, because there would be less to defend against. With everyone being well-aware that, should war loom, every planet will rapidly start fortifying again.
Attackers can use mass drivers. i.e. large asteroids propelled by exhaust from ships engines, or attaching engines to the asteroids themselves. You don't need many, 2 or 3, and can launch them from massive distances with precise accuracy. A 25km across asteroid of mostly iron and nickel moving at high speed, would just turn into the mother of all shotgun shells when targeted with defense systems. 2 or 3 of those and nothing bigger than a mouse would be alive on the surface.
@@andytol1976 the locals aren't going to shatter a mass driver, they're going disable the engine and redirect it. It doesn't take much of a push for it to miss the planet all together.
Nor are most of the planetary defenses going to be on the surface. As we're clearly assuming the defenders can't effortlessly vaporize the incoming rock, we have to assume that being a kilometer or so below ground is a cheap and effective form of armor.
But, yeah, if you aren't trying to capture the world and are willing to commit genocide, the equation changes. At that point you have access to several cheap and effective superweapons that are almost impossible to defeat. But that isn't a planetary invasion, so it's not what we're talking about.
@@gnaskar Unfortunately; if it's conflict with an alien species, genocide may end up the only option unless some kind of plot device like a universal translator is created. There are so many different ways to communicate though, that common ground would be almost impossible. Human on human I agree with you though; genocide isn't the goal, just the most common threat at that point in history. It would take lots of work to make other worlds habitable for us, would be a waste to start over.
And mass drivers don't really need an engine. Super large warships with the capability to travel interstellar space within human lifespans (way faster than light), would produce more than enough energy to get a really big rock moving so fast its momentum wouldn't notice attempts at a redirect. Overkill: a 100m across iron/nickel asteroid moving at 1/10th C would have enough kinetic energy to probably smash the planet to pierogi sized lumps. Could do those by the hundreds with Enterprise D for example. Attaching the engines would be from crazy far away for strategic launches, and the engine only needs to get your mass up to lethal speed.
The thing with orbital bombardment is quite the same for naval bombardments, there will be a planet that just won't die until you go there and shoot everyone.
Famously, Iwo Jima was so shelled that the soldiers initially thought that they had killed all the Japanese only for them to spring out and start firing when the Americans were exposed
An underwater colony on europa would be just the world you're thinking of.
Same with Tarawa
And iirc the shelling/bombing of the Normandy coast didn't go well either
Inclimate weather and poor visibility definitely played a part in Normandy's case though
An SF novel “Crest of the Stars” depicts a space-dwelling civilization called Abh Empire. This civilization’s main species is a type of engineered human, Abriel human, which has higher adaptations to space environment than on land, and they culturally do not like surface life. They have basically every resource produced on ships so they don’t necessarily need land, either. ( I don’t remember why they capture planets if they are so nomadic, probably because they are copying their creators, which they destroyed with their own hands)
The way they capture a planet is to totally eliminate this planet’s space travel abilities and than diplomatically persuade this planet to let the empire run the space port for them. The planet surface government will remain kinda independent besides taxes or other specific orders from the empire. If the people on planet want to fly again, they can apply to be the pilots of the Abh fleet or own short-ranged transportation ships. Surface human can join the ruling class of Abh Empire if they served and get rewarded in the fleet, but their offspring must be engineered to be Abriel human instead of original species. The title they earned will pass on to Abriel offsprings.
I didn’t finish the novel, so a lot of their culture is not explained clearly here. But I wonder if this “twisted” kind of civilization will actually plan to drop on to ground for a full-scale planet invasion. (They do have landing marines in their fleet, though, since surface mission like rescue crashed ships and personnel is always possible.)
From my understanding, Crest of the Stars doesn't really do invasions, you either surrender the moment you can't fight _or_ get bombed back to the stone age.
Space Mongols. Got it.
@@nulnoh219 ocean civilization to be more precise.
Oh and you remind me one thing that Abh empire’s creators were island cultured people on earth. They were against the globalization and thus abandoned by the progression of technology. They managed to colonize astral belts and build their home there, while the main strain of world already started light year migration. Abh engineered super humans and send them to explore univers, using old school rocket-propelled ships (which is like send them to death).
Isn't that an anime? Had no idea it was originally a novel
The animated adaptation was really good too. Probably one of the more plausible and well written examples in the space opera genre.
I feel as if the Acclamator-class was closer in role to an amphibious assault ship used by Marine Expeditionary Units than a troop transport.
Planetary Demonstration: Mobile Suit Gundam: Stardust Memory. The Earth Federation fleet was holding a Naval Review as a means to showcase how much of the fleet they rebuilt after the One Year War and to act as a warning against Zeon splinter factions. One such splinter faction stole a nuclear armed, Federation Gundam and used to to wreck two thirds of the fleet.
I think that's a solid example. The entire point was to say 'We could invade you with this, and you can't stop us.' Which was rather solidly counterpointed with a nuclear exclamation point by the Zeon splinter faction involved. It's also a solid example of why you need to have tight controls on your WMD's, because the amount of egg on your face if they are turned on you can be truly exceptional.
@@Sorain1 I think the Temple Institute have a negative affinity towards mobile suit Gundam or the other Gundam universe, he never talks about it.
Many factors can go into a planetary invasion and they can also go wrong. But either way, if you want to invade a world the thing you need to do, is eliminate your enemy’s fighting strength or deplete it enough to force them to surrender. But you also need to consider what you need to do once you’ve established a beachhead.
The "corporation" Star Force in the book series of the same name covers planetary relief in a few parts of the books. Truly massive scale but the Archons are ageless and have the time to implement these relief efforts slowly.
The evacuation of Romulus in star trek was a massive crisis response situation.
Starfleet actually does a lot of crisis response operations, come to think of it. One example is in TNG S6E19 "Lessons" where the Enterprise D evacuates the settlers on Bersallis III from the firestorms
For an interstellar Army I’ve envisioned, a planetary invasion only begins when Void Supremacy has been achieved (80% of void space must be achieved). The Army and Navy are two separate entities. With the navies sole role is to win the battle in space, as well as provided additional support (planetary bombardment) along with holding the space. The Navy does not fight on the ground, unless the marines have been deployed. The Army have their own ships, they act has their bases and transport. They are the exact same class of ships that is used in the navy, just much fewer in number and are unlikely able to hold and win the space battle by themselves.
Anyway, once void supremacy has been achieved, the invasion will commence. The invasion is split into 3 phases. Those being:
Phase 1. “The Softening”. This is where multiple points on the planet or area will be “softened” by light orbital bombardment (with light being a relative term here. It’s best that a target or point is destroyed but even if it isn’t, it’s likely to be decimated). After a set period of time , drop pods will be shot into the atmosphere and to other key areas, as well as to sweep up any points that haven’t been knocked out. The drop pods will contain combat droids. This will tie up any local forces within the area, forcing them to commit men, and ammunition to contain the attack.
Even if the initial droid attacks fail to truly do any damage, it will still soften up the enemy garrison/forces. Up next is the 2nd phase.
Phase 2. “Take and Hold”. From here, the invasion begins. Dropships and fighters will descend from their home ships and enter the atmosphere to begin an attack. The fighters will strife any defensive position to lockdown the troops or lockup any reinforcements coming to bolster the defenders. And here the drop ships will disembark the Heavy Assault Infantry (My version of the stormtrooper) to create and take a beachhead. Once a beachhead has been secured. The invasion moves onto the next and final phases.
Phase 3. “The Sweeping”. With a beachhead secured, a Forward Base can be established. There tanks, artillery, troops, supplies and equipment can be deployed on the ground. Note that the troops here are different from the HAI (Heavy Assault Infantry) to the regular army. The HAI is a part of the wider Army. The Infantry is to conquer the rest of the planet.
one thing that is often overlooked in the scale issue is that a conquest doesn't have to be total, there are multiple levels of conquest :
-"soft" conquest, similar to UK and india, India was officially UK territory, but outside of political power, the everyday life of citizens was virtually unscathed, very few UK citizens moved to India so the population didn't mix, didn't had to adapt to UK custom, or anything like that at all. the conquest was essentially just on paper and India was more or less just a heavily bounded vassal.
this requires virtually no troops beyond the initial war (whish may or may not happen at all), and is how the mongols managed to invade 20% of the world, despite having no fast mean to communicate, the winner is recognized as an official leader, but as little influence over the conquered territory.
-"mild" conquest, spares troops are left in the conquered territories, just enough to be able to enforce your own laws, however little to no civilians move in, and the cultural identity of the territory is largely unchanged, this can lead to rebellions, but is relatively cheap to maintain. (might be hard to do for a full planet tho)
-"hard" conquest, the conquered territory becomes undifferentiated to the rest of the winner state, populations move in and may be moved out, breaking any sort of strong cultural identity.
in the short run, this is extremely expensive, and requires a lot of diplomacy before things start being stable. (essentially impossible on a heavily populated world)
I feel like MAD is the best argument for the use of landing forces. If you bomb the shit out of your enemy's planets just to achieve strategic objectives, why shouldn't they do the same to you?
The old TV serious Babylon 5 had the Shadow Cities deep underground (which would indicate orbital bombardment occurring). As the show progressed they even had the Shadow's and Vorlon's resorting to orbital bombardment against each other's allied worlds. They never attacked each other directly however.
But also if you want to conquer the planet the last thing you want to do is make it a lifeless wasteland. Cause if you get the planet everything destroyed is something that will cost you money to rebuild. Also the more angry the native people are at you the costlier it's going to be to integrate them.
Well, you aren't expecting to lose
@@marijnvanbennekom3652 This assumes the desire to conquer and integrate. Which considering some situations would be inefficient. Especially in settings where technology makes 'fixing it in post production' easy. Better off destroying the biosphere and fixing it later... Yes, what if someone does it to you, that's why you don't let someone else do it to you...
@@clomiancalcifer I suppose if your a genocidal state that has no need of more territory then orbital bombardments work, in any scenario where the parties involved are not that then Orbital bombardments are not exactly game winning.
"If this thing needs to shoot its guns, somebody screwed up"
Meanwhile me, using Acclamators as frontline warships in Empire at War
I love these types of videos, they're why I found this channel.
Yeah. The Jedi learned this the hardway during the Battle of Ryloth. Got one of their Acclamators destroyed by large anti-air guns.
Also, screen canon shows that they were the only warships the Republic had at the time. Made sense for them to be armed. The first appearance of the Venator was not the RotS or the CGI Clone Wars no matter what fanboys want to believe. It was actually in a later episode of the Genndy Clone Wars which predates the movie by months.
@@darwinxavier3516 It was somewhere before the Battle of Christophsis that the Venator Class was introduced, but really the Republic wasn't without actual warships at the start of the war. They had the Dreadnaught Class, and those larger warships that have never been seen outside of background books and such.
Well if I remember correctly if you remove the passengers from the ship. It runs with a crew of like 300ish. Which given its punching power is very efficient.
Did someone say Venator?
Another amazingly informative and well designed video essay! You could convince someone you were reading a history book from the future!
In the Lost Fleet book series, a fleet launched an orbital bombardment, but planned it to bounce of the atmosphere, to create streaks in atmosphere, to shock the planet leaders into giving up planet bound prisoners.
Would that count as a demonstration? Or something else?
Definately some sort of show of force.
Threat of force that compelled the enemy to do that they wanted. Sometimes people need to be shown the stinger to imagine what it might feel like to actually get stung.
Hey! A fellow Lost Fleet enjoyer! How are you?
@@ryanalving3785 good!
Didn’t know there were many of us.
@@randomdude2386 there really aren't I only just finished the last book in the series a few months ago and this is the first time I've ever seen anyone else know of the series
Regarding the "demonstration" of a planetary invasion, I could point to Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior as an example.
In this, the Imperium had abducted a T'au Ethereal, slaughtering any witnesses to the abduction (again, an example of something that can't be done with orbital bombardment alone.) This provoked a military response from the T'au, who sent a retrieval force. The initial T'au strategy here involved two things: first, to convince the Imperials that the T'au were going to commit in force to landing and destroying a few strategically important parts of the planetary infrastructure, and second, to deploy a smaller force elsewhere to locate and recover the Ethereal once the bulk of the Imperial forces were committed to repelling the other attack, which would fall back before their advance.
That first operation was a demonstration attack, a feign trying to bait the Imperial defenders into engaging to repel the T'au from establishing a beachhead that the T'au never actually intended to secure, but they had to make it look like that's what they were trying to do for the feign to be successful. So they did actually land forces (and accept that those forces would take some losses) but not enough to imperil their other efforts, and those forces were ordered to fall back when the Imperial resistance became too fierce since that intensity meant the deceptive assault was working.
You don't reference the show anywhere in your video, so I would highly recommend watching the 90's animated series Exosquad. The entire show is built around more or less what WWII would look like if played out across multiple planets using futuristic technology. They show all of the types of combat scenarios you list and do a great job of showing how much work goes on in preparation for a large scale space military campaign... from recon and intel to rehearsal and execution. One of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time it is definitely something any sci-fi nerd has to watch.
In Legend of Galactic Heroes, the forces of Reinhard von Lohengramm deliberately allowed a planetary bombardment by their opponent the Lippstadt League to proceed despite being in a position to prevent the massacre. The grotesque aftermath was then used as propaganda against the League, causing desertions and loss of popular support, thus hastening their eventual defeat.
If anything, clean up would be a nightmare if you had to retake a planet destroyed by orbital bombardment. Just like a surgeon with a scalpel, precision is key when needed. Just like the escalation ladder and key assets you explained.
One type of strategic support ship that be used would be a factory ship. The thought being you need a way to repair and replace damaged equipment.
Taking a different angle on this, I think it's also fair to say that the difficulty of an invasion is directly proportional to how much you *don't* want to destroy.
If you're keen to scour the entire planet, ecosystems be damned, all you need is a suitably large asteroid and an engine to push it.
Conversely, if you want to retain critical infrastructure, planet-side resources, some degree of the local population, or the capacity for longer-term diplomatic relations the requisite manpower and resource investment increases accordingly. Thus, the more granulated the target profile, the more precise and specialized the equipment you'll need to actually achieve your objectives.
Another factor not necessarily discussed here, is time - or rather, efficiency vs effectiveness.
Logistical limitations might prevent you from amassing a large invasion force for a given planet. You might only be able to spare a large fleet to secure orbital superiority before they're needed elsewhere, or the sheer size of force required might not even be within your reach. In any case, even if you could, the wholesale bombardment or invasion of a planet is inefficient and wasteful of your resources, as is the opposed landing of troops on the surface in less-than-ideal conditions. Assuming you're not losing on other fronts, if you have orbital superiority, you can choose when and where to fight and dictate the cadence of the operation through 'energy superiority' to use air combat terminology - that being a higher altitude where the enemy must expend great energy to reach you, but you need do a lot less to reach them.
Let's think of an example with Earth; a successful invasion that removes our capacity to resist, with minimal resource expenditure relative to planet-side defensive assets. We'll also be trying to retain as much planetary infrastructure as we can.
Stage 1 of such an invasion begins years in advance, with reconnaissance efforts, passive and active, and depending on the timeline may even include sabotage and destabilizing the local political landscape. Sowing dissent or even emboldening local populations who might be supportive to your efforts could even be in the cards, depending on who it is doing the invading, or even the deployment of seemingly natural diseases, the covert triggering of something like a supervolcano, and other disruptive acts might also factor in. For the rest of this invasion, let's assume we stopped at reconnaissance, since we're trying to retain local infrastructure in a usable state.
Stage 2 begins with the insertion of first-strike capable craft into planetary orbit. Ideally, this would be done undetected, allowing such craft to seed Earth's orbit with different warheads on a variety of orbits, prior to simultaneous activation at the beginning of stage three.
Stage 3, the first overt military action, is to render the planet's detection and communication systems inert. Nuclear warheads previously left in synchronized orbits descend and detonate in the upper atmosphere, too high to cause damage on the ground, but more than potent enough to fry military tracking and targeting radar, disrupt radio communications, civilian power grids, and other electronic infrastructure. Concurrently, planetary satellite networks will be targeted, as will known connection points for major underwater cables and communication infrastructure such as internet server hubs.
Now that the planet is in the dark, if everything went well, many portions of the world may be under the assumption they're experiencing a local event, and not understand the true ramifications of it, nor be able to effectively coordinate a response and mobilize as quickly as they should.
Stage 4 begins with the selection of military targets and certain points of critical infrastructure. Runways, missile silos, command centres, armories, motor pools, naval yards, warships currently at sea, and anything else that might otherwise pose future resistance or be more difficult to hit if given time to move off-site.
By this point, the time period of states are determined mostly by the orbital period of the ships engaging in limited bombardment - so it could be anywhere from one to several hours, based upon how high an orbit they choose to take either to avoid detection or provide a security buffer space in which to shoot down any planet-launched missiles that do make it out of the atmosphere.
Stage 5 next shifts from military targets, to *parts* of logistical targets. For instance, you might not want to destroy the power grid, or the power plants themselves (unless you have better ones you mean to install later, and don't care) so instead all you need to do is take out the accumulators at each power facility, or strike local transformers. By comparison, they'll be much easier for you to fix later. For targets like New York, there's no need to hit the city directly when you can just hit the bridges. Elsewhere mountain passes, rivers, ports, canals, and any singular points which, if destroyed, would inhibit travel are being struck.
Stage 6 shifts into more opportunistic operations, with the selection of new priority targets as they appear to eliminate future opposition, and is also the transition into planetary operations in an isolated scale. Taking advantage of the isolation of local groups through selective infrastructure destruction, a comparatively small landing force can undertake a defeat-in-detail style operation of the planet. That being; If you only have say 100 thousand troops to land, you segment and isolate the enemy so that you fight them in blocks of no more than 5-10 thousand at a time. Better yet, don't fight them at all; destroy their logistical chains with special operations or raiding parties and force them to disband without giving them the chance to fire back at you.
Stage 7 is now the long game. Even a single warship in orbit could be all that's necessary. Once the fighting capacity of the local population has been broken, you can invade regional areas one at a time in order of importance. You don't even necessarily *need* to take the whole planet, just the parts of importance to you. If a later diplomatic resolution is attained, this stage might never be necessary, but it should at very least wait until after the food and consumables of nuclear missile submarines and other hostile assets that may still be present have been expended. From here, the process is only limited by the means and goals of subjugation or victory goals of the invaders.
A decent fictional depiction of this, though a more rushed equivalent, I think is The Universal Union, or 'The Combine', who took advantage of Earth's ongoing disruption before dividing, conquering, and seeking to control key infrastructure while being largely ambivalent with regards to rural areas and humans outside their aura of influence. 7 Hours to secure a planetary surrender is impressive, though they also had Xen portal storms effectively do the first half of the process for them. Still, I think they at least qualify due to the end result of their invasion, with limited and precise retention of infrastructure and population - though they did land ground forces almost immediately, so it's not a perfect analogue.
PS: The Kuwaiti amphibious landings I don't think could be considered a 'ruse' as they were in fact, a plan B. If the land invasion from the West had failed, then it would have gone ahead. Alas, the use of GPS and superiority of American armoured units proved more than effective enough to carry the initial invasion.
The thing is if you dont care what happens to the planet you probably dont care to destroy it
Based
That's a pretty thorough overview for the length you have worked with, I am impressed.
I remember something close to a demonstration in Earth: Above and Beyond. Episode 21. You actually used footage from it at 35:19 ☺
They abandoned the invasion after troops had landed. The enemy had used critical forces to counterattack, opening a very critical planet. So the fleets moved there.
They explicitly referenced Guadalcanal twice.
The Starship Trooper movie, "Planet P" initial operation might also qualify. The goal was to verify the presence of a brain bug.
I hope the Stellaris team takes notes one day!
Yes man
with stellaris, time is the most important factor, as such anything that makes an invasion quicker must be used, orbital bombardment is necessary to weaken defensive armies, which if built properly cant be beat by conventional means
@@jam8539Just dump armies on it
If one is fighting a small rebel group soon to become an Galactic wide revolution a full scale Orbital Bombardment might be seen by your populace as too far. Also think of the kind of intelligence you might lose or Civilian casualties.
You absolutely need to have a fully capable force prepared to invade what could be an entire section of a world.
This is a Star wars reference isn't it, nice.👍
The death star blowing up Allderran in Star Wars is arguably one of the worst ideas in sci-fi history. The main idea of the attack was to demonstrate what they can achieve so why blow up an entire planet full of loyal imperial citizens when you could blow up a rebel inhabited or just un-inhabited planet and most likely it would still install fear to everyone in the galaxy. Also the only rebels on Allderran we’re the royal family which could’ve been easily dealt with using a small special forces squad.
34:05 I remember an episode of star wars the clone wars where clones where dispatched to send medical supplies and technical aid to civilians in a planet after catastrophic earthquakes. The episode was about R2D2 and C3PO going with them, falling into a cavern, finding out what caused the earth quacks and solving the problems and then none of the clones beleaves them but that isn't the point. If anyone can remember the name of the episode, it could make for a good example of crisis response landings.
I don’t remember the name but I know what happened right before space Vietnam
I remember and they had to solve a riddle after running into tree looking people in the underground
This video expertly explains something I learned in business school, the trough of expectation. Every new invention many military, brings high hopes that are cut down to size when it’s limits are discovered.
many?
Though I feel you overlooked one kind of orbital bombardment, the precision strike. One meant to take out key targets, either to weaken the opposition or make way for an eventual landing.
Though I am glad we are finally seeing some Gundam representation here, or even Eastern media in general. Might I suggest Legend of Galactic Heroes as well? It is a real Sci-Fi classic in the space (no pun intended).
They mentioned the use of limited orbital bombardment to support other operations. That would fall under precision strikes.
One thing I would add to orbital bombardment. The planet you’re invading will be just as capable as a ship of building weapons just as big (if not bigger as they don’t need to be mobile) as any ship and likely at similar or longer range. Why would they just sit back and let you bomb them?
And there's a matter of what kind of planet you're invading. If the world is like Mercury or Europa, surface level bombardment is pointless since the defenders don't need to worry about silly things like 'the environment' or 'radiation'.
It's even more pointless for Europa since the 3 closest of Jupiter's largest moons are bathed in horrific radiation and there's an enormous underwater ocean that can be colonized under those tens of kilometers of ice.
There no such thing as out of range in space the navy in space would just need to be far enough away to stop or move out of the way of any return fire and shoot back on a trajectory that will hit those stationary targets
@@whyjustwhy2887
Technically you are both correct and incorrect there on "there is no out of range in space". At least when it comes to solid projectiles. But I completely understand what you're saying.
You're correct because, an object in motion will stay in motion until it hits something. However there is an effective range. If you're far enough and can detect the incoming projectile in time, the object can be intercepted or even dodged.
(Unless the object travels at light speed meaning its undetectable until its too late.)
The attacking fleet has several advantages over planetary defenses
1. Gravity... It's a lot easier to drop things on to a planet (and probably able to do it accurately from quite a distance as long as one has the time to wait and is willing to spend a little extra on control systems on the weapon.. could be just a hunk of tungsten with some rocket engines added for fine tune control)
2. A (space) ship can adjust it's position relatively easily and in 3 dimensions while a planet is on a predictable path and it takes a lot longer to change positions to one that is outside the area of effect of obrital bombardment weapons even assuming it is a "dumb" (not able to change course after launch) rock
3. A ship can see all of a planet (assuming that they launch drones or other forms of recon for the area not directly in the view of the ship) and therefore react to any counter attack much easier
4. The ship can also probably be undetected very easily in space
@@snspartan714al2
1. Gravity for Earth, as an example, is ONLY 9.8m/s. Which means if your projectile is traveling at 0.1c, well, you do the math. The Exosphere of Earth is 12km above surface and 0.1c is 299km/s. So, how long does that 0.1c projectile actually stay in Earth's atmosphere? My point being: all projectiles affected by gravity, in a scifi universe, will at MOST lose 20m/s in velocity (and I'm being extraordinarily generous by saying that the ships are being targeted at very high orbit). That is so trivial this stupid myth should never be repeated again. BTW; a planet can launch 0.1c projectiles no problem- if a fleet does that to a planet... What happens to the planet? Seriously.
2. You're thinking about hitting the planet; the planet is NOT the target: the highly mobile anti-orbital gun is that just might have naval capabilities providing it with a massive nearly free-of-charge shield that also provides an extreme level of stealth. Again; if you just want to orbital bombard the planet you're already at the point in the war where outright extermination of yourself is already a consideration or else you're just being a complete retard who should absolutely never have access to such decisions. Diplomacy is a good thing, even in war.
3. You're forgetting about weather, stealth capabilities, submersables, and subterrainian crafts.
4. Actually, the ship 100% will give off very noticeable heat, radiation, reflection, gravimetric, or energy readings. Unlike ground targets which have an entire forest of noise to hide in, ships do not enjoy such luxuries. Technologies which make ships less noticeable equally work for ground or naval forces.
It drives me mad every time someone suggests that instead of invading a planet, you'd simply level every major population center until the resistance stops, so I'm glad you covered this topic. Destroying cities from orbit and massacring millions (or billions) of civilians in the process... why do that? Unless genocide is your war goal (see: Earth-Mimbari War and Human-Covenant War) it's contrary to your interests. If the planet has no value, why are you attacking it? If it does have value, why are you destroying it?
But more so than the utilitarian question, I'm glad you also highlighted the moral question. Today we regard nuclear ICBMs as our most terrible weapons, an absolute last-resort because of the dire costs involved (human, political, economic, etc.). I see no reason for equally (or more!) devastating weapons to become normalized just because everyone's in space now... unless the setting presents an utterly depraved empire ruled by monsters. I feel like even in such setting, the mass deployment of WMDs would be a horrifying event that shows the danger of the aggressor, not just a casual thing that happens every day in wars.
There is another argument against orbital bombardment: environmental effects
No matter what universe you're in, any sort of substantial orbital bombardment would render a planet nearly uninhabitable
Case and point, it was discovered that it would only take 100 nuclear bombs the size of Little Boy (15 kilotonnes) would be enough to send Earth into a nuclear winter. And most of that isn't from the fallout, it's from the soot and ash from the burning cities.
So if it only takes a hundred low-yeild nuclear bombs to send a planet into a nuclear winter, imagine the effects of a full on orbital bombardment.
The hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of tones of ordinates entering the atmosphere alone would severely damage the ozone layer and could even begin to raise global temperatures if there is enough mass being thrown at the planet
Then there's the devastation on the ground with the burning cities, not to mention a defending force would absolutely dig into mountains and deep bunkers, so that's even more power weapons needed to up root them.
So any significant bombardment outside of limited tactical strikes would leave the planet uninhabitable.
So if you want to utilize the planet as a base or if there is a friendly/innocent civilian population present that you don't wish to harm for whatever reason, full scale orbital bombardment is out of the question right then and there
I would disagree. Physics tell us that 1 nuke of 15 Megatons will do so much damage. If you are orbiting a planet and in a surprise attack drop 3 bombs (Washington, Bejing and Moscow) you basically take out the leadership of the 3 most powerful countries on the plant. All with minimal damage.
Then you make it perfectly clear that you have no issue dropping additional weapons unless your demands are met. You may meet your goals without ever having to put boots on the ground.
@@robertwilson973 Yes and no. For one, Napoleon and Hitler thought the same thing when they both took Moscow but still lost. Like he mentioned in the video, terror bombings never really worked and they could easily call your bluff. But this really only applies to "righteous" factions where collateral damage is a real concern.
Now if we're talking about a tyrannical/predatory faction like the Goa'uld, who do exactly this, the yes this argument is absolutely sound.
It really depends on what your objective is and the political environment you reside in.
@@James-ho5te I will agree with that. In my mind, what would be the easiest way to obtain your goal with minimal loss on your side. As the video stated, if you have two equally matched powers then such events don't make much sense.
In my thinking, if you have the superiority to travel light years your probably not thinking about war anyway. Nukes would not work in 1970's Nam or Afghanistan due to the civilizations in place there. However dropping a bomb on DC would only help your war effort (and America in general but that's another conversation).
@@James-ho5te if you are in a verse where orbital bombardment is possible then presumably you have the tech to explore and find habitable planets. In that case nobody who would consider orbital bombardment would care about the environment, imo.
@@imperialamerican8209
There's also the fact that planets and moons thought to be "Uninhabitable" are fully colonized. Nuclear radiation won't do much to hurt your enemy because they had to take that into account when they made the journey to that world and to make sure they survive on that world. Or the species you're nuking can resist or even thrive on such radiation.
If you want to leave infrastructure and other resources intact than orbital bombardment is a bad ideal because you're likely to destroy what you want to capture intact. Yes you can try precision targeting but there's still the chance you will hit something you don't want to or your enemy will take advantage of the time your giving them to destroy said resources and infrastructure to prevent you from gaining control of them.
Generally speaking though, if you are that advanced to do orbital bombardment then you should have weapons that can pinpoint exactly what you want to hit. I'm sure that you would take things like atmosphere, difference's in gravity and so forth into effect.
I do see a time and place for it.
@@robertwilson973 I wonder if a future tech for ships and ground vehicles would be some kind of sensor scrambler? That would force you to get within visual range for precision targeting or you'd have to issue a general bombardment.
@@JakeBaldwin1 I know it's been 8 days since you posted this but that scrambler you mentioned is supposedly the reason fleet battles are fought at close ranges in star wars.
@@robertwilson973 If you're that advanced, the enemy's infrastructure should be irrelevant to your goals. It's easier to build infrastructure in uncontested territory than to engage in belligerence to begin with.
IE any war that devolves into 'taking worlds' is not going to be about 'ruling the defeated'. Slave labor or thralls are inefficient resources in a world where automated mining is easy and prevalent and can go places bio-miners can't. Even a 'real-estate' war isn't likely going to end with the winning civ wanting to live peacibly with the inhabitants of that world, more likely they want to terraform it....which usually comes with purging the extant biosphere....
I see few wars that result in feet on ground being that necessary, most interstellar conflicts will be political with the focus being denying worlds access to interstellar infrastructure; or destroying fleets... With the 'serious wars' where 'more than denial is necessary' being something that kinda makes invading and holding irrelevant....the only landings I see as being viable would be small scale political assassinations or tech theft or some very specific infrastructure destruction.....
This of us who actually read 40k lore would know that exterminatus was a last ditch effort, it was often viewed as defeat.
Let's say your entire interplanetary military doctrine revolved around bombing planets into submission.
And now let's say that your capital world, the crown jewel of your empire, is captured in a surprise rebellion. This was possible, because you have no real army.
Your nation has perfect orbital superiority, the rebels have no ships, just ground forces dug in in the cities.
In this situation, you have 2 options:
Let the rebels have the planet (which was your former capital, home to a significant portion of your population and industrial power)
or
Bomb your own capital until these fanatical rebels surrender (which they won't).
Congratulations. In both cases, your capital is gone.
Well i would keep an okayish ground force so thats you cant just do that but using orbital bombardment to nation you dont want them to be alive or its too difficult to invade is still a great plan the alternative is putting costly siege if you dont have the ways to invade it
A tiny elite force could hold the rebels off with the infinite air support available to them.
@@gulliverdeboer5836 Infiite air support - entire districts and tens of thousands of your own citizens glassed. Well done on giving the rebellions media arm endless propaganda fodder against your regime.
@@davidshea6272 Why do you assume it has to be so destructive? Depending on the in-universe tech it can be pin-point accurate or warships can hover at a very low altitude and if not they can just use smaller fighters, gunships, shuttlecraft, etc...
@@gulliverdeboer5836 Because every advancement of technology in our world has been heralded as opening the way for accurate, pinpoint bombardment that does away with the need for boots on the ground, and every time that has been proved laughably wrong.
Lets say your lasers are perfectly accurate. How will you be sure that you got all the rebels? As soon as your fleet hovers into orbit, they can seamlessly disperse into the population and resort to guerilla warfare. Your tiny elite force of Hoplite XIs or whatever won't be able to track and find them all, not even close. The only solution then starts looking a lot like Vietnam (which America lost despite dropping more ordinance with higher accuracy than world war 2, against an opponent that had no-where near tech parity.) And remember this scenario is your own capital. Are you willing to blow up the seat of the Plutotairiment or the Ancestral Halls of Qu'va from orbit to get a handful of armed dissidents?
Also, a warship hovering at very low altitude is not providing orbital bombardment. Its just providing close air support. and that means it can be shot down. If the rebels have access to anti-ship weapons, or even just some desperate partisans with a commercial transport plane packed with C-10, then they can potentially cripple or kill a warship at tiny cost to themselves. And a warship dropping as a blazing wreck into a city center sends a powerful message.
The main reason I could see for them having given the Aclamators guns was that they were just a stop gap ship meant to fill all roles. By the end of the war I could only see them being used for planetary invasions, possibly even having their weaponry canabalized for other more nessessary weapons craft.
Those medium turbos would be decent in orbital support and heavy torpedoes might crack planetary shield if fired in coordinated manner from whole fleet. It was assault ship not a troop transport after all.
Regarding the threat of naval invasion during the gulf war, during an Interview General Schwarzkopf mentioned, that if the Iraqi forces had redeployed from the coast the US forces might have used the opportunity to launch a naval landing. Military plans are not set in stone and are adapted to the situation. In this specific case, the iraqi army had two choices: 1) commit large forces to coastal defence to prevent/oppose a military landing or 2) redeploy their forces and allow the enemy to land a large force in th rear of their army.
Edit: Regarding 40k Drop Pods, there is a version which can deploy a single dreadnought (armoured walker). Just a minor correction
Something that does interest me the most is how a metaphysical extra dimensional war between higher metaphysical factions would be like? There is one sci fi called Manifold by Stephen Baxter that delves into the near almighty Downstreamers but I never heard of a huge hyper dimensional war they have been through that was described in great detail. So a metaphysical conflict is quite a unknown yet fascinating concept to me.
It would help a group like say the SCP Foundation alot in their universe which is full of metaphysical dangers and factions.
FINALLY SOMEONE REFFERS TO BAXTER!!!!!
@@loreman2803
Yep. I heard of it and read a little bits of descriptions of the Downstreamers. Some people say there are evil Downstreamers out there but the articles I read imply no such thing.
You know. the "prelude" could be skiped by quoting drill instructor fleet sarge Charles Zim...
"If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how-or why-he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people-'older and wiser heads,' as they say-supply the control. Which is as it should be."
SGT Charles Zim
damn, I wish I'd thought of that
@@TemplinInstitute Well I wasnt that far in the video :D but in fact the movie Zim was quite a good guy...
their medics can fix that hand in minutes :D
@@Paerigos I really like both Zims
Excellent dissertation! Lines up pretty on par with my own project. Orbital landings are defined as Objective Raids, Planetary Assaults, or Planetary Occupations and follow can follow the escalation ladder in order to reach the end goal.
Raids to knock out AA and/or Orbital Defenses, neutralize key targets etc. Assaults to land a sizable force in order to achieve a more expansive goal ie seize locations, destroy infrastructure, combat enemy forces or secure a beachhead, etc. Lastly, Occupation would be make use of an existing beachhead to land a substantial force with the intent of engaging in a prolonged operations...
On the subject of orbital bombardment, you really have to take into account the setting as you mentioned,
for example, in the book series: We are Legion (We are Bob), there is a species called the Others, who are basically human intelligent but with ant like levels of agression and social cohesion, they view the entire universe as one giant 0-sum game, to the point where they dont even bother colonising other systems as that would just create a rival down the line, so thier method is to just show up, gamma-blast the surface killing all life, then mine the system for all metals.
The primary reason for those statements about war paradigms shifting always being wrong is the ladder, as you said, but if one side just views the universe as a constant battle, then you can skip the ladder and go straight to the unrestricted option,
Incidentally, the only solution to the Others was the 'last resort' they blew their home star up.
I think this has the background assumption that not every war is a an all out total war, which is the only option for the Other as you describe.
@@paulmahoney7619 The thing is, interstellar governments have access to resources and technology that make almost all 'justifications for wars resulting in terrestrial invasion' irrelevant, other than 'that person/thing/society is an existential threat', or 'I want to terraform that planet for me, but it's inhabited by X....guess we're getting rid of X'....which leads to 'Y is an existential threat'....both of which kinda make invasions inefficient as the goal is to eliminate X or Y or at least deny one or the other further unfettered access to interstellar infrastructure. Any other wars that are more political in nature would largely circle around denying one side the ability to access interstellar infrastructure or at least provide terms for the access...and this can be done largely by non-terrestrial means.
One day, hundreds of years from now, space combat military academy’s will be using these videos for educational purposes, and that’s weirdly comforting....
They will probably have a great laugh. It's comparable to modern militaries watching a video about military tactics from the 1600s.
Very likely this video will be considered more or less like military comedy
On the Dropship section, I was wondering whether you would talk about tackling the delta v requirements to lift back out of the atmosphere in a way that Earth 1 science and capabilities currently understand things.
That will wholy depend on where technology has reached at the point in time we're executing planetary invasions.
Many books I've read had magnetic field manipulation for surface to orbit/orbit to surface craft. Others just the vague anti gravity/gravity manipulation concept. Several more just had hyper efficient, high output engines that still followed physics as we know them currently, but diminished the limitations they presented.
“Planning before an operation is, after all, very different from planning it as it’s underway.”
Here we see the Kenobi school and the Skywalker school.
31:54 In Gundam SEED, Zaft prepared for a massive assault on the Earth Alliance's Panama base where their mass driver spaceport was located. Even the invading forces thought that was the target. But at the last moment, the target was changed to the EA Alaska base which was their central military headquarters. Leaks about the Panama attack were allowed and even encouraged in order to fool the EA into diverting much of their forces away from Alaska.
Though this was a double ruse. Certain elements in Zaft hoping to escalate the war into mutual annihilation had leaked the real target of the invasion. The EA leadership evacuated Alaska, leaving all the undesirable parts of their military to give the illusion of the EA's presence. Once the Zaft forces were close enough to the base, a massive network of microwave radiation devices that had been set up ahead of time would be activated, disintegrating all organics and leveling everything else.
That struck me as one of the best written examples of a strategic level play-counterplay situation I've ever seen put to screen.
So... You mentioned in the video that there was; military escalation (as you covered extensively), diplomatic, and economic escalation. Perhaps in the future you can cover how an interstellar empire can use the other two escalations?
Back a year after the comment politely requesting this again
Another point that I don’t think that was covered, is that if the planet that’s being invaded is advanced enough your focus could be key services, take and hold these for long enough and even the most ardent force will be worn down.
Since Halo has recently been in the collective mind, where might you put the Pelican? I think it is somewhere between light and medium dropships. Mostly for its ability to carry vehicles for why it might a bit above a light dropship. There could be an argument for it being a gunship too, since it can use its nose gun or be equipped with missile hardpoints or be made into a gunship variant entirely.
medium transport for just the chain-gun armed version (Medium cause it can carry armoured vehicles, albeit not from orbit realistically) Partly cause it can carry 10 marines sitting alongside 2 mongeese in the enclosed bay.
Prolly medium gunship if armed with the missile pods, chain-gun, and the extra bonus of a rear facing turret when the ramp opens. MTOW probably would restrict it to not being able to carry heavier vehicles as easily from all the extra munitions.
Medium transport gunship with chain guns and missiles would be extremely useful it can be used as a fighter craft too
One thing you forgot about the LAAT is that it can carry an AT-RT along with the Infantry if need be. AT-RT being an All Terrain Reconnaissance Transport. This capabilty was shown in the Republics Planetary Assault of Umbara when the 501st gunships descended to drop off all the AT-RTs so they could soften Umbaran defenses for the Infantry
Gundam, Aldnoah Zero, and Space Battleship Yamato references. I love to see anime sci-fi being finally given the attention it deserves. I really wish that the Temple Institute, Spacedock, and other scifi channels would look at anime alternate worlds too :)
I think there are good examples of all of these planetary invasions in Craig Alanson's Expeditionary Force series. I do want to highlight 2 of the operations. First is the Ruhar invasion of Earth that takes place in the first book Columbus Day. The Ruhar perform a planetary raid. They land a minimal amount of troops in strategic locations to destroy industrial areas on Earth. The point of this was to stall another species the Kristang from using earth as a jumping off point. The second is the Kristang using Humans for garrison duty on a conquered planet. This fits with humanitarian aid sort off. The Humans were simply on the planet to keep the peace so the Ruhar could evacuate their citizens.
Aw, now I'm sad there haven't been more large scale invasions in at least a handful of the sequels. Expeditionary Force both sides mostly adhere to the "Rules of Engagement" which aim to preserve planets and resources, which does limit options to invasion or targeted attacks. Although they blew up a moon or something in a pretty cool way as a punitive measure.
@@Arashmickey in the spin off Mavericks series there are large scale invasions of planets. I agree though most actions in the series are smaller in scale.
@@corydrichmond Very cool! Haven't read Mavericks yet...
I absolutely adore that you featured the Raven from Elysium, i love that craft so much, it's ridiculous, but that's what I'd want to arrive in. It's just too damn cool.