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Reasons to use 'Traditional' combat units in Sci-Fi?

ShogunTrooper

ShogunTrooper

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Germany
Now this question is a bit complicated.
I know that many people are of the opinion that you don't need boots on the ground if you have orbital superiority, and that any type of 'Fighter' or 'Bomber' type of craft is completely pointless.
But what would be reasons to actually use them? What are their advantages over simply sticking to capital ships and orbital bombardments?
 
Non-lethally taking hostages from fortified areas, rescuing things like cities that are under enemy control but you can't afford to bomb.
 
A recent example I can think of is how they did it in Call of Duty: Black Ops III. The development of advanced defense systems have ruled air superiority through drones and made other forms of proxy warfare obsolete. Therefore, the focus of military operations has shifted back to foot soldiers, making individual soldiers extremely valuable again, especially with the advent of augmentations that turn them into cyborg supersoldiers.
 
Insufficient Dakka said:
I imagine it depends heavily on the country.
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True, but I think it's a valid excuse.

From a more cynical perspective, it's probably harder for the civilizans to take pride in the valor and martial prowess of their nation's military if said military is all drones, and brave soldiers dying bravely plays better on the propaganda posters.
 
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I can definitely see nations taking pride in "advanced, safe drones that mean we don't needlessly risk our own troops' lives, unlike more barbaric countries".
 
Countermeasures happen to line up just-right to make face to face doable?

Like, ECM is awesome, interceptors top ability to beat interceptors, there's stuff to scramble AIs, refract lasers, etc., til you're down to a biounit with a gun.

krinsbez said:
Militaries are often fairly conservative and fond of tradition are they not?
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Until it involves actually killing the enemy better in contested circumstances, yes.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
Now this question is a bit complicated.
I know that many people are of the opinion that you don't need boots on the ground if you have orbital superiority, and that any type of 'Fighter' or 'Bomber' type of craft is completely pointless.
But what would be reasons to actually use them? What are their advantages over simply sticking to capital ships and orbital bombardments?
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Because grunts provide for a happy medium between doing nothing and waging a war of extermination.

What if you actually like the planet below? What if it's an internal rebellion and you'd prefer all the citizens back under control instead of dead? Consider that America also debated the doctrine of massive retaliation in the fifties: a small, vestigial military combined with a massive nuclear arsenal, which wouldn't do a lot of fighting but would certainly use a lot of WMDs. It was rejected back then, for the same reasons.
 
krinsbez said:
I dunno, isn't one of the reasons WWI was so bloody because it took several years before the generals were willing to admit that warfare had changed and they needed new tactics?
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Yes and no.

A thing about early WW1 tactics is, in similar circumstances, they *worked*, that was how you took a trench... but the scale of the conflict made the redundancy of the lines so thick that there was always another line, always a counterattack.

A lot of the thawing came due to advances in trench-breaking technology rather than the militaries wanting to stick with the old ways by choice. There were some holdouts, but the 'early WW1 generals were morons,' thing is overplayed. A lot of it was just difficulty in adjusting to the scale, no-one refused machineguns, airplanes, or tanks.
 
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Why would you need 'boots on the ground'?

Hmm. Well, looking at automatisation procedures today, probably the same reason why you would still various humans even though you have lots of robots doing most of the tasks: maintenance, quality control, and improvisation once things break down somewhere.

I was once told by a close friend that computers and robots are not smart, as they only really do what you tell them to do. They have no imagination, if you will. "Artificial intelligence" is a nice word, but something can be intelligent without actually being very smart. Or at least as smart as you need it to be to solve your problem.

I imagine that for all that drones would be versatile and powerful, they would either be very specialised at one thing or not good enough at everything, and/or have trouble when encountering a problem or obstacle that thinks outside the box.

In that regard, a human being would still be involved in warfare because they would make up stopgaps in capability that the drones cannot cover, would be specialised to solve problems the drones cannot handle or support them where they are weak, or have enough versatile skills to solve a multitude of problems or overcome a variety of obstacles in combat where a (specialised) robot or drone may be halted.

Besides, why do foot soldiers exist when more powerful solutions are available?

That's a simple question. You don't want a hammer to solve problems, as the solution to any given problem will inevitably be the smash of the hammer. This may not actually be the result you want.

Thus you want a toolbox, as it gives you more options to solve problems. Meaning you can approach a problem differently and vary the results according to your preference, with the solution to a problem not causing more problems.

In theory, at least.
 
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Fernandel said:
I was once told by a close friend that computers and robots are not smart, as they only really do what you tell them to do. They have no imagination, if you will. "Artificial intelligence" is a nice word, but something can be intelligent without actually being very smart. Or at least as smart as you need it to be to solve your problem.
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I...think this is a bad way of putting the situation. Current computer problem solving systems aren't smart, or intelligent, or anything like that; there's not really a lot of point in drawing a distinction because no system we have is either. Trying to map the behavior of how current systems (which are not designed to be AGI) to hypothetical system that is an AGI and built on completely different principles is not a great comparison.

Also, if we're talking about any form of AGI...the thing that gets you from "capable of rudimentary but general problem-solving" to "capable of brilliant general problem-solving" looks to be a lot easier than the jump to "capable of even really stupid general purpose problem solving". In AI, the hard things (like making something that can make brilliant, counter-intuitive leaps of observation out of a jumble of data) are easy, and the easy things (opening a door) are hard. The place in AGI technology where AGI is just a little bit more dumb than humans seems to be pretty unstable; either your AGI is really fucking dumb compared to humans - to the point where you can't even meaningfully call it intelligent - or it very quickly gets smarter.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
But what would be reasons to actually use them? What are their advantages over simply sticking to capital ships and orbital bombardments?
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Oh, and while I mostly was responding to the AGI stuff (look, compsci is kinda my thing), I feel like I should respond to the actual OP. And the answer to this question is that the question is wrong. The question is "what is the advantage of having spaceships at all over simply sticking to interplanetary missiles?"

(There are good answers to this question, but you have to think about them to answer your first question.)
 
For infantry, set up a war huge in scope, spanning hundreds of planets, but the most advanced ships and the resources needed to maintain them are stretch to a breaking point, so both sides have no choice but to send armies in their less advanced shitbox ships to defend planets the old fashioned way.
 
ShogunTrooper said:
Now this question is a bit complicated.
I know that many people are of the opinion that you don't need boots on the ground if you have orbital superiority, and that any type of 'Fighter' or 'Bomber' type of craft is completely pointless.
But what would be reasons to actually use them? What are their advantages over simply sticking to capital ships and orbital bombardments?
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Besides what other people have mentioned, bombarding a world indiscriminately from orbit may result in somebody more powerful than you destroying your government for breaking the rules of warfare. The "Eridani Edict" in the Honor Harrington series being an example; indiscriminate orbital bombardment will get you crushed by the Solarian League, assuming somebody else doesn't do it first.

Another possibility is that ground-to-space weapons are powerful enough that orbital bombardment will get your ships destroyed. A Bolo tank from the Bolo series is perfectly capable of shooting down incoming weapons and destroying the ships that fired them too. And in Alan Dean Foster's Damned trilogy ground troops are used because neither side wants to destroy the population of the worlds they are fighting over, and ground-based anti-ship weapons are powerful enough that staying around in orbit to provide support isn't survivable.


Edit: There's also the rarely used scenario where the invaders don't actually have very good (or any) spaceships, and are using some kind of stargate/parallel universe based travel technique to arrive on that planet.
 
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ShogunTrooper said:
Now this question is a bit complicated.
I know that many people are of the opinion that you don't need boots on the ground if you have orbital superiority, and that any type of 'Fighter' or 'Bomber' type of craft is completely pointless.
But what would be reasons to actually use them? What are their advantages over simply sticking to capital ships and orbital bombardments?
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Simple. You don't want to orbital bombard one of the handful of habitable planets in the galaxy.

A lot of sci-fi tend to inflate the amount of habitable planets in a galactic space. I always felt in a lot of sci-fi that habitable planets were a dime a dozen and were just around the corner and that you could always just bunnyhop to the next one in the next star system over. Actually, habitable planets like Earth are extremely rare because of the circumstances needed for such a planet to just exist. You don't want to go around exterminatus'ing every habitable planet you see, because those planets are likely worth more than dozens of your fleets combined.

Hence, you deploy ground forces to establish control over the planets. Planets are valuable, and contribute massively to your war effort and your civilization if you can establish your infrastructure on said planet.

Star Wars Battlefront II managed to portray this quite accurately with their Galactic Conquest mode, as two sides fight over planetary territories that actively contribute to your war effort by allowing you to construct fleets and provide war points to purchase upgrades and bonuses. Having more planets under your control gives you an edge by allowing you to have more fleets and obtain support tools faster.
 
Another factor brought up on SB is, depending on the tech assumptions, your spaceships either need to sit in geosynchronous orbit, which is... less than ideal for surveillance and orbital bombardment, or when they're at the right altitude to properly conduct surveillance and bombardment that gives them limited windows to do anything to specific areas. Either way, having boots on the ground, and atmospheric bombing capability, gives you more precision and round-the-clock support.
 
Just quickly adding in one option: Practical orbital bombardment isn`t a thing. Think about Star Wars: Take the tech more realistically and every important place needs Death Star level firepower to deal with. In Rogue One, they show a secret base with a planet covering shield that can almost tank Star Destroyers crashing into it. Concentrate that shielding into the gateway station and you might well shrug off a Death Star attack. However, there`s a catch: Several types of shielding in star wars can be bypassed by moving slowly. Like the projector covering Destroyer Droid shields. Mix all this and you can have a planet that has ground troop invasion as the most practical means of attack because of having a trade friendly planet covering shield that allows things below a set speed through.
 
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Avernus said:
And in Alan Dean Foster's Damned trilogy ground troops are used because neither side wants to destroy the population of the worlds they are fighting over
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Kokurokoki said:
because of the circumstances needed for such a planet to just exist. You don't want to go around exterminatus'ing every habitable planet you see, because those planets are likely worth more than dozens of your fleets combined.
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I generally don't buy this kind of thing. The most basic goal of war is to reduce your opponent's ability to fight; capturing something intact is generally better than blowing it up, but given a choice between your opponent having it, and no one having it, the latter is preferrable. Other factors to consider: planets are big and just reducing everyone to the stone age doesn't mean rendering it uninhabitable, and if capturing the infrastructure intact was going to be very useful to you in the first place, the defenders are going to deny it to you anyway.

It wasn't until the advent of the nuclear bomb that destroying enemy territory by bombardment was even feasible. Tellingly, rather than just fighting out WWIII on the "no nukes cuz that would be lame" rule, WWIII did not happen.
 
Kokurokoki said:
Simple. You don't want to orbital bombard one of the handful of habitable planets in the galaxy.

A lot of sci-fi tend to inflate the amount of habitable planets in a galactic space. I always felt in a lot of sci-fi that habitable planets were a dime a dozen and were just around the corner and that you could always just bunnyhop to the next one in the next star system over. Actually, habitable planets like Earth are extremely rare because of the circumstances needed for such a planet to just exist. You don't want to go around exterminatus'ing every habitable planet you see, because those planets are likely worth more than dozens of your fleets combined.
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It really depends on a lot of factors. We haven't found that many planets that could support life, but that's partially because with our current means it can be difficult to find planets the size of Jupiter, much less smaller ones what would be able to support life. And while there are a lot of circumstances that need to come together to support life, there are also a lot of stars out there. So how many planets can support life easily isn't really something that you can nail down for certain with our current understanding.
 
Acatalepsy said:
I generally don't buy this kind of thing. The most basic goal of war is to reduce your opponent's ability to fight; capturing something intact is generally better than blowing it up, but given a choice between your opponent having it, and no one having it, the latter is preferrable. Other factors to consider: planets are big and just reducing everyone to the stone age doesn't mean rendering it uninhabitable, and if capturing the infrastructure intact was going to be very useful to you in the first place, the defenders are going to deny it to you anyway.
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In the Damned trilogy the goal of the aggressors is to convert the population to their belief system, and they regard unnecessary killing as directly in opposition to that. And in the Honorverse setting the present rules came about after a period where billions of people were regularly killed by orbital bombardment; preventing such a period from coming about again is in everybody's self interest.

There's also the problem that if you went around destroying the population of planets to take them over, it would then become rational for the inhabitants to start setting up doomsday weapons that render their own planet useless to you, even if doing so will kill the too. Dead is dead.

Or they can do worse; like if you destroy their planet then the Von Neumann war machines they've left hidden in their Oort cloud activate, and a few decades later a fleet of genocidal war machines with no off switch and no programming for negotiation sweep out of deep space and start killing all your worlds.

Really, arguments like that basically presume that everyone involved are either totally helpless to fight back or emotionless machines that consider that kind of cold blooded analysis perfectly reasonable. However, in reality a human opponent who isn't helpless is going to react to that kind of behavior by going on a vengeful crusade, not calmly accept it. It would be like China nuking New York as a tactic in a trade dispute and expecting the US to calmly perform a cost/reward analysis & decide to capitulate. People don't think like that.
 
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