My only Grip with this is. When you want the infrastructure of that planet intact. Like in star wars when there is a Construction world. that Builds Space ships. If Possible, You would want to take it with as little collateral damage as you can. For not only is the Industry of that planet Important. and would literally Take Decades at best to repair or replace. But the Workers you want to keep working for you, If you can. So Attack from Orbit with Space Artillery. Is not a use-able Method at that point for such a world. Also there are times when the enemy you want to take out on a world is not known where they are. So you waste Huge amounts of resources to Glass a Planet like that. and then their are times when Waging a war is possible, And you don't want to glass it. Like with a Farming world. You want the Food Production for your self. And the Population is small enough that you can ether Bully them into obeying, Or You can literally win a Straight out land war. Lastly what about worlds that have these 4 things, 1) Planetary Shield Generators, Which makes Bombardment from Space nay impossible, 2) Weapon Platforms that can return fire at your space ships from the planet surface, 3) Underground Infrastructure that Makes it Pretty hard to locate and Bombarded them and deal proper Damage to your enemies. 4) Planetary Defense forces that Use Mass Short Distance Fighters and Orbital small war ships, Including mass Boarding Parties from the planet surface.
What if you want the planet for a resource that would be destroyed by bombing and they refuse to surrender, then you gotta get hands dirty and if you remember during the clone wars there were opposing warships and during the imperial era forget bombing the planet they just destroy it, also keep in mind half the planets had friendliest on them and were simply held by the enemy, as opposed to purely enemy control such as the planet ryloth during the clone wars, to be honest I think the only clone wars invasion I remember where the planet had no friendlies was umbara and we have the morals of the Jedi generals to thank for no planetary scale bombing, they only wanna fight people who fight back not the women and children too.... unless it’s anakin
Also you said about space battles and make them surrender as opposed to destroy them... what if the enemy is programmed not to surrender? (Clone wars battle droids seem too dumb to get the concept of surrender anyways) then either the clones have to match this resolve or they will lose the war
I would like to point out that Halo is actually a *subversion* of this trope. Sure, *we* see Spartans and ODSTs doing ground battles all the time, but that's because the player is playing as a *marine.* Every game makes it abundantly clear that while the UNSC has parity on the ground, they're getting curbstomped in space, which is why the UNSC is losing horribly. Orbital bombardment is so common that they have a name for it, "glassing". The only reason ground forces even get the chance to fight at all is because a) It's a boarding action of some kind, or b) the Covenant want something on the planet's surface, undamaged by orbital bombardment (IE Reach, or Earth, both of which held Forerunner artifacts the Covenant weren't willing to glass). Additionally, while you list Star Wars as your other main example of planetary invasions used in the media (And let's be fair, it is), the series has given good explanations for not using wide scale orbital bombardments. Specifically, in Star Wars Rebels, it's shown that even a halfway decent planetary based shield can stand up to an ISD's bombardment, which is consistent with other portrayals of Star Wars invasions. Hoth's invasion, the one you reference, was the same setup, where the Rebels had a planetary shield, forcing the Empire to do a ground invasion. This explains why most navies won't solely drop bombs on entrenched positions, since it'd take too long to have an effect, and gives the enemy time to respond (As what happened in Rebels, and ESB). It should also be noted that orbital bombardment is hell on the native peoples living on a planet. During the clone wars, when most of the D-Day style invasions occurred, the Republic wasn't trying to bomb the separatists into submission, they were trying to liberate worlds, to bring them back into the Republic without commiting enough violence on them to alienate their people for centuries to come (See: Mandalore). So planetary invasions actually make sense in that context. Also, this is nitpicking, but in the specific example you used, when Obi Wan invades Ryloth, is actually *another* subversion of this trope. Obi Wan *wanted* to bombard the Separatist position, but the droid commander was using human shields, which made that infeasible. So while I get what you mean by adding those examples, Halo *fully* acknowledges the implications of orbital bombardment, and Star Wars at least has *some* justification for the practice.
@@es4583 Incorrect. Most shields protect specifically against high-velocity objects. If a missile went in with low enough velocity, it would just be shot down by anti-air defenses.
@@danielm.595 Questionable, obviously we can't speak to a history that never happened, but the somewhat successful US push through the pacific and more successful but later soviet push through the senkaku islands were significant factors. Without dimensional travel it'd be impossible to say if they'd surrender without them, but I feel it's safe to say it would take a lot longer and lead to a far smaller Japanese population... Not to say that wouldn't be covered by marines though, dropping marine units from space to take key strategic locations or capture satellite facilities would likely still coexist with planetary siege.
@@SheezyBites Well, history says that Japan surrendered shortly after the Nuclear Bombings, so, in my book, I'd say that it was one of the main factors in the surrendering of the country
Responding to the concept of surrendering in space battles: there is a precedent for this. In the age of sail, when combat was often decided by boarding action, surrender was common. In WW1 and WW2, however, surrender was so rare as to be almost unheard of. In WW1 and WW2, no capital ships of any nation surrendered to an enemy force. No British, American, French, German, Dutch, Italian or Japanese capital ship ever surrendered at sea during either conflict, no matter the circumstances. It may seem insane, but it happened. When the German battleship Bismarck was crippled, outnumbered and surrounded by British ships, it fought to the bitter end. When the British heavy cruiser HMS Exeter was overwhelmed by Japanese ships, they fought to the bitter end. When the USS Astoria was overwhelmed by Japanese ships, they fought to the bitter end. And when the American task force Taffy 3 was hilariously and horrifically outgunned by a Japanese fleet, they fought to the bitter end. When Scharnhorst was outnumbered and overwhelmed by a British fleet, including a British battleship that outgunned her, Scharnhorst fought until she was sunk. Psychology plays a part in this. The British in particular developed a naval philosophy of aggression and pride where surrender was considered completely unacceptable, which then affected the navies of other nations, particularly the Americans and Japanese. Nobody wanted the stigma and dishonour of surrendering their ship, typically preferring to abandon ship and scuttle. This has a knock-on effect in sci-fi. There is certainly a disconnect between naval psychology (space forces psychology, in this example) and ground psychology. Naval battles are typically short, and there are clear escape routes since lifeboats typically aren't fired upon. Victory is assured by simply sinking the enemy ship, a clear and relatively easy goal. Ground battles tend to be longer, larger, more bloody, and it's much harder to achieve a "total" victory. Moreover, individual troops are more likely to surrender on their own accord, which isn't an option for sailors who are stuck on a ship at sea or in space. There's much more to the topic, of course. Still, that's something to keep in mind.
This is a great point that I had never thought about before. It probably doesn't help that a naval battle can completely flip with just a single lucky shot disabling large guns or causing an ammunition explosion. Therefor if you can just keep firing it's totally possible that your next salvo will win you the battle. Ground battles don't work like that, even a well placed artillery strike won't completely wipe out an army. And even if they start retreating they can always regroup and counterattack, a sinking ship can't do that.
There's an exchange between a marine officer and destroyer captain mentioned in Neptune's Inferno. The marine was fresh out of the mud with low rations and the captain gave him a full officer's meal. Even so, the marine said he'd prefer a foxhole. Cause while the ship does have lifeboats, at least on land you weren't completely stranded with little to no hope of rescue
um ever met polish people? Poland during ww2 soviet threatened to kill 10K poles if they the rebels didn’t stop. polish rebels replied make it 20K we don’t care! Give me liberty or give me death! polish rebels never stop fighting the Soviet’s the polish raids on Soviet Union ended when Soviet Union fell So it depends how willed they are ever met a right wing Americans who love freedom... they find them hard to break even when there oppressed in current period ever met a Russian they fighting sweat police whom have been known to use tanks to slaughter Russians during protests... some are just unbreakable, specially the kraig marine whom have no home but a Dead Rock consider themselves already dead... these are traits of radical soldier that’s unbreakable
@@insidious7329 a lot of WH40K material is thoroughly grounded in realism, but a lot of it os over shadowed by the over the top stuff and contradicting material.
It also kinda illustrates why bombardment is a bad idea, remember Narn got blown back to the stone age. That's generally a bad idea, because it makes the natives restless and means the planet is useless until you pour resources into making it habitable, or even somewhat useable. Resources which you'd supposedly have saved by not committing a ground invasion.
So, during world war 2 in the pacific the whole point of parking a huge fleet off the coast of an island was to commence bombardment in preparation for a landing. And those islands were held by a fiercely dedicated enemy that would rather die in battle than surrender. And on most islands days of battleship bombardment and bomber sorties from carriers did nothing to the vast majority of the well hidden defensive emplacements. Ultimately each island took thousands to tens of thousands of Marines lives to secure victory. So I would say a fleet can intimidate, but any space based military will ultimately need to be prepared to take the planet with ground forces with support from the fleet.
Still one thing. Chemical, biological and nucreal weapons. Its more likely that small force woud be send to figurete out how meat/steelsuit its working, and then send enought viruses, gas and dirty bombs down, to decimate population enought to couse them to surrender. this is a solution when you want to WIN campins, and don't realy care about what politics say. If you are atacking a basicly a planet size city, there is no other way. Bomb to submision. If it is some fresly-colonised planet, you coud land troops there to perform small raids to not waste amunition. if its a huge-mine/factory style planet, then gas and viruses woud be bast way to minimalise damage to valuble places. Planetary invasion coud take place, in scenario similar to war in 1984. War as tool to "force" people into submision and sacryficies. Just far away frontiere world, with nothing valuvle to send man to die, with nearby civilisation constatly changing the role of "atacker" and "defender" to get rid of unwanted people, and those who stay, force into even more poverty and sarcrifice.
@@dertafors keep in mind if this was human on human fighting there is a thing called the Geneva convention. Unless they are some super space dictatorship it would be pretty hard to convince your populous that nuking a planet let alone killing their populous is a good idea. Look at the Japanese and their suicidal honor preventing americans from capturing islands with ease and the americans being forced to use a nuke to prevent thousands of men dying in an invasion of Japan and that was frowned upon by a lot of people.
In a FTL space universe, you do not need the planet. You need some planets, you need some resources, but if you are fighting a war and you have to deal with an enemy planet, you do not need that planet. You can mine resources in space, you can build space stations, space colonies, and space shipyards. There is no reason why you would need the planet, aside from getting its populace to stop resisting. So you defeat their fleet, their space stations, and you have the planet sieged down. But there are still the people on the planet. Why would you send an army down? You don't need anything on the planet. You just need them to stop fighting you. You have space superiority. Why would things go any farther? You tell the planet, "We have you over a barrel, surrender. Agree to terms. We don't care about your planet, aside from you not continuing to fight." The planet surrenders. Even if they hate your guts, they can't do anything about it. Yeah, we can't go down and push people around, but they can't effect space maneuvers either. If they refuse, then we just start blasting. What is the point from their end? Now, if you want some other objective that must be accomplished by controlling the planet's surface, and the populace won't allow that in the terms of their surrender, and you can't for some reason just glass the planet and then go down to accomplish your objective, then maybe you would need to invade. But you would need more than a planet's population and resources in order to invade a planet. But that's a niche and frankly cherry picked scenario. In a truly galactic war, you would defeat the planet's means to fight in space, and then siege their planet, maybe bombarding them, and have the rest of your fleet move on to other, more pressing, objectives.
dertafors >just commit warcrimes and atrocities, that'll make the population want to surrender! Why don't you ask the Germans how well that worked in Russia, I heard the local populace loved them.
@@nuggs4snuggs516 well, initially local population (especially in recently incorporated territories) was usually quite receptive to German occupation, but atrocities often made locals to prefer "red plague" over "black death"
There is already a “proof of concept” battle from history to examine regarding the bombing of an enemy into surrender - it’s now known as “The Battle of Britain” and it completely failed. Any orbital battle fleet would have to do far more than just “bombard until surrender” - it would require a means of cutting off enemy supplies, disabling any ground-based defenses they have, be careful not to harm vital infrastructure in the planet (assuming the goal is to take a functioning planet - the resource cost of rebuilding infrastructure can be very high), etc... This would require at least some form of ground assault at key points on the planet.
You just fail to grasp what space battle is, and what it actually means. When you are bombing a planet you are not dropping 50 kg bombs, you don't need to cut supplies, you just need 5 minutes of space superiority and then just drop a 10km asteroid on the planet. That costs nothing, and just destroy the planet. The simple fact than any space ship could push a 10km asteroid toward your planet should be a threat enough to surrender. Because it's just a cataclysm close to what destroyed the fucking dinosaurs. You don't even need to aim. You don't need logistics. Just a spare engine to push the damn rock toward the planet and let gravity do the rest. You don't need a functioning planet. You just need one exemple and everyone will surrender in the whole galaxy. "Surrender, or be changed to molten rock". And everyone would be using that tactic, because there's no reason not to.
@@ZheinPasRoux Just one problem here - turning a planet to molten rock can backfire horribly from a political standpoint: demonstrating a willingness to do such a thing can easily motivate other worlds to form alliances against you to avoid becoming the next Alderaan.
I also think that it's unlikely that when civilisations are at the point of "space warfare" that they wouldn't have developed technologies or strategies to deal with this. The day after the first successful flight of man was the first day of development of the anti-aircraft gun...
@@ZheinPasRoux Extinction-scale asteroids wouldn't be used for the same reason megaton bombs don't get used, except destroying worlds would be even more so political suicide.
@@FrankCastle-tq9bz The rest of the world has not joined together against the united states when they used an atomic bomb on japan. They built their own. And you expect that there will be anything else than using rocks from space to obliterate anything that stand on the ground ? That they will instead make some d-day-starthip-trooper landing style to take a planet ? We didn't bother with japan. We won't bother in case of interplanetary war. Nobody will. Because just the idea of planetary invasion is a logistical nightmare 10000 times of what is a naval invasion.
Yeah but Halo and Star Wars often have situations that rule out planetary bombardment. Such as with planetary deflector shields, or the battles taking place on a holy installation of religious importance.
Correct. More often than not, the planetary invasions in Star Wars aren't to try and take over an entire planet, it's specifically targeting a vital area on that planet that makes the planet valuable for something. Hoth was a land battle because the Rebels put of a shield that was strong enough to protect against bombardment long enough to let them escape. During the Clone Wars most ground battles were to target certain areas like destroying a factory or wiping out a certain base, etc. In Halo the Covenant would just glass the world if there was nothing of value there for them, but if there was a Forerunner artifact detected, they'd launch an invasion to recover it, or to land troops to knock out ground-side generators for the orbital defenses, things like that.
Also in the clone wars, the whole purpose on either side was to win the people over to your cause, which can't really be done if your blowing them to kingdom come. Also most populated planets in star wars have planetary shields that prevent that sort of thing
Please note he said realistic sci fi. If in my universe there is a god of ani bombardment who deletes all attempts at planetary bombardment, then yes in my universe you have to have planetary invasions. If you had a BS invincibility shield you would use it every ware not just at strategic plot points. If their is something important enough that we can't drop 100 tzar bombas on it, ok we glass the other 99.9% of the planet then send down like 500 guys to clean up the 2 square miles we did not destroy.
So, here's the thing. I've heard of something called "The Garden World Protocol". Essentially, green worlds are somewhat...expensively rare. Essentially, ground assault is required because terraforming is expensive as hell, and anyone that would DARE to glass a garden world would find themselves suddenly facing off against anyone else in the star-faring level. If: A: I'm on a garden world AND B: You can't (or rather, won't due to treaties) glass my world THEN You can only assault via ground OR Blockade. That's it. Any setting that has any variation of the "Garden World Protocol" WILL, therefore, include ground-based combat. Guaranteed.
Unless the garden world, is no better to an alien races eyes than a gas giant or barren rock would be to us. If the aliens needed spacesuits just to be able to breath in the atmosphere of what would be a garden world to us, then I think they would be far less likely to care about orbital bombardment or even in the worst case terraforming the planet while it is still inhabited.
I feel Warhammer 40K does this concept extremely well because every planetary war lasts years, with reinforcements being constantly brought in by the attacking force, and having a space naval advantage as an extremely important factor in who wins or loses.
40K is completely unrealistic in almost every regard. With the exception of the Tyranid and Necron, none of the other governments in 40K are even remotely feasible, especially chaos and the Impirium. functionally they would collapse under the weight of their own stupidity and ineptness. Chaos would be too busy killing themselves to get anything accomplished and the totalitarian impirium would just collapse due to tactical stupidity. Example, Impirium captain of a battleship deviates from standard tactics in their codex. Wins said battle, then after the battle he is executed by a commisar for doing so. Sorry, does not work.
@@evilspoon5280 my friend, thats the whole point of 40K the imperium of man is in constant collaps for 10k years now. but its sheer vastness keeps it from collapsing liek the roman empire did. i recommend you read into factions that actually work. like the Tau for example. one of two factions in 40k that actually thrives in the setting.
That’s what they say in the indexes, but all the books have fleets and armies annihilating vast amounts of ancient machines just to drive up the drama.
@@evilspoon5280 The Templin Institut: Imperium of Man | Warhammer 40,000 "the imperium carries on only through the weight of it’s one immensity ever expanding and ever declining" a perfekt explanation
No. Firstly, we have PLENTY of examples in history, where "parking large ship at an island" does not make it surrender. Whole War in the Pacific is exactly that scenario. Second, well equipped land based fortifications have a total edge against space ship. Ship is always a compromise between engines, tanks, size, armor, weapons, energy etc. You can put only so much stuff inside space-faring vessel. This is not an issue with land based installation. You can have literally thousands of missiles, guns of any caliber you can produce, infinite energy, all protected by vast territory and/or whatever amount of armor plating you can build. And this would be way cheaper than building a fleet. If your IP has shields, any shield generator on planet would be way more powerful than one on a ship. Third, what kind of planet are we talking about here? It might be an ecomenopolis - than it would be definitely unassailable, like fortresses of the past. It would be much easier to starve it to submission by system-wide blockade. It could be a small colony with a couple of cities - then assault is completely feasible. You don't need to hunt every last partisan in the wilds - just take over key points and manpower concentrations, and that's it. There would be partisan action for years, but it's expected, and you are effectively holding the planet. This would be no different to invading a nation on Earth IRL. The planet might be uninhabitable apart from sealed habitats with controlled environments. In such case, you won't even have partisans after rooting out the resistance. And a multitude of other options. The reason for Mars being unable to invade Earth in Expanse is because number of troops Mars can lift and drop to Earth is pathetic, both in comparison to Earth's population, and it's military. This is not the case in every possible scenario.
Alejandro Ochagavía If you're going to sling asteroids at it, destroying their manpower, industry, and infrastructure (obviously meaning none of that matters to you), why not just... bypass the world? If nothing on it matters to you, why even try securing it via what one could amount to genocide and risk the PR disaster when you can just avoid it?
Another reason for Mars being unable to invade Earth in Expanse is that Martian troops would find it difficult to function in Earth's higher gravity without some mechanical aid.
@@rare_kumiko those are some good points, which I'd like to discuss. First point, re: threat of bombardment. While this theoretically could work, for an isolated planet (example - modern day Earth vs alien threat), this might not be politically possible. If planet is a part of nation, and fleet is part of other nation, then MAD doctrine would probably exist, and that would severely undermine legitimacy of the threat. Even if one of the opposing nations aren't able to destroy a planet in return, there might be third parties, which won't look kindly to such exchange. I mean, even though USA is a nuclear superpower, every conflict since WW2, including ones that arguably failed, was conducted with conventional weapons. Second point. While powered asteroids is of course a valid threat, especially in "low-tech" sci-fi, it's not like it's an ultimate weapon. If tech levels are equal, a man-made weapon would be more effective than just a rock, albeit more expensive. An accelerated asteroid would fly at still (relatively) low speed and predictable trajectory. It can be intercepted, diverted or destroyed even via conventional weaponry. And this whole process with fleet capturing rocks, attaching engines or towing them and planetary defense trying to intercept them would look very much like a typical siege scenario. It might take a long time, time which attacker might not have. And I'm not saying that planet is undefeatable - far from it, it is, like you said, an object that can't maneuver. However, if you move your fleet out of planetary defense range, you are also moving away from effective range of your fleet's weapons. The further you are, the more time there would be for ground defense to intercept whatever you throw at it, and, with advanced enough technology, even railgun shots would be intercepted. Again, it all boils down to scenario. Powerfull enough fleet might threated weak enough planet into submission without a fight, but in different scenario, landing a couple million boots on the ground might be the only available solution.
A land fortification is useless against even the smallest space ship. your fortification can't doge my ship can. Let say your fort has 10^10000 missile launchers and infinite ammo for all of them. I have 1 missile. your missiles have 200X my missiles range. I sit out of range of your missiles and fire. I will hit you because you are fixed to the plaint which is moving in orbit. a high schooler can calculate the ballistic trajectory for my missile. If you fire back I wait till your missiles go ballistic and then just move a bit. It would be the same for any weapon you care to name. Forts only work when the enemy has to get in range of the fort to take it out. On earth this works because of air resistance slowing down your missile ect meaning if the two sides have similar range. but in space if I am willing to wait enough I can launch my weapon from another galaxy and still hit your fort.
The problem is, Spacedock MacNamara, that bombing a country to the ground isn't necessarily going to make them surrender. The USA learned this the hard way when dealing with Vietnam during the mass bombing campaign they conducted. A ground invasion may be unrealistic (as in invading literally every square inch), but as you said, the point is to make them surrender, and the best way to do that is to take strategic locations on that planet through invading them and preventing them from being used by those who want to hide within them. Bombardment simply isn't going to win the war unless your idea of bombardment is to turn everything into radioactive slag and render the planet entirely uninhabitable for carbon based life. Ground invasions don't have to be as over the top as other sci-fi make them, but they're definitely going to be necessary to force surrenders by capturing capital cities, production centres, and other important regions for the function of the planet's economy and politics. Siege tactics work for towns and cities because they can't produce their own food on a large enough scale to sustain them, it doesn't work on a planet which has the entirety of that planet's agriculture still under their control. And if that planet's resources and people are important, then unfortunately bombing them until the planet is completely barren isn't going to be an option either. While I agree with some of the points made, that bombing can be useful, bombing is only so useful as it can support ground forces for the purpose of conquest. The Expanse example of yours makes partial sense, but nations (or rather multinational state in the case of the UN (still don't know how it hasn't collapsed because most nations hate eachother and longterm unity between the powers through just 'agreeing to be friends' is generally impossible so long as there is a continued rivalry between varying powers (oh right yeah there's also the matter of non-power nations that were subjugated, is the UN expecting them to not resist?)) not having dedicated military ground forces (especially the UN, as they'd have to subject their colonized nations on Earth to harsh occupation in a lot of cases, considering the UN in the Expanse is a very US-centric polity) is a very bad idea, and Mars should definitely be able to comprehend the simple idea that important places should be taken, and the unimportant ones will surrender. Anyway yeah the argument has gotten off point, but regardless, planetary invasions are still definitely a strategy that could be used for forces in a way that would deal with important cities as opposed to having to invade everywhere on the planet. kill me
Have you read the books? Spoilers... When dealing with space warfare, you don't need to bomb the entire planet to bring civilization to a halt. Let orbital mechanics, K = 1/2mv^2, and some rocks do it for you lol. Sure, bombing nam didn't work, but an extinction level event is quite enough to make people surrender. Marco's plan could have worked if only he coordinated his strikes on the Martian convoy better, and if he wasn't carried away by the roci in BA, which left him hanging out to dry (which was Duarte's plan all along). That being said, he never wanted to set foot on Earth, but only remove it from the equation for good. All in all, just throw rocks man!
@@K.Gthealmighty "The USA learned this the hard way when dealing with Vietnam during the mass bombing campaign they conducted" and ignored the lesson of WW2: neither the Brits nor the Germans surrendered.
From space you have lots of options. If you just want to eliminate the threat then bomb all their big industry. They now can't launch any sort of space ship and will not be able to for years. From a big space war perspective they might as well not exist now. Or if they NEED to go down sling shot a huge asteroid into them. The Vietnamize would have surrendered/ stopped existing if the US had dropped a few thousand nukes on them.
The video assumes a couple of things that would not necessarily be true in many situations. 1. The attacking fleet would be willing to bomb civilians. There is certainly precedent for all out total war but there is also precedent for less serious wars. And in those the attacking fleet would likely not bombard cities even if just so that the enemy doesn´t do the same to them. It´s also possible the attacking force has to worry about public opinion if they start nuking planets. 2. Ground based defenses. Ships in space are like thermal beacons. There is likely no real stealth in space contrary to what even settings like the Expanse depict.That however is not true for ground based installations. They can disperse heat into the ground and be basically impossible to detect from space. A camouflaged railgun with radar deflective covering could launch missiles into space all day and recieve and endless supply from the industrial capacity of the planet. The only way to deal with such installations might be landing ground troops. Or carpet bombing the entire planet with WMDs/crashing an asteroid into it but for that case see point 1 for one but also the attacking fleet could very well not have the capacity for this. 3. Depending on how stretched supply lines are a continued siege as implied in the video may simply not be possible. Even if the attacking fleet was willing to bomb cities and had the capacity to overwhelm ground-space defenses to achieve this they might not have the capacity to outlast said defenses. A planet worth taking would have a quasi infinite supply of ammo and even material to repair installations or even build new ones. Same would not be the case for the fleet or it would likely be very costly at least to continually supply it. It may be much easier to at least invade part of the planet and use it´s industry to resupply the fleet so that it can siege the rest.
If you invade a planet, those streets are gonna run red with the blood of civilians. Which makes the point about bombarding civilians moot. And as far as planet side defenses, you would have to deal with that when launching an invasion as well, along with every kind of defense that can't reach space, but can reach your atmospheric troops.
@@shorewall Compared to nuking the planet a lot less civilians will die in a land invasion. There will certainly be collateral damage but also a lot less than you might think as weaponry is bound to be much more precise in the future. And of course you´d still have to deal with defenses. But ground vs ground isn´t slanted against the attacker. Ground vs space very much is.
1 assumes the invaders care about civilian casualties. If the invaders are a different species, it will be much easier to take the planet by making the natives extinct. 2 The ground defenses better have long range, when a ship can go anywhere in the solar system grab a big rock and send it on an impact trajectory to the planet, no nukes needed. Again big enough to make the natives extinct. 3 if they came from another star, depending on how long it takes to get there, they may indeed have enough supplies to last long enough for the natives to die out. Or they could drop a few big rocks, leave and come back in a couple decades once the dust settles. Repeat if there are survivors.
@@chrisbrantley6120 I don´t see humans just genociding an alien species unless they are Space Nazis which I doubt. And logically same would apply to Alien Species. I highly doubt pretty much any species capable of interstellar travel would be so primitive as to just kill billions of people. Even if they are they are they still have to slug it out with ground defenses. Any advanced planet could easily intercept incoming asteroids. Shit we will probably develop the ability to be able to intercept just about any asteroid within the next 50 years or so. For a civilization capable of interstellar travel it would be an every day task. No fleet would could carry even remotely enough supplies to outlast a planet worth of resources unless it´s stupidly large but then we aren´t talking about a remotely equal fight.
Sieges/blockades are undoubtedly effective in contemporary warfare, but would they still work on interplanetary scales? If the planet has the capacity to sustain itself with food, energy, and other vital resources, then they might be able to wait out an enemy force in orbit, depending on that enemy's supply lines and rations. Moreover, if it's an industrialised world, they might be able to build and then deploy capital weapons like long-range missiles, or something like planetary defence cannons. While I agree that the idea of literal legions of Space Marines falling from the sky in drop-pods isn't optimal (ignoring that in 40K the rule of cool wins out over heretical logic), I think that the burden of urgency will often be on the attacker. Unless, of course, they're willing to bombard it into a state of complete ruin.
Yes burden of urgency. What if the planet has HVT (High Value Target) hidden/hold hostage somewhere? Then they can't afford to bombard nor wait out a siege. Heck, the entire planet itself could be HVT.
Yeah! A planet's too big too conquer, but by the same measure, it'd be easy to conceal almost anything of value, like a person or information. Essentially, it's a case of why the planet needs conquering versus being outright destroyed: if the planet isn't necessary, then I'd guess the assaulting forces would choose to bombard everything into submission or annihilation - but, if there's necessity to keeping the world inhabited/habitable, then some kind of ground attack would be required. It might be more clandestine, or maybe large deployments against selected targets, but I doubt that space supremacy alone would be enough.
well you can deny that sustenance if you hold the orbit - unless some sort of proper planetary scale fortification (like shields) is available to defenders, you can just bombard the fields where they grow their food. And if they started building weapons to assail you, you could still just as well bomb these before they can be fired now if they had such weaponry to threaten your fleet on the orbit before your arrival it would be more messy :)
The only risk to attacking farmland, etc. would be how quickly the invaders could rejuvenate and restore it for their own use, either as colonisers, or occupiers. Something I learnt from the Mass Effect codex which might be relevant, is the notion of placing defending forces or positions near or obscuring things of potential value to the attackers. This essentially means any successful assault would end up costing the attackers things of worth to them. An example might be placing defence weapons in a spaceport, so any direct bombardment would deny an occupying force that resource.
I agree with almost everything here, but the Battle of Hoth in Star Wars was a ground battle because of a shield that the Rebels deployed that could defend against the planetary fleet. In that situation, planetary, or even localized, shields would change this dynamic.
@@eoinchadwick9381 I agree. Hoth was never an invasion. Once the rebels knew they were found they immediately started to evacuate. They only fought to hold out long enough to get everyone on ships and out of the system. Remember that the imperial commander hyperjumped to close and was detected early. If he had done his job right he would have probably captured most of the rebels. The only reason the imperials didn't just bomb them out of existence is they wanted prisoners to question and intel from rebel systems in the base. If they just wanted them dead they would of came in with six star destroyer's and bombarded the base from orbit till it was just loose atoms. Shields only mattered in this case because it held up landing troops closer to the rebel base.
@@eoinchadwick9381 well in a senario where shield generators are numerous then an invasion force is needed. Give me a number of what you think the requirements are for invasion, I cant win an argument over vague terms.
Not really since Shields can be forced to collapse with enough fire. No matter the reactor power the Rebels had, if the ISD´s in orbit decided to bombard the Shields with their impressive weapons array it would have collapsed at some point. Then the Bombardment just continues until the Base and the surrounding area are reduced to rubble. ISD´s are laid out for a strategy called "Base Delta Zero" in which a Fleet of them go into formation around the planet and systematically bombard the entire surface until all that is left is a burning rock unable to sustain life. Not to mention the Superstardestroyer, that one can Base Delta Zero a planet all by himself in a matter of days and nothing withstands that sort of firepower.
A settlement underneath an ocean would be almost immune to kinetic bombardment. Worlds with entire surfaces of liquid are somewhat common, and without controlling the ocean floor you can harvest no resources. You would be forced to land and fight undersea, since even bombs and torpedoes can be intercepted since all movement is slowed by water.
A safer spot could be deep within the crust even the low parts of a planet's mantle. Convention bombardment simply can't go that far. And you would have to get asteroids bigger than the dino killer. (Which you would realistically rather use for raw resources.) ua-cam.com/video/jZQP2oNDkAM/v-deo.html
@@bkane573 The UK was never at risk of being completely obliterated by a few dozen bombers. Not only that it's not like they were in the war with no allies, and no capacity to resist.
@@insidious7329 At one point they were in a War with No Allies. There was The British Empire and there Was Nazi Germany. Everyone else had been conquered, or like the French Empire, just rolled over.
"If there's a giant battleship parked next to the island, none of the potential outcomes involve an invasion of the island." *Glances at Iwo Jima and Okinawa*
Actually, in the unlikely scenario that the planet and the fleet are equally matched, the fleet is at a massive disadvantage. The ships must carry their armor, weapons, energy, and ammo. The planet, however, will never run out of any of that and can have more of it bc it doesn't need to carry it.
@@TheCoolCucumber WW2 was unlike most modern wars. There could very well be an all out war like WW2 in space but certainly not every war or even most would be like that. Simply because those wars will end with either both sides fucked or one winning decisively so in the aftermath it might take a while until there even is another side to fight a total war against.
This assumes conventional technology of course. If you can put something like planetary shields as a common technology, then ground battles can be worked in, albeit with different objectives
Even camouflaged railguns could make sustained planetary bombardment impossible. No need for shields. Ships are relatively easy to spot. Hidden ground installations on the other hand would be extremely difficult to spot. Nevermind that the planet would have a quasi infinite supply of ammo and material to build new installations as the battle continues. I actually have the complete opposite opinion to Spacedock. I think in a realistic setting a attacking fleet would have to strike hard and fast at a specific point of the planet to land ground troops. That is if it´s a highly developed planet. A prolonged slug fest with ground defenses would be suicide.
MysticHero the problem there is that space doesn’t really have a range limit, whereas railguns do, they could simply bombard from out of range, it might be less precise, (although that’s by no means certain) but railguns only serve as a minor inconvenience
Spacedock: Conquering an entire populated planet is literally impossible Me: Challenge excepted EDIT: Also, am I the only one who thinks "World Anvil" would be the name of some sort of gargantuan ancient spaceship/space station that is discovered to be able to seed worlds with sentient life, like the Precursors in Halo?
I feel like this isn't really true. Let me explain: 1) treath of bombing to force surrender, or even bomb them until surrender: Both Japan and Germany (and to a lesser extent Great Britain) give enough proof why this is a beautiful myth. Only nuclear bombing could achieve this (perhaps) and that brings me to the next point. 2) If you want the planet, you don't destroy the planet. Yeah, you could force them to surrender by dropping enough nukes to create twenty godzilla's. And then you made the planet useless, great resource management. 3) Massive surface area: Good point, but we can take photographs from space with a resolution of one meter, and those are not even spy satellites. Surely a fleet would have much better sensors, capable of recognising a human being, or a human being with guns. And they'd have a much larger field of view (this wouldn't work on tropical worlds or heavely forested onces) 4) "it doesn't matter if you're 500 guys with rifles when there is a giant battleship parked next to the island" The entire "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific was literally that and Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of WW2. While bombing surely has its place, it needs to be used to destroy important infrastructure like dams, factories, bridges, canals,... and the invasion force should be landed on small, key area's. It is very much like a siege of a castle, you can utterly destroy it and then it won't be of any use ever again or you can try to wait it out, hoping no relief force shows up, or you can try to storm it. By taking farmland you can starve them out, by taking important trade choke points you can starve them out. It doesn't matter how you turn it, unless you are willing to destroy the planet, you need to invade or need to have an insane amount of patience.
Agreed. I get the impression that this was mostly a rant against the Starship Troopers movie, where they make All The Mistakes and play it off as heroism.
To paraphrase the starship troopers book, you can nuke a planet till it glows but now no one has the planet so the only way to take a planet is to kick the other guy off it and that's why you have the MI. Do you want to know more?
""it doesn't matter if you're 500 guys with rifles when there is a giant battleship parked next to the island" The entire "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific was literally that and Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of WW2." The difference here being that WW2 battleships couldn't just destroy all japanese installations from the sea, and a huge battleship next to the planet would have it a tad easier. And as soon as they could drop nukes they did that to avoid having to try to conquer "traditionally" any more islands. "If you want the planet, you don't destroy the planet. Yeah, you could force them to surrender by dropping enough nukes to create twenty godzilla's. And then you made the planet useless, great resource management." No need for nukes. nukes are expensive, and you need to deal with weird consequences of their usage. You are already holding orbit. Couple of tungsten rods is all you will need. Don't need to even fire them. Just drop them. Untill some sort of planetary energy shield becomes a thing there will be no countermeasure to that. And when the rod actually impacts the ground the force it will deliver will be greater than most of nukes. And you don't even need proper fleet to mantain that threat over the planet - you could just scatter a network of satelites with rods all around the planet, and govern it from orbit. Someone try to take one down? Drop a rod on next city. Bonus points if your satelites come equipped with point defence to actually fend off missiles coming from the planet. You have destroyed couple of bigger cities, rest shat their pants over concept of doom they cannot stop and surrender. No radiation, no resources that are actually lost. No need for invasion.
@@MehrumesDagon but see, that is exactly the point. You don't need to "destroy a few big cities" that is exactly what we did. Germany got hit with everything we had. We dropped napalm bombs on cities where many buildings were made from wood in japan. They didn't surrender because of it. Yes, you can drop asteriods. And yes, they can do more damage than nukes. It could work. And what then? Will they surrender? No. Unless you show zero mercy and the population realises you are perfectly fine with wiping them out they won't surrender. And if you do that, the entire universe would jump on you. Because you just wiped out billions of creatures only to try to make them surrender. In the end. The best thing, both for the people on the ground and for your own pr, it is better to launch an invasion alongside tactical bombardment. And the battleships... I'd like to see a battleship from space trying to destroy a bunker complex embedded in a mountainrange. Exactly the same as a bunkercomplex on an island threathend by bombers and battleships, the only diffrence is scale.
@@hmswarspite1064 well for the rest of the universe to turn on you, they would need to know about it. issue with germany is that the bombings were not the kind that would deliver the point on "impending doom and you can do nothing about it" japan got hit with two nukes and they did surrender - because it did deliver the point. as for drilling through mountain bunkers - well it would highly depend on tech available tothat battleship. that being said in the meantime I've started debating the topic with a friend,and he raised a very interesting point in here. point of "why do you need to conquer that planet in the first place", resources available planetside for our current knowledge are laughtable compared to the rest of the solar system. So if they were posing threat to your operations you can just glass the planet and you won't loose anything of value. and the answer to that question would pretty much dictate what's feasible and what is not feasible :)
The moment I saw the title, I knew this was going to be like when the Templin Institute tried to debunk why the idea of a mega-corp government wouldn't work. Five to fifteen minutes of the speaker making a statement that only shows HUGE gaps in their knowledge. With Templin, it was a dubious understanding of economics as well as the history and organization of the East Indian Trading Company. Here... we have the assumption that everyone is making logical, rational decisions in an activity where emotional extremes run hot and people let patriotism and nationalism take over. While yes, space warfare would likely see a much greater emphasis on smaller units of elite SPESS MAHRINES performing surgical attacks and commando raids, the idea that ground armies designed for large scale engagements would become obsolete is inaccurate and shows the speaker suffers from the "sci-fi writers have no sense of scale" problem. If you have an empire that spans multiple planets, then raising an invasion force of a billion soldiers is not a huge problem if each of those planets has the same number of people as modern day Earth. I have not read the Expanse series but from what I picked up second-hand, that sounds like a bad example. Mars is still in the process of being terraformed (which limits the amount of habitable space available on Mars) while Earth still has the lion's share of the Solar System's population. And if the author built the Expanse universe to be like the last age of colonialism, Earth has virtually all of the manufacturing assets of note as well (meaning they can drown the other planets in ships as well as bodies if they desire.) The example you gave sounds more like a commentary on propaganda that ignores reality (commentary that's still quite relevant these days) then on the impracticality of planetary invasions in general. And as others have noted, your statement doesn't take into account things like planetary defenses (such as missile silos and giant rail guns for destroying enemy ships in orbit) or that there might be planet-side assets that the invader does not want to destroy. OR maybe the invader only wants to destroy military assets and deploys ground forces because orbital bombardments may be too imprecise? For example, what if the Evil Galactic Empire (TM) decides to put a hospital for maimed children next to their biggest garrison on the planet? If you hit the garrison from orbit, you might destroy the hospital. Which regardless of your moral compass would be something the Empire's propagandists will RUN with and use to whip up the rest of the Empire's people into a frenzy.
World history is against your assertion of "If you have a Battleship parked of an island, you don't need to invade." Guess you never read WWII pacific history.
Except there is a large difference between threatening an entrenched military force and threatening a planet with typically a much larger percentage of civilian population. Additionally, there is a large difference between the US which was trying to accelerate a victory by rapidly island hopping until they were in flight range of bombing Tokyo as well as cutting off shipments of oil from Indonesia, thus they decided to invade instead of blockading and starving them out. As opposed to any presumed space navy which would find it far faster to sit back and bomb a planet to oblivion rather than try to invade and occupy it. Additionally everyone here seems to forget that in this analogy, the US was trying to work its way towards the Japanese mainland. If a nation had ships in orbit, they practically have free range to threaten wherever they want.
It’s one thing I like in 40k, a bunch of the conquests in the universe start with orbital bombardment or the threat thereof, but even when there does need to be an invasion, the operation takes months to years of grueling attrition, not the days to weeks we see in things like Star Wars. And it’s usually just to accomplish one specific objective before letting garrison troops handle the rest.
And to be fair, in OT any ground combat was fighting retreat, commando raid or boarding action (not counting policing actions like on Tatooine in ANH). TPM was at first occupation duty (and offscreen rolling over remaining resistance) and in latter part guerilla fights. In AOTC separatists were pretty much with pants down (they were already loading into the ships) and later in TCW cartoon Geonosis was retaken by CIS when Republic pulled off most assets to fight the war. Kashyyk was the matter of high value targets, relatively low population and possibly simultaneous battles on and over planet, so both sides could not use bombardment without exposing themselves
@@OrDuneStudios well, I usually reject ST in thought process as it is contradictory mess - not only with other trilogies as well as with other films of said trilogy. But yeah, rebels 2.0 base got nuked from orbit because it had no theater/planetary shield, but one has to admit that they were more or less packed to leave
I mean you can bombard a planet to rubble and kill most or even all of a planetary population in Stellaris. It's my favorite method to play Fanatic Purifiers, choose Tomb World origin and use percussive terraforming to conquer the world.
@spacedock as Sun Tzu says, it is better to take the enemy whole and intact. So that you can utilize what it is your capturing. So to that end, launching invasions to do the same thing as your bombing would, and force the enemy to surrender but without dealing as much damage to the infrastructure that the bombing would, as a method would be possibly/probably more efficient. Using an invasion force to convince the enemy to surrender would be more ideal then deleting whole cities of usable resources including manpower.
Well, here's the thing. Any substantial body is far more resistant to orbital bombardment than most people assume. Sure, you can theoretically sterilize the surface. But with hydroponics, nuclear and geothermal power, deep underground tunnel networks and infrastructure, etc., its not entirely unreasonable in a sci-fi setting to have the planet break before the garrison does. Depending on the capabilities of the tech in the setting, you could even have them capable of blasting ships out of the sky. We even have a very light version of this IRL, with Cheyenne mountain and other nuke-hardened command bunkers.
If the enemy is so deep underground that orbital bombardment can't touch them, they can't touch anything on the surface either. So you can just collapse the entrances and set down your own facilities while leaving a minor garrison behind. Repeat step 1 any time they try and poke their heads out.
@@thepsion5 I mean sure but the enemy will know that, and make an intricate system of tunnels. What you thought was an entrance was actually a decoy and now your bases are being nuked from within, your water poisoned or the ground underneath collapse on you. What Im saying is that a competent army could have really good odds in the wait for reinforcements. Plus, what if most of the planet already lives underground? We are assuming a habitable planet but invasions could happen in places that are so well built against asteroid hits and radiarion that they are immune to bombardment.
@@robertoguzman6556 The intricate system of tunnels would be collapsed by a very brief bombardment, and you can't build new ones without alerting seismometers and ground-penetrating radar. It's like a castle siege - very easy to lock people in, and very hard for the defenders to do meaningful damage to the attacking force.
Also ground based railguns would be difficult to detect and a serious threat to orbiting vessels. The assumption that the attacking fleet could bombard with impunity just because they overwhelmed space defenses is utterly ridiculous.
You should study Iwo Jima. You should also study any land war ever fought. WWII is a great example. If you are an interstellar species, you can presumably bring a lot of troops to the fight.
wasn't it kind of explained in Star wars, that during the battle of Hoth they had a massive planetary shield preventing the bombardment of the actual base? so the empire had to land elsewhere on the planet and invade from the ground?
*Objection* There is one concept that is quite neglected in most sci-fi: planetary weapons. It is much easier and cheaper to construct and maintain surface weapons that can shoot on anything that gets near the planet or attempts to bombard the surface. Even in historical context, coastal artillery was quite common form of defense against approaching enemy fleet. There are few shots in the video where it actually makes sense to launch the ground invasion. The Klendathu invasion was a catastrophic failure, but it shows that you cannot just hover above the planet and shoot on any place that has trees and houses still standing. The ground force on Klendathu was quite successful at destroying the Plasma Bugs, so there is still some potential for (at least limited) ground strikes in case the ships or air force are not able to strike those objectives, or would suffer high losses in attempt to do so. The battle of Hoth is another example of the threat the planetary ion cannons can be. Any populated planet with much larger garrison than of the Rebel Alliance on Hoth would be able to set up much greater defense network across the planet. The Galactic Empire had to land armored vehicles to break through the Rebel's defenses, disable their shield, and allow for borbandment of the Echo base from space. The Empire still could afford to deploy the fleet and blockade the planet, because despite the fact the Rebels could disable any ship on orbit, they likely couldn't exploit it and destroy the Imperial star destroyers, because they were missing necessary means, such as bombers, capital ships, and other surface-to-space weapons. If the planetary cannons were part of the game, any invasion would be much more difficult to handle. Both sides would have to decide what their approach is going to be, but there will always be high losses, whether it be ships destroyed while bombarding the planet, or whole ground divisions wiped out. As I noted, ground invasions would still make sense in striking critical objectives, such as the planetary cannons, to secure the space around the planet and allow for the fleet to deploy and bombard however it desires. The defenders, on the other hand, would have to decide whether they would activate their weapons and expose their position, making them easier to target by the next invasion wave.
This is how planetary invasion is handled in Honor Harrington. Space-based warships are so much more overwhelmingly powerful vs ground units that planetary control is determined entirely in space.
Hoth had a giant shield stopping the bombardment. Dune actually has a reason for this since bombardment was stopped by treaties and had structured warfare. With the common people just wanting to survive
Its interesting you picked the Battle of Hoth, where there actually was a reason for them not to just bombard the rebel base, in that Vader was interested in taking specific captives alive. If you need to capture a specific person or location unharmed, thats where the marines become relevant.
I would argue a planetary bombardment is a planetary invasion. And much like you stated, if you bomb a target into submission then it will submit. Which will allow you to land troops on the planet, and if some resist (as they will inevitably do) then you can fight them - you're not fighting the planet, just isolated countries or cities.
So basically the Reaper invasions of Mass Effect are realistic. They don’t use infantry units or have a military force, they’re just massive ships with legs and they can use the native people of planets as canon fodder. Edit: their methods of invasion are realistic; their goal to destroy all life is irrelevant to that point. Conquer or exterminate, the methods are realistic all the same. Why the two respectable individuals in the comment thread thought they needed to tell me Reaper goals is oblivious to me when it is completely irrelevant to that point.
The Reapers try to kill off intelligent, space faring life while leaving the biosphere of planets as untouched as possible - they aren't trying to take over a planet. As soon as everyone is dead and all traces of civilisations are wiped out, they leave.
Assassiiinuss true but that’s not the point I was making, the principle is the same. There is incentive for in-atmosphere battles, starships with foldable legs. That’s some War of the Worlds stuff right there. Just equip them with some Iron Mans then BAM!
Totally wrong, even the Reapers use ground units instead of only using their ships to bombard the planet, since they are not invading to conquer, they invade to anihilate the life on that planet.
Nilus Merakas not the point. Not relevant. I did not need a refresher of Reaper goals. To exterminate or conquer; their methods of invasion are realistic all the same. Why do their goals matter to this point? They don’t.
Well, i suppose it depends on the planets population, if there is just some cities, it's probably possible to invade it, it would be like invading a small country. Despite that you make a lot of good points.
Interestingly, in the Starship Troopers novel the mobile infantry was usually employed as a smash and run force. Drop _individually_ from orbit with enough firepower and numbers to make a fearsome show of force, secure an LZ for extraction than cause as much havoc as you can before the situation becomes untenable then pull out. The goal is to strike a specific instillation that is not particularly viable as an orbital bombardment target or to break the public will to fight of your enemy. But....... don't forget: if you are in orbit you are a very visible and predictable target for any ground to orbit weapons. You will want to take them out before parking your fleet a few hundred km up. So, you have a small force of ground troops inserted at known GtO emplacements to take out the biggest threat (ship launches are very visible and fairly easily countered unlike hyper-sonic missiles and even less energy weapons) similar to special forces and cruse missiles taking out AAA and AA-missile batteries today. You then use orbital bombardment to take out major command and control centers, weapons production facilities, and financial centers. Then ground troops with the twin mission of tending to those who surrender and making others wish they had. That last bit is vital! You _must_ send the message that resistance is death and compliance is compassion and fairly comfortable life.
It is often impossible to bomb a planet if you want it intact, for natural resources or industry. In that case you need to land troops to take over these resources and protect them at all cost. Also, terror bombing is not as effective as it would seem, germany did not surredser when all their cities were turned to rubble, they surrendered when the soviet soldiers occupied Berlin.
I mean, Japan surrendered to two atomic bombs. It's a matter of scale. Inefficient carpet bombing is one thing, a single massive blast annihilating most or even all of a city is something else entirely.
@felix hamel, if you annihilate all of the cities at once, sure. But that's why you only destroy one city at first. Then when the ENTIRE REST OF THE PLANET SURRENDERS the lost infrastructure is negligible compared to what you gained.
@@TheAchilles26 Japan surrendered for other reason besides the bombing. Their Fleet has been sunk, US subs were sinking most of the food transport ships from Korea which would have lead to mass starvation and the Soviet Union just joined the war against Japan removing them as a possible neutral negotiating party and threating Manchuria and Korea. Also in terms of area damaged and civilians killed the Firebombing of Tokyo was worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm not saying the atomic bombing didn't have an impact but it wasn't the only reason. Even then there was an attempted coup against the government by Army officers to stop the surrender of Japan.
@@TheAchilles26 NO, japan was gonna keep going even after the nukes, it was when we agreed not to take out the emperor that they surrendered.... and if you look at WW2 the pacific front was a bitch after japan fell and we invaded France even that was hard fighting and slow but after the beaches were cleared and we moved in it was block warfare, taking territory street by street all the way to Berlin, but the pacific campaign took so long that the British started to wonder if we could do it but we did lol watch the WW2 docs, they paint a very different picture than games or school tries to shovel down our necks....
Quick query: What if that planet has Surface to space missile arsenals and/or planetary shields? Wouldn't this force the Marines for create a 'beach-head' in order to advance and destroy those arsenals or shields?
A few points: 1. Planetary Bombardment may not be possible. If the goal is to take land or resources, any Bombardment that would eliminate a sufficiently dug in enemy may well also damage the planet or resources beyond repair, making an air/ground campaign the only option. 2. Siege and blockade is a viable option, but is very time consuming, and there are numerous reasons one may not have the time to wait out the enemy. Additional, the planet may be self sufficient, making Siege completely ineffective.
4:05 I want you to google the following: 1. The Battle of Stalingrad 2. Saragarhi - The Last Stand - Extra History 3. Iwo Jima, Okinawa, US Island Hopping Campaign
I would suggest that 100 ton guns of Fort Rinella in Malta is a historic example that could break this logic. These guns were so massive that they could destroy any ship from well outside the range the ship's guns. Not only that but even if the ship managed to get into range it had to score a direct hit on the gun to disable or destroy it. The guns meanwhile could pretty much hit anything on the relatively much larger target of the ship to cause critical damage. However the guns were vulnerable to assault from over land so a large garrison with many fortifications were maintained on the island to prevent this from happening. I would therefore suggest a possible scenario for a planetary invasion is possible. A planet is protected by a large, fixed emplacement that can destroy capital ships from well outside the range of the weapons carried by the capital ships. This prevents straight up bombardment of the planet as suggested. So a strike must be launched to take out that emplacement before the fleet can close to bombardment range. Of course this emplacement would be heavily defended necessitating an assault force landing in smaller craft to storm the emplacement and silencing the weapon.
The only time you’d need to land troops on a planet in the context of an invasion, realistically, would probably be to take out ground-based anti-ship defenses.
There's also the idea of capturing key figured within the enemy ranks, like their leadership, or key facilities (like ship-yards) you don't want destroyed in a bombardment. After all, if you capture their leaders, you can hold a gun to the head of their people and force them to give up, or live and watch the planet burn (which is an even worse fate).
Anti ship artillery is overrated and unrealistic in most areas, you can shoot and carper bomb a planet far away without realistically needing to be to close of a planet, if you want anti ship artillery realistically you want them in orbit and they would serve more the same way tank destroyers did
@@MechanicWolf85 - because it's impossible to clear the skies with ground defenses only? Someone doesn't think very highly of SAM systems :p Realistically, if you are a space faring race you have the technology required to mount a considerable defense of a planet you control against an equally advanced military. Doesn't mean you will win, doesn't mean you will loose. Planetary defenses do not have to be immobile easy targets begging to be destroyed. Further, we as a species can blow up shit in space right now via ground based weapons and we haven't made it past the damn moon lol!
@@martinsharrett1872 Yeah, but the problem is that ground based weapons need to be big to overcome the planet's gravity. And big means immobile. And immobile means your enemy always knows exactly where they are and can just nudge a few asteroids to take them out from the other side of the solar system.
I was going to comment about all the things I think are wrong with this video: bombing not being a showstopper from a morale and technical perspective, anti-orbit defences, the point of not taking an entire planet not being about capturing every square metre, etc. It’s clear everyone else has it covered, so I’ll just leave it at that.
I think the problem with this approach, is that if orbital bombardment is the issue, planets, or at least those with strategic importanse will naturally develop meassures to mitigate the damage, making landing armies again necesary, specially if you want to actually take the planet instead turning it into wasteland.
To be fair to The Empire Strikes back, basically none of the problems you listed apply to that ground battle. No one was going to go chill in the hills of Hoth and fight the Empire, the ground troops just went in to flush them out.
Star Wars explained the need for ground battles as occurring to take out planetary deflector shields so that bombardment could *then* happen. In that case, the ground battles made sense since they were small scale, focusing on taking out a single target, and routing defending enemy troops.
Unless you need the resources on the planet, and they have a shields around key installations because as long as they don't come down to the planet they are just wasting their time and resources, so even planetary bombardment won't do anything, at times you have to actually get on the ground to fully route the enemy
I’ve come up with my own rethinking of Star Wars. In this concept, the Empire isn’t omnipresent. It maintains its hold over so many planets by visiting each one every few years with a Star Destroyer. If the planet remains loyal, the SD provides a reminder of the Empire’s overwhelming power. If the planet has risen in revolt, the SD is capable of “restoring order”. Star Destroyers are not capital ships, per se. They are more like mobile siege platforms. Any one SD is usually capable of defeating planetary defense forces, which are usually composed of fighters, small armed civilian ships, and maybe a couple orbital forts or asteroid installations. (Incidentally, this is why SDs don’t seem supremely well-suited to capital-ship battle - they aren’t designed to be) Each SD also carries a ground-force component. Planets which revolt realize the Empire wants to rule them, not wreck them through orbital bombardment. it is therefore conceivable that they might sullenly decline to surrender immediately. So after the space defenses are destroyed, the stormtroopers land to smash up whatever planetary militia may exist, then seize centers of political authority and communications so they can install a new ruling elite. (And this is why stormtroopers are so feared, but don’t seem very capable at conventional warfare; they usually just have to smash hastily-levied militia, and then exercise some creative brutality to demoralize the civilians) This all worked quite well for the Empire, until planets started cooperating together to form a unified Rebel Alliance in exile…
Well, in the Pacific Theater of WWII, we (the US and Allies) DID essentially land large numbers of Marines on islands to take the islands from Japanese control, this AFTER the battleships pounded the islands with naval gunfire...
This ignores some events in history. Iwo Jima was garrisoned by 21,000 troops. It was a tiny rock surrounded by a massive fleet of battle ships. Even after 3 days of continuous bombardment, there was hardly any damage to the defenses. The defenders had specifically prepared to survive the bombardment and force the Americans to suffer as many losses as possible.
The anime Legend of Galactic Heroes has a lot of retreating and surrender ... but it has lots of willing to die bits too ... might be a fun one to do analysts on
I feel like the Battle of Hoth is exactly the answer to your objections raised: 1. possibility of seige. The rebels had a shield generator "strong enough to deflect any bombardment." orbital bombardments/bombings would be ineffective. 2. unsustainability of extended ground warfare. Hoth is not a planet with a government and a local sapient population. It's an ice cube in space with some local flora and fauna where the rebels dug out a base. They're not defending their homes, this is just another hidey hole. Fleeing the invading forces in favor of another hole on the same planet would simply mean that they're in the same position as before, except with no protective shield and no heat, AND no means of evacuation. 3. suicidal mentality of staying put. Even with the planetary shield in place the Rebels didn't stay and fight to drive off the Empire, they stayed and fought in order to buy time for a scrambled evacuation. As soon as they had the opportunity to the defending forced retreated, gathered at a secondary rendezvous location, and fled the planet. Actually I don't think ANY Star Wars land war matches your objections. Except maybe the Battle for Naboo, but even then I think that's mitigated by the fact that the Naboo had not formal military, and the invading force were droids, AND that it started with a seige and attempt to force surrender. AND EVEN THEN there were (in legends anyway) resistance forces as you said which in the end contributed to the battle which lost the war for the Trade Federation. The Battle of Geonosis wasn't to conquer the planet, it was to rescue the Jedi and destroy the droid factories on system, and I suppose capture the CIS leadership. The Battle of Coruscant wasn't to conquer the planet, it was to kidnap the Chancellor. The Battle of Utapau was different as the planet had already surrendered to the CIS, but was sympathetic to the republic, all that Republic needed to do was drive off the CIS from their main military installations to win that battle. I'm not going to get into The Clone Wars because not even I'M that neurotic. Battle of Yavin was to destroy the planet Battle of Hoth, see above Battle of Endor was to destroy a target objective, not to subjugate a populace. Same with Battle of Starkiller base Battle of Crait - crait was uninhabited, and the invading force had a singular objective which it failed due to misguided leadership and I hate The Last Skywalker so my memories of those battles are too flimsy to mount a proper defense of. Not to mention a lack of motivation. I feel like the battles in The Clone Wars might be better examples of what you're talking about, but for Star Wars at least I feel like the objections don't quite match the demonstrated material, not in the movies anyway.
"you can´t never send men after men for decades" Imperium of Man Warhammer 40K: "we don´t send wave after wave, we send ocean after ocean for centuries"
What about the idea of a planetary shield, where massive weapons can’t penetrate and in order to strike the planet, ships need to enter the planets atmosphere but would be exposed to anti ship weaponry from the ground; I think that would be the standard defense for any advanced space civilization and in order to capitulate the enemy you would to send an army or task force to get rid of the planets shield generator to allow for orbital bombardment. So the idea of a ground invasion would still make sense in future scifi warfare in my opinion
One does not build ships on planets and launch them into space to fight, one builds weapons of mass destruction that will bomb the ships in orbit back.
Yeah... the only time planetary forces would be needed is in small contained engagements even if massive armies seems cool. The only exceptions is in things like civil wars... where the planet is essentially fighting itself and an outside force shows up with an army to help one side of the civil war or another. Mass Effect does the first one pretty well, the "First Contact War" only had like 1200 casualties all around, so it was presumably limited to a very small part of Shanxi. Edit: As for Halo... the Covenant is more realistic then most since their main strategy IS just to bomb or "glass" the planet, and we're given the impression that they only invade to get forerunner artifacts or for "glory" or whatever.
One thing that might make orbital bombardment difficult would be a defensive grid of high-powered lasers. Also, you'd need in the tens of millions of troops to garrison a world like Earth, that and a fleet in orbit.
Counter point The imperial guard from Warhammer have defenses capable of annihilating any ship above hive cities. Or at least make ships nervous. The defenses are needed to be taken out to re take the world. Or sometimes annihilation is simply not possible as they need to retake the world, or take specific people. Or to kill specific targets.
Replace every single use of "orbital bombardment" with "nuclear strike" and see how well the argument holds up in the real world. Would it be effective? Of course, but there are numerous reasons on-top of reasons why the first war that nukes were used was also the last war where nukes were used.
Imagine the logistical nightmare it'd be trying to supply troops on another planet millions of KM or even light years away from your own. Unless you could directly open up a portal on the surface of whatever planet you're invading it'd be an absolute fucking logistical nightmare invading other planets
Just to be remember, invading a planet need Alot of manpower, you cannot just send some 100.000 or 1.000.000 soldier to invade a planet, probably need 100.000.000 soldier or more
Actually at least in Warhammer 40k orbital bombardments aren't that effective, unless Exterminatus grade weaponry is used, even then it may not be a guarantee. For example most heavily defended worlds in 40k have Void Shield Generators covering major settlements such as Hive Cities and Fortress Monasteries along with anti-orbital defense cannons with extremely well defended worlds such as Ryza possessing orbital battle stations. Even after disabling the Void Shield orbital bombardment may not cut it, properly built Imperial fortresses are ridiculously durable, for example the Dark Angels legion/chapter's home world Caliban was subjected to severe orbital bombardment to the point of mass scattering the planet but the Fortress Monastery was somehow still intact. So orbital bombardment in 40k is not very useful in forcing a surrender unless you're bombing a feudal or feral world.
You said Hoth invasion wouldn't happen? But they had a deflector shield to protect them from bombardment, and and Ion cannon to disable the orbiting ships so they needed to do a ground invasion to disable the shield.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” - some old dude.
Tho the example used for Star Wars, the battle of Hoth actually did require a ground battle. This was due to the fact that the rebel base initially was protected by a strong energy shield that need to be disabled before the battleships could do anything.
Like I said, first attempt to invade Wake Island the USMC drove off the invasion fleet. If they had be able to be resupplied or more realistically evacuated, they wouldn't have been captured in the second attempt.
In regards to the "You never see retreat or rout in a Sci-Fi setting" comment - I recommend reading/listening to "The Lost Fleet" series by Jack Campbell. The entire premise of the series is that a fleet becomes trapped impossibly far behind enemy lines and must make a fighting withdrawal through dozens of hostile systems, with their supplies and morale slowly dwindling, and trying to avoid being cornered by superior enemy forces. It's not even really "contrived" how the fleet manages to become trapped behind enemy lines - it makes complete sense in the context. The battles also are highly realistic - taking into account things like the speed of light affecting reaction times (ie if the enemy fleet is one light minute away, they could already have made a move that you won't see for another 60 seconds) and so on. Overall, great series for Sci-Fi fans on the 'harder' end of the spectrum. Be forewarned though: one thing this author wasn't was a master of dialogue. It ranges from decent at best to downright Jar-Jar Binks at worst.
MBTs since the Cold War have NBC protection as standard, making them highly resistant to nuclear weapons. The Soviets in particular designed heavy tanks that were designed to stay intact and upright relatively close to a nuke. It isn't a stretch to me then that in sci fi militaries could deploy protected vehicles and EVA/powered infantry armor that can protect their operators from radiation and bombardments from tactical yield weapons. A system similar to the Terran marines of Starcraft which can flexibly operate close to nuclear weapons while staying mobile. Or the shielded and nimble Mantis from HALO.
"nobody will fight for castles", "nobody will fight for cities", "nobody will try to invade a continent", "nobody will invade a planet" How about taking strategic points, useful infrastructure, valuable ressources? War isn't changing to reduce casualties, it is optimized to reduce loss in infrastructure and to become cheaper. See reluctance to accept casualties and dead soldiers is mostly a thing in developed countries where there is no real understanding of warfare anymore. Less developed countries/cultures don't have that so much. And their soldiers stand and fight and don't retreat even in the face of a far superior enemy.
the reluctance is borne out of a superior position wishing to minimize losses is a luxury one only states in supremacy can truly appreciate but it's also been shown when those states are at risk suddenly alot of people are willing to step up to the plate
I broadly agree. In most cases, the attacker would only send down commando teams to attack or occupy key objectives which would quicken the surrender of the defender. I always found it interesting that the devs of Xcom EU/EW felt they needed to create a complicated story as to why the aliens just didn't invade and take over Earth. In reality, the explanation is very simple. In Xcom, we can assume that the aliens want to take over Earth intact if they can. So they don't want to launch a planetary bombardment. I would also assume that the manpower and supplies of the forces is limited and not capable of conquering Earth by full-scale invasion. So what do they do. They launch many small scale commando and terror missions. These have the objective of destabilising the national government and demoralise the population in an effort to make them believe the aliens are so superior they can't be defeated. As the attacks continue and the aliens infiltrate the echelons of of power, the governments eventually surrender, or allow the aliens to bring order. Another Sci-fi series which depicted an alien invasion more correctly was V, where the aliens first came as friends and then gradually took over the governments. I can see only a few reasons why a full scale invasion would be feasible: - Neither side has capital warships that can siege or bombard a planet - The attacker feels culturally obliged to conquer by ground combat for some reason - The attacker is reluctant to bombard the planet for some reason (e.g. for ethics reasons, to stop destruction of resources, prevent deaths of non-hostile population, etc) - There are only a small number of settlements that need be attacked and occupied. - The attacker invades mainly to demonstrate it's superiority to its enemies, both in combat ability and tenacity. - The attacker is 'liberating' a planet where most of the population is either friendly, or at worst, neutral, to the attacker. - The attackers wants a long drawn out war for some reason
This is a very simplistic take. There could be tonnes of reasons for ground invasions and situations where straight orbital bombardment wouldn't work. There could be planetary defenses so that you can't just hang out in the orbit casually bombing it. The planet could have valuable infrastructure you don't want to ruin. Indiscriminately bombing an entire planet into submission might be bad PR for some regimes. The might have the support of a significant portion of the planet's population etc. etc.
Your analysis is on track. But what about taking it a step further? Why even bombard the surface of a planet? The anime series Crest of the Stars has this funny scene in episode one where a spacefaring empire just destroyed the defending fleet and orbital defenses of this planet. Effectively conquering the planet. The President of the planet sends a transmission to the invading fleet commander hoping to express his people’s defiance and willingness to fight to the last. The fleet commander cuts him off and says they weren’t planning on landing anything on the planet, nor even bombarding the planet. As far as they were concerned, the planet’s space trade facilities where under there control and so where the shipping lanes the planet sat at the center of, and that’s all the empire wanted. The President is flustered by the lack of hostility and expresses confusion. The fleet commander points out that his people are purely a space dwelling people who are powerful by controlling space travel and trade. He explains: “the idea of actually ruling your planet is what we would consider the furthest thing from elegant.” Basically saying - why would we want to actually run your ball of dirt and resources? You can do that yourselves. Just keep that trade going.
Isn't it feasible to conclude that anyone or anything that possesses the technology to travel here will also be so advanced that we couldn't even conceive their ability to wage war (as we know it to be?) It's pretty safe to say that their entire existence would be on another dimension?
A whole planet´s worth of gun emplacements shooting into space from the surface is realistic and big ships couldn´t dare approach. - Unconcerned with mass, you can put massive generators and massive guns on the Surface. sending small landing craft to take those out makes sense.
I think you should check out SFIA for why it would not only be necessary to invade a planet, that it would be impossible to bombard any equally developed planet into submission. The Planet always has the advantage of resources.
At about 2:00. People might have a build-in self-preservation instinct, but they are also so tribal that it might be more likely for everybody to die than for everybody to agree.
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My only Grip with this is. When you want the infrastructure of that planet intact. Like in star wars when there is a Construction world. that Builds Space ships. If Possible, You would want to take it with as little collateral damage as you can. For not only is the Industry of that planet Important. and would literally Take Decades at best to repair or replace. But the Workers you want to keep working for you, If you can. So Attack from Orbit with Space Artillery. Is not a use-able Method at that point for such a world. Also there are times when the enemy you want to take out on a world is not known where they are. So you waste Huge amounts of resources to Glass a Planet like that. and then their are times when Waging a war is possible, And you don't want to glass it. Like with a Farming world. You want the Food Production for your self. And the Population is small enough that you can ether Bully them into obeying, Or You can literally win a Straight out land war. Lastly what about worlds that have these 4 things, 1) Planetary Shield Generators, Which makes Bombardment from Space nay impossible, 2) Weapon Platforms that can return fire at your space ships from the planet surface, 3) Underground Infrastructure that Makes it Pretty hard to locate and Bombarded them and deal proper Damage to your enemies. 4) Planetary Defense forces that Use Mass Short Distance Fighters and Orbital small war ships, Including mass Boarding Parties from the planet surface.
What if you want the planet for a resource that would be destroyed by bombing and they refuse to surrender, then you gotta get hands dirty and if you remember during the clone wars there were opposing warships and during the imperial era forget bombing the planet they just destroy it, also keep in mind half the planets had friendliest on them and were simply held by the enemy, as opposed to purely enemy control such as the planet ryloth during the clone wars, to be honest I think the only clone wars invasion I remember where the planet had no friendlies was umbara and we have the morals of the Jedi generals to thank for no planetary scale bombing, they only wanna fight people who fight back not the women and children too.... unless it’s anakin
Also EldrenOfTheMist makes some great points
Got to refute the last point about 500 guys on an island verses a battleships .
See the entire second world war Pacific campaign.
Also you said about space battles and make them surrender as opposed to destroy them... what if the enemy is programmed not to surrender? (Clone wars battle droids seem too dumb to get the concept of surrender anyways) then either the clones have to match this resolve or they will lose the war
"Insane, entire planet of self-destructive sociopaths" shows Imperial Guard
Sounds about right
rokg95 Navy but yes haha
Or Orks, Chaos or Genestealer tainted humans. There are many sociopaths or faithful Imperial citizens in the 41st Millennium.
the planet cracked before the guard
It's actually the exterminatus in Dawn of war 2 and that was because of Tyranid or chaos infestation, I can't quite remember
"Insane, entire planet of self-destructive sociopaths" Death Korps of Krieg anyone?
I would like to point out that Halo is actually a *subversion* of this trope. Sure, *we* see Spartans and ODSTs doing ground battles all the time, but that's because the player is playing as a *marine.* Every game makes it abundantly clear that while the UNSC has parity on the ground, they're getting curbstomped in space, which is why the UNSC is losing horribly. Orbital bombardment is so common that they have a name for it, "glassing".
The only reason ground forces even get the chance to fight at all is because a) It's a boarding action of some kind, or b) the Covenant want something on the planet's surface, undamaged by orbital bombardment (IE Reach, or Earth, both of which held Forerunner artifacts the Covenant weren't willing to glass).
Additionally, while you list Star Wars as your other main example of planetary invasions used in the media (And let's be fair, it is), the series has given good explanations for not using wide scale orbital bombardments. Specifically, in Star Wars Rebels, it's shown that even a halfway decent planetary based shield can stand up to an ISD's bombardment, which is consistent with other portrayals of Star Wars invasions. Hoth's invasion, the one you reference, was the same setup, where the Rebels had a planetary shield, forcing the Empire to do a ground invasion. This explains why most navies won't solely drop bombs on entrenched positions, since it'd take too long to have an effect, and gives the enemy time to respond (As what happened in Rebels, and ESB).
It should also be noted that orbital bombardment is hell on the native peoples living on a planet. During the clone wars, when most of the D-Day style invasions occurred, the Republic wasn't trying to bomb the separatists into submission, they were trying to liberate worlds, to bring them back into the Republic without commiting enough violence on them to alienate their people for centuries to come (See: Mandalore). So planetary invasions actually make sense in that context.
Also, this is nitpicking, but in the specific example you used, when Obi Wan invades Ryloth, is actually *another* subversion of this trope. Obi Wan *wanted* to bombard the Separatist position, but the droid commander was using human shields, which made that infeasible.
So while I get what you mean by adding those examples, Halo *fully* acknowledges the implications of orbital bombardment, and Star Wars at least has *some* justification for the practice.
Well spoken.
@@es4583 The shield that warded high velocity ordinance? Like missiles?
@@es4583 Incorrect. Most shields protect specifically against high-velocity objects. If a missile went in with low enough velocity, it would just be shot down by anti-air defenses.
Human shields?
Dude, I'm pretty sure those were Twi'leks.
Obi Wan should have purged the filthy xenos.
Except we know you can send ships through shields now...which means you can send bombs through them or things moving a hyperspace.....
Spacedock 2020: we can just bomb them until they surrender
American during Vietnam war: we can just bomb them until they surrender
Germany 1940: "Ve vill bomb London until they surrender."
US Military to Japan: "We will bomb them until they surrender"
@@Isaacreeper hey, that one worked
@@danielm.595 Questionable, obviously we can't speak to a history that never happened, but the somewhat successful US push through the pacific and more successful but later soviet push through the senkaku islands were significant factors. Without dimensional travel it'd be impossible to say if they'd surrender without them, but I feel it's safe to say it would take a lot longer and lead to a far smaller Japanese population...
Not to say that wouldn't be covered by marines though, dropping marine units from space to take key strategic locations or capture satellite facilities would likely still coexist with planetary siege.
@@SheezyBites Well, history says that Japan surrendered shortly after the Nuclear Bombings, so, in my book, I'd say that it was one of the main factors in the surrendering of the country
"full of soldiers and ship crews who were unwilling to surrender"
Imperial Japan and some allied warships would like to have a word with you
To go even further back.... "I have not yet begun to fight!" -John Paul Jones
@@viperstriker4728 Or the Greeks during the Persian Wars.
There was one soldier who didn't surrender for like 30 years after the war ended.
Responding to the concept of surrendering in space battles: there is a precedent for this. In the age of sail, when combat was often decided by boarding action, surrender was common. In WW1 and WW2, however, surrender was so rare as to be almost unheard of. In WW1 and WW2, no capital ships of any nation surrendered to an enemy force. No British, American, French, German, Dutch, Italian or Japanese capital ship ever surrendered at sea during either conflict, no matter the circumstances. It may seem insane, but it happened.
When the German battleship Bismarck was crippled, outnumbered and surrounded by British ships, it fought to the bitter end. When the British heavy cruiser HMS Exeter was overwhelmed by Japanese ships, they fought to the bitter end. When the USS Astoria was overwhelmed by Japanese ships, they fought to the bitter end. And when the American task force Taffy 3 was hilariously and horrifically outgunned by a Japanese fleet, they fought to the bitter end. When Scharnhorst was outnumbered and overwhelmed by a British fleet, including a British battleship that outgunned her, Scharnhorst fought until she was sunk.
Psychology plays a part in this. The British in particular developed a naval philosophy of aggression and pride where surrender was considered completely unacceptable, which then affected the navies of other nations, particularly the Americans and Japanese. Nobody wanted the stigma and dishonour of surrendering their ship, typically preferring to abandon ship and scuttle. This has a knock-on effect in sci-fi.
There is certainly a disconnect between naval psychology (space forces psychology, in this example) and ground psychology. Naval battles are typically short, and there are clear escape routes since lifeboats typically aren't fired upon. Victory is assured by simply sinking the enemy ship, a clear and relatively easy goal. Ground battles tend to be longer, larger, more bloody, and it's much harder to achieve a "total" victory. Moreover, individual troops are more likely to surrender on their own accord, which isn't an option for sailors who are stuck on a ship at sea or in space.
There's much more to the topic, of course. Still, that's something to keep in mind.
This is a great point that I had never thought about before. It probably doesn't help that a naval battle can completely flip with just a single lucky shot disabling large guns or causing an ammunition explosion. Therefor if you can just keep firing it's totally possible that your next salvo will win you the battle. Ground battles don't work like that, even a well placed artillery strike won't completely wipe out an army. And even if they start retreating they can always regroup and counterattack, a sinking ship can't do that.
How about surrender bc of overheat. Buckle up, realism time!
Taffy 3 didn't fight to the bitter end: they won. They could have held out for at least five or six minutes more...maybe as long as ten!
at least a sub surrendered and some freighters
There's an exchange between a marine officer and destroyer captain mentioned in Neptune's Inferno. The marine was fresh out of the mud with low rations and the captain gave him a full officer's meal. Even so, the marine said he'd prefer a foxhole. Cause while the ship does have lifeboats, at least on land you weren't completely stranded with little to no hope of rescue
"everyone has a basic self-preservation instinct": shows 40k footage
40k is many things, but realistic isn't one of them.
It’s a good joke.
um ever met polish people?
Poland during ww2 soviet threatened to kill 10K poles if they the rebels didn’t stop. polish rebels replied make it 20K we don’t care! Give me liberty or give me death!
polish rebels never stop fighting the Soviet’s the polish raids on Soviet Union ended when Soviet Union fell
So it depends how willed they are ever met a right wing Americans who love freedom... they find them hard to break even when there oppressed in current period
ever met a Russian they fighting sweat police whom have been known to use tanks to slaughter Russians during protests...
some are just unbreakable, specially the kraig marine whom have no home but a Dead Rock consider themselves already dead...
these are traits of radical soldier that’s unbreakable
Kek
@@insidious7329 a lot of WH40K material is thoroughly grounded in realism, but a lot of it os over shadowed by the over the top stuff and contradicting material.
points for using the bombardment of Narn.
Agree, but minus one point for including the battle of hoth, this was not a planitary invasion but an attack of a single base.
this is a feelsbad moment for londo
Londo: Great Maker...what have I done?
It also kinda illustrates why bombardment is a bad idea, remember Narn got blown back to the stone age. That's generally a bad idea, because it makes the natives restless and means the planet is useless until you pour resources into making it habitable, or even somewhat useable. Resources which you'd supposedly have saved by not committing a ground invasion.
@@entylsa And ground invasion was only done because of defenses from orbital bombardment.
So, during world war 2 in the pacific the whole point of parking a huge fleet off the coast of an island was to commence bombardment in preparation for a landing. And those islands were held by a fiercely dedicated enemy that would rather die in battle than surrender. And on most islands days of battleship bombardment and bomber sorties from carriers did nothing to the vast majority of the well hidden defensive emplacements. Ultimately each island took thousands to tens of thousands of Marines lives to secure victory. So I would say a fleet can intimidate, but any space based military will ultimately need to be prepared to take the planet with ground forces with support from the fleet.
Still one thing.
Chemical, biological and nucreal weapons. Its more likely that small force woud be send to figurete out how meat/steelsuit its working, and then send enought viruses, gas and dirty bombs down, to decimate population enought to couse them to surrender.
this is a solution when you want to WIN campins, and don't realy care about what politics say.
If you are atacking a basicly a planet size city, there is no other way. Bomb to submision.
If it is some fresly-colonised planet, you coud land troops there to perform small raids to not waste amunition.
if its a huge-mine/factory style planet, then gas and viruses woud be bast way to minimalise damage to valuble places.
Planetary invasion coud take place, in scenario similar to war in 1984. War as tool to "force" people into submision and sacryficies. Just far away frontiere world, with nothing valuvle to send man to die, with nearby civilisation constatly changing the role of "atacker" and "defender" to get rid of unwanted people, and those who stay, force into even more poverty and sarcrifice.
@@dertafors keep in mind if this was human on human fighting there is a thing called the Geneva convention. Unless they are some super space dictatorship it would be pretty hard to convince your populous that nuking a planet let alone killing their populous is a good idea. Look at the Japanese and their suicidal honor preventing americans from capturing islands with ease and the americans being forced to use a nuke to prevent thousands of men dying in an invasion of Japan and that was frowned upon by a lot of people.
In a FTL space universe, you do not need the planet. You need some planets, you need some resources, but if you are fighting a war and you have to deal with an enemy planet, you do not need that planet. You can mine resources in space, you can build space stations, space colonies, and space shipyards. There is no reason why you would need the planet, aside from getting its populace to stop resisting.
So you defeat their fleet, their space stations, and you have the planet sieged down. But there are still the people on the planet. Why would you send an army down? You don't need anything on the planet. You just need them to stop fighting you. You have space superiority. Why would things go any farther?
You tell the planet, "We have you over a barrel, surrender. Agree to terms. We don't care about your planet, aside from you not continuing to fight." The planet surrenders. Even if they hate your guts, they can't do anything about it. Yeah, we can't go down and push people around, but they can't effect space maneuvers either. If they refuse, then we just start blasting. What is the point from their end?
Now, if you want some other objective that must be accomplished by controlling the planet's surface, and the populace won't allow that in the terms of their surrender, and you can't for some reason just glass the planet and then go down to accomplish your objective, then maybe you would need to invade. But you would need more than a planet's population and resources in order to invade a planet.
But that's a niche and frankly cherry picked scenario. In a truly galactic war, you would defeat the planet's means to fight in space, and then siege their planet, maybe bombarding them, and have the rest of your fleet move on to other, more pressing, objectives.
dertafors >just commit warcrimes and atrocities, that'll make the population want to surrender!
Why don't you ask the Germans how well that worked in Russia, I heard the local populace loved them.
@@nuggs4snuggs516 well, initially local population (especially in recently incorporated territories) was usually quite receptive to German occupation, but atrocities often made locals to prefer "red plague" over "black death"
There is already a “proof of concept” battle from history to examine regarding the bombing of an enemy into surrender - it’s now known as “The Battle of Britain” and it completely failed.
Any orbital battle fleet would have to do far more than just “bombard until surrender” - it would require a means of cutting off enemy supplies, disabling any ground-based defenses they have, be careful not to harm vital infrastructure in the planet (assuming the goal is to take a functioning planet - the resource cost of rebuilding infrastructure can be very high), etc... This would require at least some form of ground assault at key points on the planet.
You just fail to grasp what space battle is, and what it actually means. When you are bombing a planet you are not dropping 50 kg bombs, you don't need to cut supplies, you just need 5 minutes of space superiority and then just drop a 10km asteroid on the planet.
That costs nothing, and just destroy the planet. The simple fact than any space ship could push a 10km asteroid toward your planet should be a threat enough to surrender. Because it's just a cataclysm close to what destroyed the fucking dinosaurs. You don't even need to aim. You don't need logistics. Just a spare engine to push the damn rock toward the planet and let gravity do the rest.
You don't need a functioning planet. You just need one exemple and everyone will surrender in the whole galaxy. "Surrender, or be changed to molten rock". And everyone would be using that tactic, because there's no reason not to.
@@ZheinPasRoux Just one problem here - turning a planet to molten rock can backfire horribly from a political standpoint: demonstrating a willingness to do such a thing can easily motivate other worlds to form alliances against you to avoid becoming the next Alderaan.
I also think that it's unlikely that when civilisations are at the point of "space warfare" that they wouldn't have developed technologies or strategies to deal with this. The day after the first successful flight of man was the first day of development of the anti-aircraft gun...
@@ZheinPasRoux Extinction-scale asteroids wouldn't be used for the same reason megaton bombs don't get used, except destroying worlds would be even more so political suicide.
@@FrankCastle-tq9bz The rest of the world has not joined together against the united states when they used an atomic bomb on japan. They built their own.
And you expect that there will be anything else than using rocks from space to obliterate anything that stand on the ground ? That they will instead make some d-day-starthip-trooper landing style to take a planet ? We didn't bother with japan. We won't bother in case of interplanetary war.
Nobody will. Because just the idea of planetary invasion is a logistical nightmare 10000 times of what is a naval invasion.
Yeah but Halo and Star Wars often have situations that rule out planetary bombardment. Such as with planetary deflector shields, or the battles taking place on a holy installation of religious importance.
Correct. More often than not, the planetary invasions in Star Wars aren't to try and take over an entire planet, it's specifically targeting a vital area on that planet that makes the planet valuable for something. Hoth was a land battle because the Rebels put of a shield that was strong enough to protect against bombardment long enough to let them escape. During the Clone Wars most ground battles were to target certain areas like destroying a factory or wiping out a certain base, etc. In Halo the Covenant would just glass the world if there was nothing of value there for them, but if there was a Forerunner artifact detected, they'd launch an invasion to recover it, or to land troops to knock out ground-side generators for the orbital defenses, things like that.
Thats the challenge of writers, to reasonably justify their stories advents with in-universe lore.
Also in the clone wars, the whole purpose on either side was to win the people over to your cause, which can't really be done if your blowing them to kingdom come. Also most populated planets in star wars have planetary shields that prevent that sort of thing
Please note he said realistic sci fi. If in my universe there is a god of ani bombardment who deletes all attempts at planetary bombardment, then yes in my universe you have to have planetary invasions. If you had a BS invincibility shield you would use it every ware not just at strategic plot points. If their is something important enough that we can't drop 100 tzar bombas on it, ok we glass the other 99.9% of the planet then send down like 500 guys to clean up the 2 square miles we did not destroy.
@@taloob493 Shields won't last forever.
So, here's the thing.
I've heard of something called "The Garden World Protocol". Essentially, green worlds are somewhat...expensively rare.
Essentially, ground assault is required because terraforming is expensive as hell, and anyone that would DARE to glass a garden world would find themselves suddenly facing off against anyone else in the star-faring level.
If:
A: I'm on a garden world
AND
B: You can't (or rather, won't due to treaties) glass my world
THEN
You can only assault via ground
OR
Blockade.
That's it. Any setting that has any variation of the "Garden World Protocol" WILL, therefore, include ground-based combat. Guaranteed.
Unless the garden world, is no better to an alien races eyes than a gas giant or barren rock would be to us. If the aliens needed spacesuits just to be able to breath in the atmosphere of what would be a garden world to us, then I think they would be far less likely to care about orbital bombardment or even in the worst case terraforming the planet while it is still inhabited.
I feel Warhammer 40K does this concept extremely well because every planetary war lasts years, with reinforcements being constantly brought in by the attacking force, and having a space naval advantage as an extremely important factor in who wins or loses.
40K is completely unrealistic in almost every regard. With the exception of the Tyranid and Necron, none of the other governments in 40K are even remotely feasible, especially chaos and the Impirium. functionally they would collapse under the weight of their own stupidity and ineptness. Chaos would be too busy killing themselves to get anything accomplished and the totalitarian impirium would just collapse due to tactical stupidity.
Example, Impirium captain of a battleship deviates from standard tactics in their codex. Wins said battle, then after the battle he is executed by a commisar for doing so. Sorry, does not work.
@@evilspoon5280 my friend, thats the whole point of 40K
the imperium of man is in constant collaps for 10k years now.
but its sheer vastness keeps it from collapsing liek the roman empire did.
i recommend you read into factions that actually work. like the Tau for example.
one of two factions in 40k that actually thrives in the setting.
That’s what they say in the indexes, but all the books have fleets and armies annihilating vast amounts of ancient machines just to drive up the drama.
@@evilspoon5280 actually it does works because the entire imperium is run by the death cult of the ecclesiarchy.
@@evilspoon5280 The Templin Institut: Imperium of Man | Warhammer 40,000 "the imperium carries on only through the weight of it’s one immensity ever expanding and ever declining" a perfekt explanation
No.
Firstly, we have PLENTY of examples in history, where "parking large ship at an island" does not make it surrender. Whole War in the Pacific is exactly that scenario.
Second, well equipped land based fortifications have a total edge against space ship. Ship is always a compromise between engines, tanks, size, armor, weapons, energy etc. You can put only so much stuff inside space-faring vessel. This is not an issue with land based installation. You can have literally thousands of missiles, guns of any caliber you can produce, infinite energy, all protected by vast territory and/or whatever amount of armor plating you can build. And this would be way cheaper than building a fleet. If your IP has shields, any shield generator on planet would be way more powerful than one on a ship.
Third, what kind of planet are we talking about here? It might be an ecomenopolis - than it would be definitely unassailable, like fortresses of the past. It would be much easier to starve it to submission by system-wide blockade. It could be a small colony with a couple of cities - then assault is completely feasible. You don't need to hunt every last partisan in the wilds - just take over key points and manpower concentrations, and that's it. There would be partisan action for years, but it's expected, and you are effectively holding the planet. This would be no different to invading a nation on Earth IRL. The planet might be uninhabitable apart from sealed habitats with controlled environments. In such case, you won't even have partisans after rooting out the resistance. And a multitude of other options.
The reason for Mars being unable to invade Earth in Expanse is because number of troops Mars can lift and drop to Earth is pathetic, both in comparison to Earth's population, and it's military.
This is not the case in every possible scenario.
Good points, but i think video addresses the concept of FULL BLOWN EARTH-LIKE WORLD TOTAL CAPTURE more then else.
Alejandro Ochagavía If you're going to sling asteroids at it, destroying their manpower, industry, and infrastructure (obviously meaning none of that matters to you), why not just... bypass the world? If nothing on it matters to you, why even try securing it via what one could amount to genocide and risk the PR disaster when you can just avoid it?
Another reason for Mars being unable to invade Earth in Expanse is that Martian troops would find it difficult to function in Earth's higher gravity without some mechanical aid.
@@rare_kumiko those are some good points, which I'd like to discuss.
First point, re: threat of bombardment. While this theoretically could work, for an isolated planet (example - modern day Earth vs alien threat), this might not be politically possible. If planet is a part of nation, and fleet is part of other nation, then MAD doctrine would probably exist, and that would severely undermine legitimacy of the threat. Even if one of the opposing nations aren't able to destroy a planet in return, there might be third parties, which won't look kindly to such exchange. I mean, even though USA is a nuclear superpower, every conflict since WW2, including ones that arguably failed, was conducted with conventional weapons.
Second point. While powered asteroids is of course a valid threat, especially in "low-tech" sci-fi, it's not like it's an ultimate weapon. If tech levels are equal, a man-made weapon would be more effective than just a rock, albeit more expensive. An accelerated asteroid would fly at still (relatively) low speed and predictable trajectory. It can be intercepted, diverted or destroyed even via conventional weaponry.
And this whole process with fleet capturing rocks, attaching engines or towing them and planetary defense trying to intercept them would look very much like a typical siege scenario. It might take a long time, time which attacker might not have.
And I'm not saying that planet is undefeatable - far from it, it is, like you said, an object that can't maneuver. However, if you move your fleet out of planetary defense range, you are also moving away from effective range of your fleet's weapons. The further you are, the more time there would be for ground defense to intercept whatever you throw at it, and, with advanced enough technology, even railgun shots would be intercepted.
Again, it all boils down to scenario. Powerfull enough fleet might threated weak enough planet into submission without a fight, but in different scenario, landing a couple million boots on the ground might be the only available solution.
A land fortification is useless against even the smallest space ship. your fortification can't doge my ship can. Let say your fort has 10^10000 missile launchers and infinite ammo for all of them. I have 1 missile. your missiles have 200X my missiles range. I sit out of range of your missiles and fire. I will hit you because you are fixed to the plaint which is moving in orbit. a high schooler can calculate the ballistic trajectory for my missile. If you fire back I wait till your missiles go ballistic and then just move a bit. It would be the same for any weapon you care to name.
Forts only work when the enemy has to get in range of the fort to take it out. On earth this works because of air resistance slowing down your missile ect meaning if the two sides have similar range. but in space if I am willing to wait enough I can launch my weapon from another galaxy and still hit your fort.
Spacedock: Bombing the planet would make the enemy surrender
Principality of Zeon: *Well yes, but actually no*
When you wipe out half of your enemy's population but you still lost
They gave up too early and didn't go to far because they wanted to 'save' the planet. No Earth. No Earth Federation.
@@pll3827 Yeah cause all the Sides love the Zeons... :P NOT ;)
@@edwardbarillas7263 Zeon also lost half their population.
@@pll3827 untill Chars Rebellion, there he tried to create a planetary exinction event .
The problem is, Spacedock MacNamara, that bombing a country to the ground isn't necessarily going to make them surrender. The USA learned this the hard way when dealing with Vietnam during the mass bombing campaign they conducted. A ground invasion may be unrealistic (as in invading literally every square inch), but as you said, the point is to make them surrender, and the best way to do that is to take strategic locations on that planet through invading them and preventing them from being used by those who want to hide within them. Bombardment simply isn't going to win the war unless your idea of bombardment is to turn everything into radioactive slag and render the planet entirely uninhabitable for carbon based life. Ground invasions don't have to be as over the top as other sci-fi make them, but they're definitely going to be necessary to force surrenders by capturing capital cities, production centres, and other important regions for the function of the planet's economy and politics. Siege tactics work for towns and cities because they can't produce their own food on a large enough scale to sustain them, it doesn't work on a planet which has the entirety of that planet's agriculture still under their control. And if that planet's resources and people are important, then unfortunately bombing them until the planet is completely barren isn't going to be an option either. While I agree with some of the points made, that bombing can be useful, bombing is only so useful as it can support ground forces for the purpose of conquest. The Expanse example of yours makes partial sense, but nations (or rather multinational state in the case of the UN (still don't know how it hasn't collapsed because most nations hate eachother and longterm unity between the powers through just 'agreeing to be friends' is generally impossible so long as there is a continued rivalry between varying powers (oh right yeah there's also the matter of non-power nations that were subjugated, is the UN expecting them to not resist?)) not having dedicated military ground forces (especially the UN, as they'd have to subject their colonized nations on Earth to harsh occupation in a lot of cases, considering the UN in the Expanse is a very US-centric polity) is a very bad idea, and Mars should definitely be able to comprehend the simple idea that important places should be taken, and the unimportant ones will surrender. Anyway yeah the argument has gotten off point, but regardless, planetary invasions are still definitely a strategy that could be used for forces in a way that would deal with important cities as opposed to having to invade everywhere on the planet.
kill me
Have you read the books? Spoilers...
When dealing with space warfare, you don't need to bomb the entire planet to bring civilization to a halt. Let orbital mechanics, K = 1/2mv^2, and some rocks do it for you lol. Sure, bombing nam didn't work, but an extinction level event is quite enough to make people surrender. Marco's plan could have worked if only he coordinated his strikes on the Martian convoy better, and if he wasn't carried away by the roci in BA, which left him hanging out to dry (which was Duarte's plan all along). That being said, he never wanted to set foot on Earth, but only remove it from the equation for good. All in all, just throw rocks man!
*Shoots you in The face*
@@K.Gthealmighty "The USA learned this the hard way when dealing with Vietnam during the mass bombing campaign they conducted" and ignored the lesson of WW2: neither the Brits nor the Germans surrendered.
From space you have lots of options. If you just want to eliminate the threat then bomb all their big industry. They now can't launch any sort of space ship and will not be able to for years. From a big space war perspective they might as well not exist now. Or if they NEED to go down sling shot a huge asteroid into them. The Vietnamize would have surrendered/ stopped existing if the US had dropped a few thousand nukes on them.
The video assumes a couple of things that would not necessarily be true in many situations.
1. The attacking fleet would be willing to bomb civilians. There is certainly precedent for all out total war but there is also precedent for less serious wars. And in those the attacking fleet would likely not bombard cities even if just so that the enemy doesn´t do the same to them. It´s also possible the attacking force has to worry about public opinion if they start nuking planets.
2. Ground based defenses. Ships in space are like thermal beacons. There is likely no real stealth in space contrary to what even settings like the Expanse depict.That however is not true for ground based installations. They can disperse heat into the ground and be basically impossible to detect from space. A camouflaged railgun with radar deflective covering could launch missiles into space all day and recieve and endless supply from the industrial capacity of the planet. The only way to deal with such installations might be landing ground troops. Or carpet bombing the entire planet with WMDs/crashing an asteroid into it but for that case see point 1 for one but also the attacking fleet could very well not have the capacity for this.
3. Depending on how stretched supply lines are a continued siege as implied in the video may simply not be possible. Even if the attacking fleet was willing to bomb cities and had the capacity to overwhelm ground-space defenses to achieve this they might not have the capacity to outlast said defenses. A planet worth taking would have a quasi infinite supply of ammo and even material to repair installations or even build new ones. Same would not be the case for the fleet or it would likely be very costly at least to continually supply it. It may be much easier to at least invade part of the planet and use it´s industry to resupply the fleet so that it can siege the rest.
If you invade a planet, those streets are gonna run red with the blood of civilians. Which makes the point about bombarding civilians moot. And as far as planet side defenses, you would have to deal with that when launching an invasion as well, along with every kind of defense that can't reach space, but can reach your atmospheric troops.
@@shorewall Compared to nuking the planet a lot less civilians will die in a land invasion. There will certainly be collateral damage but also a lot less than you might think as weaponry is bound to be much more precise in the future.
And of course you´d still have to deal with defenses. But ground vs ground isn´t slanted against the attacker. Ground vs space very much is.
1 assumes the invaders care about civilian casualties. If the invaders are a different species, it will be much easier to take the planet by making the natives extinct. 2 The ground defenses better have long range, when a ship can go anywhere in the solar system grab a big rock and send it on an impact trajectory to the planet, no nukes needed. Again big enough to make the natives extinct. 3 if they came from another star, depending on how long it takes to get there, they may indeed have enough supplies to last long enough for the natives to die out. Or they could drop a few big rocks, leave and come back in a couple decades once the dust settles. Repeat if there are survivors.
@@chrisbrantley6120 I don´t see humans just genociding an alien species unless they are Space Nazis which I doubt. And logically same would apply to Alien Species. I highly doubt pretty much any species capable of interstellar travel would be so primitive as to just kill billions of people. Even if they are they are they still have to slug it out with ground defenses.
Any advanced planet could easily intercept incoming asteroids. Shit we will probably develop the ability to be able to intercept just about any asteroid within the next 50 years or so. For a civilization capable of interstellar travel it would be an every day task.
No fleet would could carry even remotely enough supplies to outlast a planet worth of resources unless it´s stupidly large but then we aren´t talking about a remotely equal fight.
@@XMysticHerox We'd genocide a planet of Xenomorphs without a moment's hesitation.
Sieges/blockades are undoubtedly effective in contemporary warfare, but would they still work on interplanetary scales? If the planet has the capacity to sustain itself with food, energy, and other vital resources, then they might be able to wait out an enemy force in orbit, depending on that enemy's supply lines and rations.
Moreover, if it's an industrialised world, they might be able to build and then deploy capital weapons like long-range missiles, or something like planetary defence cannons.
While I agree that the idea of literal legions of Space Marines falling from the sky in drop-pods isn't optimal (ignoring that in 40K the rule of cool wins out over heretical logic), I think that the burden of urgency will often be on the attacker. Unless, of course, they're willing to bombard it into a state of complete ruin.
Yes burden of urgency. What if the planet has HVT (High Value Target) hidden/hold hostage somewhere? Then they can't afford to bombard nor wait out a siege. Heck, the entire planet itself could be HVT.
Yeah! A planet's too big too conquer, but by the same measure, it'd be easy to conceal almost anything of value, like a person or information.
Essentially, it's a case of why the planet needs conquering versus being outright destroyed: if the planet isn't necessary, then I'd guess the assaulting forces would choose to bombard everything into submission or annihilation - but, if there's necessity to keeping the world inhabited/habitable, then some kind of ground attack would be required. It might be more clandestine, or maybe large deployments against selected targets, but I doubt that space supremacy alone would be enough.
well you can deny that sustenance if you hold the orbit - unless some sort of proper planetary scale fortification (like shields) is available to defenders, you can just bombard the fields where they grow their food. And if they started building weapons to assail you, you could still just as well bomb these before they can be fired
now if they had such weaponry to threaten your fleet on the orbit before your arrival it would be more messy :)
The only risk to attacking farmland, etc. would be how quickly the invaders could rejuvenate and restore it for their own use, either as colonisers, or occupiers.
Something I learnt from the Mass Effect codex which might be relevant, is the notion of placing defending forces or positions near or obscuring things of potential value to the attackers. This essentially means any successful assault would end up costing the attackers things of worth to them. An example might be placing defence weapons in a spaceport, so any direct bombardment would deny an occupying force that resource.
@@mikeyjones5901 Why would a planet be too big to conquer? By that logic nations would be too big to conquer too but that is clearly not the case.
I agree with almost everything here, but the Battle of Hoth in Star Wars was a ground battle because of a shield that the Rebels deployed that could defend against the planetary fleet. In that situation, planetary, or even localized, shields would change this dynamic.
It's a raid not an invasion - which makes complete sense as something that would continue to exist
@@eoinchadwick9381 I agree. Hoth was never an invasion. Once the rebels knew they were found they immediately started to evacuate. They only fought to hold out long enough to get everyone on ships and out of the system. Remember that the imperial commander hyperjumped to close and was detected early. If he had done his job right he would have probably captured most of the rebels. The only reason the imperials didn't just bomb them out of existence is they wanted prisoners to question and intel from rebel systems in the base. If they just wanted them dead they would of came in with six star destroyer's and bombarded the base from orbit till it was just loose atoms. Shields only mattered in this case because it held up landing troops closer to the rebel base.
Besides, the Empire wanted some high-ranking rebels so they could find other Rebel cells. And of course Vader wanted Luke.
@@eoinchadwick9381 well in a senario where shield generators are numerous then an invasion force is needed. Give me a number of what you think the requirements are for invasion, I cant win an argument over vague terms.
Not really since Shields can be forced to collapse with enough fire. No matter the reactor power the Rebels had, if the ISD´s in orbit decided to bombard the Shields with their impressive weapons array it would have collapsed at some point. Then the Bombardment just continues until the Base and the surrounding area are reduced to rubble. ISD´s are laid out for a strategy called "Base Delta Zero" in which a Fleet of them go into formation around the planet and systematically bombard the entire surface until all that is left is a burning rock unable to sustain life. Not to mention the Superstardestroyer, that one can Base Delta Zero a planet all by himself in a matter of days and nothing withstands that sort of firepower.
A settlement underneath an ocean would be almost immune to kinetic bombardment. Worlds with entire surfaces of liquid are somewhat common, and without controlling the ocean floor you can harvest no resources. You would be forced to land and fight undersea, since even bombs and torpedoes can be intercepted since all movement is slowed by water.
A safer spot could be deep within the crust even the low parts of a planet's mantle. Convention bombardment simply can't go that far. And you would have to get asteroids bigger than the dino killer.
(Which you would realistically rather use for raw resources.)
ua-cam.com/video/jZQP2oNDkAM/v-deo.html
"Everyone has a self-preservation instinct"
Tell that to Cadia, which broke before the guard did
or the United Kingdom.
@@bkane573 The UK was never at risk of being completely obliterated by a few dozen bombers. Not only that it's not like they were in the war with no allies, and no capacity to resist.
@@insidious7329 At one point they were in a War with No Allies. There was The British Empire and there Was Nazi Germany. Everyone else had been conquered, or like the French Empire, just rolled over.
...would you surrender to CHAOS?
Death Korps of Krieg has entered the chat.
"If there's a giant battleship parked next to the island, none of the potential outcomes involve an invasion of the island."
*Glances at Iwo Jima and Okinawa*
came here for this.
Actually, in the unlikely scenario that the planet and the fleet are equally matched, the fleet is at a massive disadvantage. The ships must carry their armor, weapons, energy, and ammo. The planet, however, will never run out of any of that and can have more of it bc it doesn't need to carry it.
I feel like someone should point out that planetary bombardment may or may not be a bit of a war crime
Valid, but that's only if there's a galactic governing body like the UN and even they are kinda just a paper tiger. A valid point, regardless though.
@@FilmGuy7000 Or if your own people are disgusted by such actions or is illegal.
@@TheCoolCucumber WW2 was unlike most modern wars. There could very well be an all out war like WW2 in space but certainly not every war or even most would be like that. Simply because those wars will end with either both sides fucked or one winning decisively so in the aftermath it might take a while until there even is another side to fight a total war against.
unfortunately, the winners in war, determines who gets charged with what crimes.
"We have treaties..."
"Ink on a page!"
This assumes conventional technology of course. If you can put something like planetary shields as a common technology, then ground battles can be worked in, albeit with different objectives
Wasn't that the whole point of the ground invasion in Empire Strikes Back? It was about disabling the shield generator and capturing the princess.
@@draeh well, her and the rest of the rebel leadership, as well as Luke Skywalker
Even camouflaged railguns could make sustained planetary bombardment impossible. No need for shields. Ships are relatively easy to spot. Hidden ground installations on the other hand would be extremely difficult to spot. Nevermind that the planet would have a quasi infinite supply of ammo and material to build new installations as the battle continues.
I actually have the complete opposite opinion to Spacedock. I think in a realistic setting a attacking fleet would have to strike hard and fast at a specific point of the planet to land ground troops. That is if it´s a highly developed planet. A prolonged slug fest with ground defenses would be suicide.
MysticHero the problem there is that space doesn’t really have a range limit, whereas railguns do, they could simply bombard from out of range, it might be less precise, (although that’s by no means certain) but railguns only serve as a minor inconvenience
Spacedock: Conquering an entire populated planet is literally impossible
Me: Challenge excepted
EDIT: Also, am I the only one who thinks "World Anvil" would be the name of some sort of gargantuan ancient spaceship/space station that is discovered to be able to seed worlds with sentient life, like the Precursors in Halo?
Mankind in the future engaged in a bloody war across the stars: Challenge accepted
This is 2020, surely you mean challenge expected....
I feel like this isn't really true. Let me explain:
1) treath of bombing to force surrender, or even bomb them until surrender:
Both Japan and Germany (and to a lesser extent Great Britain) give enough proof why this is a beautiful myth. Only nuclear bombing could achieve this (perhaps) and that brings me to the next point.
2) If you want the planet, you don't destroy the planet. Yeah, you could force them to surrender by dropping enough nukes to create twenty godzilla's. And then you made the planet useless, great resource management.
3) Massive surface area: Good point, but we can take photographs from space with a resolution of one meter, and those are not even spy satellites. Surely a fleet would have much better sensors, capable of recognising a human being, or a human being with guns. And they'd have a much larger field of view (this wouldn't work on tropical worlds or heavely forested onces)
4) "it doesn't matter if you're 500 guys with rifles when there is a giant battleship parked next to the island" The entire "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific was literally that and Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of WW2.
While bombing surely has its place, it needs to be used to destroy important infrastructure like dams, factories, bridges, canals,... and the invasion force should be landed on small, key area's. It is very much like a siege of a castle, you can utterly destroy it and then it won't be of any use ever again or you can try to wait it out, hoping no relief force shows up, or you can try to storm it. By taking farmland you can starve them out, by taking important trade choke points you can starve them out. It doesn't matter how you turn it, unless you are willing to destroy the planet, you need to invade or need to have an insane amount of patience.
Agreed. I get the impression that this was mostly a rant against the Starship Troopers movie, where they make All The Mistakes and play it off as heroism.
To paraphrase the starship troopers book, you can nuke a planet till it glows but now no one has the planet so the only way to take a planet is to kick the other guy off it and that's why you have the MI. Do you want to know more?
""it doesn't matter if you're 500 guys with rifles when there is a giant battleship parked next to the island" The entire "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific was literally that and Okinawa was the bloodiest battle of WW2."
The difference here being that WW2 battleships couldn't just destroy all japanese installations from the sea, and a huge battleship next to the planet would have it a tad easier.
And as soon as they could drop nukes they did that to avoid having to try to conquer "traditionally" any more islands.
"If you want the planet, you don't destroy the planet. Yeah, you could force them to surrender by dropping enough nukes to create twenty godzilla's. And then you made the planet useless, great resource management."
No need for nukes. nukes are expensive, and you need to deal with weird consequences of their usage. You are already holding orbit. Couple of tungsten rods is all you will need. Don't need to even fire them. Just drop them. Untill some sort of planetary energy shield becomes a thing there will be no countermeasure to that. And when the rod actually impacts the ground the force it will deliver will be greater than most of nukes. And you don't even need proper fleet to mantain that threat over the planet - you could just scatter a network of satelites with rods all around the planet, and govern it from orbit. Someone try to take one down? Drop a rod on next city. Bonus points if your satelites come equipped with point defence to actually fend off missiles coming from the planet.
You have destroyed couple of bigger cities, rest shat their pants over concept of doom they cannot stop and surrender. No radiation, no resources that are actually lost. No need for invasion.
@@MehrumesDagon but see, that is exactly the point. You don't need to "destroy a few big cities" that is exactly what we did. Germany got hit with everything we had. We dropped napalm bombs on cities where many buildings were made from wood in japan. They didn't surrender because of it. Yes, you can drop asteriods. And yes, they can do more damage than nukes. It could work. And what then? Will they surrender? No. Unless you show zero mercy and the population realises you are perfectly fine with wiping them out they won't surrender. And if you do that, the entire universe would jump on you. Because you just wiped out billions of creatures only to try to make them surrender. In the end. The best thing, both for the people on the ground and for your own pr, it is better to launch an invasion alongside tactical bombardment.
And the battleships... I'd like to see a battleship from space trying to destroy a bunker complex embedded in a mountainrange. Exactly the same as a bunkercomplex on an island threathend by bombers and battleships, the only diffrence is scale.
@@hmswarspite1064 well for the rest of the universe to turn on you, they would need to know about it.
issue with germany is that the bombings were not the kind that would deliver the point on "impending doom and you can do nothing about it"
japan got hit with two nukes and they did surrender - because it did deliver the point.
as for drilling through mountain bunkers - well it would highly depend on tech available tothat battleship.
that being said in the meantime I've started debating the topic with a friend,and he raised a very interesting point in here.
point of "why do you need to conquer that planet in the first place", resources available planetside for our current knowledge are laughtable compared to the rest of the solar system. So if they were posing threat to your operations you can just glass the planet and you won't loose anything of value.
and the answer to that question would pretty much dictate what's feasible and what is not feasible :)
The moment I saw the title, I knew this was going to be like when the Templin Institute tried to debunk why the idea of a mega-corp government wouldn't work. Five to fifteen minutes of the speaker making a statement that only shows HUGE gaps in their knowledge. With Templin, it was a dubious understanding of economics as well as the history and organization of the East Indian Trading Company. Here... we have the assumption that everyone is making logical, rational decisions in an activity where emotional extremes run hot and people let patriotism and nationalism take over.
While yes, space warfare would likely see a much greater emphasis on smaller units of elite SPESS MAHRINES performing surgical attacks and commando raids, the idea that ground armies designed for large scale engagements would become obsolete is inaccurate and shows the speaker suffers from the "sci-fi writers have no sense of scale" problem. If you have an empire that spans multiple planets, then raising an invasion force of a billion soldiers is not a huge problem if each of those planets has the same number of people as modern day Earth.
I have not read the Expanse series but from what I picked up second-hand, that sounds like a bad example. Mars is still in the process of being terraformed (which limits the amount of habitable space available on Mars) while Earth still has the lion's share of the Solar System's population. And if the author built the Expanse universe to be like the last age of colonialism, Earth has virtually all of the manufacturing assets of note as well (meaning they can drown the other planets in ships as well as bodies if they desire.) The example you gave sounds more like a commentary on propaganda that ignores reality (commentary that's still quite relevant these days) then on the impracticality of planetary invasions in general.
And as others have noted, your statement doesn't take into account things like planetary defenses (such as missile silos and giant rail guns for destroying enemy ships in orbit) or that there might be planet-side assets that the invader does not want to destroy. OR maybe the invader only wants to destroy military assets and deploys ground forces because orbital bombardments may be too imprecise? For example, what if the Evil Galactic Empire (TM) decides to put a hospital for maimed children next to their biggest garrison on the planet? If you hit the garrison from orbit, you might destroy the hospital. Which regardless of your moral compass would be something the Empire's propagandists will RUN with and use to whip up the rest of the Empire's people into a frenzy.
I agree.
World history is against your assertion of "If you have a Battleship parked of an island, you don't need to invade." Guess you never read WWII pacific history.
ugh, all of his examples worked against his argument!
you could have just put history.
Except there is a large difference between threatening an entrenched military force and threatening a planet with typically a much larger percentage of civilian population. Additionally, there is a large difference between the US which was trying to accelerate a victory by rapidly island hopping until they were in flight range of bombing Tokyo as well as cutting off shipments of oil from Indonesia, thus they decided to invade instead of blockading and starving them out. As opposed to any presumed space navy which would find it far faster to sit back and bomb a planet to oblivion rather than try to invade and occupy it. Additionally everyone here seems to forget that in this analogy, the US was trying to work its way towards the Japanese mainland. If a nation had ships in orbit, they practically have free range to threaten wherever they want.
@@FoxDren You mean like sieges, which I believe have been a fairly effective tactic used over the last couple of thousand years?
@@Modolvr not comparable, a besieged location usually isn't self sustaining.
It’s one thing I like in 40k, a bunch of the conquests in the universe start with orbital bombardment or the threat thereof, but even when there does need to be an invasion, the operation takes months to years of grueling attrition, not the days to weeks we see in things like Star Wars. And it’s usually just to accomplish one specific objective before letting garrison troops handle the rest.
And to be fair, in OT any ground combat was fighting retreat, commando raid or boarding action (not counting policing actions like on Tatooine in ANH). TPM was at first occupation duty (and offscreen rolling over remaining resistance) and in latter part guerilla fights. In AOTC separatists were pretty much with pants down (they were already loading into the ships) and later in TCW cartoon Geonosis was retaken by CIS when Republic pulled off most assets to fight the war. Kashyyk was the matter of high value targets, relatively low population and possibly simultaneous battles on and over planet, so both sides could not use bombardment without exposing themselves
@@Jfk2Mr and then in the ST we see what happens without ground defences. You get orbital bombardment
@@OrDuneStudios well, I usually reject ST in thought process as it is contradictory mess - not only with other trilogies as well as with other films of said trilogy.
But yeah, rebels 2.0 base got nuked from orbit because it had no theater/planetary shield, but one has to admit that they were more or less packed to leave
Stellaris: I'm gonna pretend I didn't see this
*laughs in colossus*
I mean you can bombard a planet to rubble and kill most or even all of a planetary population in Stellaris.
It's my favorite method to play Fanatic Purifiers, choose Tomb World origin and use percussive terraforming to conquer the world.
@spacedock as Sun Tzu says, it is better to take the enemy whole and intact. So that you can utilize what it is your capturing. So to that end, launching invasions to do the same thing as your bombing would, and force the enemy to surrender but without dealing as much damage to the infrastructure that the bombing would, as a method would be possibly/probably more efficient. Using an invasion force to convince the enemy to surrender would be more ideal then deleting whole cities of usable resources including manpower.
Yes apparently he hasn't read Sun Tzu. Lol
Well, here's the thing. Any substantial body is far more resistant to orbital bombardment than most people assume. Sure, you can theoretically sterilize the surface. But with hydroponics, nuclear and geothermal power, deep underground tunnel networks and infrastructure, etc., its not entirely unreasonable in a sci-fi setting to have the planet break before the garrison does. Depending on the capabilities of the tech in the setting, you could even have them capable of blasting ships out of the sky.
We even have a very light version of this IRL, with Cheyenne mountain and other nuke-hardened command bunkers.
Cheyenne Mountain???
*Stargate theme intensifies.
If the enemy is so deep underground that orbital bombardment can't touch them, they can't touch anything on the surface either. So you can just collapse the entrances and set down your own facilities while leaving a minor garrison behind. Repeat step 1 any time they try and poke their heads out.
@@thepsion5 I mean sure but the enemy will know that, and make an intricate system of tunnels. What you thought was an entrance was actually a decoy and now your bases are being nuked from within, your water poisoned or the ground underneath collapse on you.
What Im saying is that a competent army could have really good odds in the wait for reinforcements. Plus, what if most of the planet already lives underground? We are assuming a habitable planet but invasions could happen in places that are so well built against asteroid hits and radiarion that they are immune to bombardment.
@@robertoguzman6556 The intricate system of tunnels would be collapsed by a very brief bombardment, and you can't build new ones without alerting seismometers and ground-penetrating radar.
It's like a castle siege - very easy to lock people in, and very hard for the defenders to do meaningful damage to the attacking force.
Also ground based railguns would be difficult to detect and a serious threat to orbiting vessels. The assumption that the attacking fleet could bombard with impunity just because they overwhelmed space defenses is utterly ridiculous.
You should study Iwo Jima. You should also study any land war ever fought. WWII is a great example. If you are an interstellar species, you can presumably bring a lot of troops to the fight.
wasn't it kind of explained in Star wars, that during the battle of Hoth they had a massive planetary shield preventing the bombardment of the actual base? so the empire had to land elsewhere on the planet and invade from the ground?
Ya I guess he didn't see that one lol
*Objection*
There is one concept that is quite neglected in most sci-fi: planetary weapons. It is much easier and cheaper to construct and maintain surface weapons that can shoot on anything that gets near the planet or attempts to bombard the surface. Even in historical context, coastal artillery was quite common form of defense against approaching enemy fleet.
There are few shots in the video where it actually makes sense to launch the ground invasion. The Klendathu invasion was a catastrophic failure, but it shows that you cannot just hover above the planet and shoot on any place that has trees and houses still standing. The ground force on Klendathu was quite successful at destroying the Plasma Bugs, so there is still some potential for (at least limited) ground strikes in case the ships or air force are not able to strike those objectives, or would suffer high losses in attempt to do so.
The battle of Hoth is another example of the threat the planetary ion cannons can be. Any populated planet with much larger garrison than of the Rebel Alliance on Hoth would be able to set up much greater defense network across the planet. The Galactic Empire had to land armored vehicles to break through the Rebel's defenses, disable their shield, and allow for borbandment of the Echo base from space. The Empire still could afford to deploy the fleet and blockade the planet, because despite the fact the Rebels could disable any ship on orbit, they likely couldn't exploit it and destroy the Imperial star destroyers, because they were missing necessary means, such as bombers, capital ships, and other surface-to-space weapons.
If the planetary cannons were part of the game, any invasion would be much more difficult to handle. Both sides would have to decide what their approach is going to be, but there will always be high losses, whether it be ships destroyed while bombarding the planet, or whole ground divisions wiped out. As I noted, ground invasions would still make sense in striking critical objectives, such as the planetary cannons, to secure the space around the planet and allow for the fleet to deploy and bombard however it desires. The defenders, on the other hand, would have to decide whether they would activate their weapons and expose their position, making them easier to target by the next invasion wave.
This is how planetary invasion is handled in Honor Harrington. Space-based warships are so much more overwhelmingly powerful vs ground units that planetary control is determined entirely in space.
If u like HH...check out her 'lol sis' Kris Longknife
Hoth had a giant shield stopping the bombardment. Dune actually has a reason for this since bombardment was stopped by treaties and had structured warfare. With the common people just wanting to survive
Its interesting you picked the Battle of Hoth, where there actually was a reason for them not to just bombard the rebel base, in that Vader was interested in taking specific captives alive. If you need to capture a specific person or location unharmed, thats where the marines become relevant.
General Vears also reported that the Rebel Base had a shield that could withstand an orbital bombardment.
I would argue a planetary bombardment is a planetary invasion. And much like you stated, if you bomb a target into submission then it will submit. Which will allow you to land troops on the planet, and if some resist (as they will inevitably do) then you can fight them - you're not fighting the planet, just isolated countries or cities.
You should check out this wacky police action called Vietnam ;)
So basically the Reaper invasions of Mass Effect are realistic. They don’t use infantry units or have a military force, they’re just massive ships with legs and they can use the native people of planets as canon fodder.
Edit: their methods of invasion are realistic; their goal to destroy all life is irrelevant to that point. Conquer or exterminate, the methods are realistic all the same. Why the two respectable individuals in the comment thread thought they needed to tell me Reaper goals is oblivious to me when it is completely irrelevant to that point.
The Reapers try to kill off intelligent, space faring life while leaving the biosphere of planets as untouched as possible - they aren't trying to take over a planet. As soon as everyone is dead and all traces of civilisations are wiped out, they leave.
Assassiiinuss true but that’s not the point I was making, the principle is the same. There is incentive for in-atmosphere battles, starships with foldable legs. That’s some War of the Worlds stuff right there. Just equip them with some Iron Mans then BAM!
Totally wrong, even the Reapers use ground units instead of only using their ships to bombard the planet, since they are not invading to conquer, they invade to anihilate the life on that planet.
Nilus Merakas not the point. Not relevant. I did not need a refresher of Reaper goals. To exterminate or conquer; their methods of invasion are realistic all the same. Why do their goals matter to this point? They don’t.
Well, i suppose it depends on the planets population, if there is just some cities, it's probably possible to invade it, it would be like invading a small country. Despite that you make a lot of good points.
Interestingly, in the Starship Troopers novel the mobile infantry was usually employed as a smash and run force. Drop _individually_ from orbit with enough firepower and numbers to make a fearsome show of force, secure an LZ for extraction than cause as much havoc as you can before the situation becomes untenable then pull out. The goal is to strike a specific instillation that is not particularly viable as an orbital bombardment target or to break the public will to fight of your enemy.
But....... don't forget: if you are in orbit you are a very visible and predictable target for any ground to orbit weapons. You will want to take them out before parking your fleet a few hundred km up. So, you have a small force of ground troops inserted at known GtO emplacements to take out the biggest threat (ship launches are very visible and fairly easily countered unlike hyper-sonic missiles and even less energy weapons) similar to special forces and cruse missiles taking out AAA and AA-missile batteries today. You then use orbital bombardment to take out major command and control centers, weapons production facilities, and financial centers. Then ground troops with the twin mission of tending to those who surrender and making others wish they had.
That last bit is vital! You _must_ send the message that resistance is death and compliance is compassion and fairly comfortable life.
It is often impossible to bomb a planet if you want it intact, for natural resources or industry. In that case you need to land troops to take over these resources and protect them at all cost. Also, terror bombing is not as effective as it would seem, germany did not surredser when all their cities were turned to rubble, they surrendered when the soviet soldiers occupied Berlin.
I mean, Japan surrendered to two atomic bombs. It's a matter of scale. Inefficient carpet bombing is one thing, a single massive blast annihilating most or even all of a city is something else entirely.
@felix hamel, if you annihilate all of the cities at once, sure. But that's why you only destroy one city at first. Then when the ENTIRE REST OF THE PLANET SURRENDERS the lost infrastructure is negligible compared to what you gained.
There's a different between "bombing some cities to rubble" and "bombing a planet until there's no one left on it".
@@TheAchilles26 Japan surrendered for other reason besides the bombing. Their Fleet has been sunk, US subs were sinking most of the food transport ships from Korea which would have lead to mass starvation and the Soviet Union just joined the war against Japan removing them as a possible neutral negotiating party and threating Manchuria and Korea.
Also in terms of area damaged and civilians killed the Firebombing of Tokyo was worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
I'm not saying the atomic bombing didn't have an impact but it wasn't the only reason. Even then there was an attempted coup against the government by Army officers to stop the surrender of Japan.
@@TheAchilles26 NO, japan was gonna keep going even after the nukes, it was when we agreed not to take out the emperor that they surrendered....
and if you look at WW2 the pacific front was a bitch after japan fell and we invaded France even that was hard fighting and slow but after the beaches were cleared and we moved in it was block warfare, taking territory street by street all the way to Berlin, but the pacific campaign took so long that the British started to wonder if we could do it but we did lol
watch the WW2 docs, they paint a very different picture than games or school tries to shovel down our necks....
40K Universe: We hear you're logic, and rightfully throw it out the airlock.
Quick query: What if that planet has Surface to space missile arsenals and/or planetary shields? Wouldn't this force the Marines for create a 'beach-head' in order to advance and destroy those arsenals or shields?
A few points:
1. Planetary Bombardment may not be possible. If the goal is to take land or resources, any Bombardment that would eliminate a sufficiently dug in enemy may well also damage the planet or resources beyond repair, making an air/ground campaign the only option.
2. Siege and blockade is a viable option, but is very time consuming, and there are numerous reasons one may not have the time to wait out the enemy. Additional, the planet may be self sufficient, making Siege completely ineffective.
Unless the planet just launches missiles, en mass. Or hide underground till the problem goes away or both
4:05
I want you to google the following:
1. The Battle of Stalingrad
2. Saragarhi - The Last Stand - Extra History
3. Iwo Jima, Okinawa, US Island Hopping Campaign
This video is a bit "ww1 could never happen because artillery would wreck all the cities and people would give up"
"planetary invasion is impossible! It would take too long and cost too many lives!"
The Imperium of Man: was that a challenge?
Paraphrasing the Vong commander after watching a Super Star Destroyer conduct an orbital bombardment, "Why didn't anyone tell me they could do that?!"
I would suggest that 100 ton guns of Fort Rinella in Malta is a historic example that could break this logic. These guns were so massive that they could destroy any ship from well outside the range the ship's guns. Not only that but even if the ship managed to get into range it had to score a direct hit on the gun to disable or destroy it. The guns meanwhile could pretty much hit anything on the relatively much larger target of the ship to cause critical damage. However the guns were vulnerable to assault from over land so a large garrison with many fortifications were maintained on the island to prevent this from happening.
I would therefore suggest a possible scenario for a planetary invasion is possible. A planet is protected by a large, fixed emplacement that can destroy capital ships from well outside the range of the weapons carried by the capital ships. This prevents straight up bombardment of the planet as suggested. So a strike must be launched to take out that emplacement before the fleet can close to bombardment range. Of course this emplacement would be heavily defended necessitating an assault force landing in smaller craft to storm the emplacement and silencing the weapon.
The only time you’d need to land troops on a planet in the context of an invasion, realistically, would probably be to take out ground-based anti-ship defenses.
yeah, it doesn't matter that you have higher ground when your opponent is the ground.
There's also the idea of capturing key figured within the enemy ranks, like their leadership, or key facilities (like ship-yards) you don't want destroyed in a bombardment. After all, if you capture their leaders, you can hold a gun to the head of their people and force them to give up, or live and watch the planet burn (which is an even worse fate).
Anti ship artillery is overrated and unrealistic in most areas, you can shoot and carper bomb a planet far away without realistically needing to be to close of a planet, if you want anti ship artillery realistically you want them in orbit and they would serve more the same way tank destroyers did
@@MechanicWolf85 - because it's impossible to clear the skies with ground defenses only? Someone doesn't think very highly of SAM systems :p
Realistically, if you are a space faring race you have the technology required to mount a considerable defense of a planet you control against an equally advanced military. Doesn't mean you will win, doesn't mean you will loose.
Planetary defenses do not have to be immobile easy targets begging to be destroyed. Further, we as a species can blow up shit in space right now via ground based weapons and we haven't made it past the damn moon lol!
@@martinsharrett1872 Yeah, but the problem is that ground based weapons need to be big to overcome the planet's gravity. And big means immobile. And immobile means your enemy always knows exactly where they are and can just nudge a few asteroids to take them out from the other side of the solar system.
In empire strikes back, they had to invade Hoth in order to disable the shield generator.
I was going to comment about all the things I think are wrong with this video: bombing not being a showstopper from a morale and technical perspective, anti-orbit defences, the point of not taking an entire planet not being about capturing every square metre, etc.
It’s clear everyone else has it covered, so I’ll just leave it at that.
I think the problem with this approach, is that if orbital bombardment is the issue, planets, or at least those with strategic importanse will naturally develop meassures to mitigate the damage, making landing armies again necesary, specially if you want to actually take the planet instead turning it into wasteland.
To be fair to The Empire Strikes back, basically none of the problems you listed apply to that ground battle. No one was going to go chill in the hills of Hoth and fight the Empire, the ground troops just went in to flush them out.
Star Wars explained the need for ground battles as occurring to take out planetary deflector shields so that bombardment could *then* happen. In that case, the ground battles made sense since they were small scale, focusing on taking out a single target, and routing defending enemy troops.
Unless you need the resources on the planet, and they have a shields around key installations because as long as they don't come down to the planet they are just wasting their time and resources, so even planetary bombardment won't do anything, at times you have to actually get on the ground to fully route the enemy
Yeah, thats why in WW2 all the islands were never invaded....
"if you cant win you wont fight" looks at japan
I’ve come up with my own rethinking of Star Wars. In this concept, the Empire isn’t omnipresent. It maintains its hold over so many planets by visiting each one every few years with a Star Destroyer. If the planet remains loyal, the SD provides a reminder of the Empire’s overwhelming power. If the planet has risen in revolt, the SD is capable of “restoring order”.
Star Destroyers are not capital ships, per se. They are more like mobile siege platforms. Any one SD is usually capable of defeating planetary defense forces, which are usually composed of fighters, small armed civilian ships, and maybe a couple orbital forts or asteroid installations.
(Incidentally, this is why SDs don’t seem supremely well-suited to capital-ship battle - they aren’t designed to be)
Each SD also carries a ground-force component. Planets which revolt realize the Empire wants to rule them, not wreck them through orbital bombardment. it is therefore conceivable that they might sullenly decline to surrender immediately. So after the space defenses are destroyed, the stormtroopers land to smash up whatever planetary militia may exist, then seize centers of political authority and communications so they can install a new ruling elite.
(And this is why stormtroopers are so feared, but don’t seem very capable at conventional warfare; they usually just have to smash hastily-levied militia, and then exercise some creative brutality to demoralize the civilians)
This all worked quite well for the Empire, until planets started cooperating together to form a unified Rebel Alliance in exile…
Well, in the Pacific Theater of WWII, we (the US and Allies) DID essentially land large numbers of Marines on islands to take the islands from Japanese control, this AFTER the battleships pounded the islands with naval gunfire...
What's that footage from at 02:45?
Never give up! Never Surrender! Damn the resonance cannons, full speed ahead!
This ignores some events in history. Iwo Jima was garrisoned by 21,000 troops. It was a tiny rock surrounded by a massive fleet of battle ships.
Even after 3 days of continuous bombardment, there was hardly any damage to the defenses. The defenders had specifically prepared to survive the bombardment and force the Americans to suffer as many losses as possible.
I think you overestimated the effectiveness of bombardments
The anime Legend of Galactic Heroes has a lot of retreating and surrender ... but it has lots of willing to die bits too ... might be a fun one to do analysts on
"Legend of the galactic heroes" comes to mind
So why wasn't the Pacific theater just a campaign of bombarding islands until they sank?
I feel like the Battle of Hoth is exactly the answer to your objections raised:
1. possibility of seige. The rebels had a shield generator "strong enough to deflect any bombardment." orbital bombardments/bombings would be ineffective.
2. unsustainability of extended ground warfare. Hoth is not a planet with a government and a local sapient population. It's an ice cube in space with some local flora and fauna where the rebels dug out a base. They're not defending their homes, this is just another hidey hole. Fleeing the invading forces in favor of another hole on the same planet would simply mean that they're in the same position as before, except with no protective shield and no heat, AND no means of evacuation.
3. suicidal mentality of staying put. Even with the planetary shield in place the Rebels didn't stay and fight to drive off the Empire, they stayed and fought in order to buy time for a scrambled evacuation. As soon as they had the opportunity to the defending forced retreated, gathered at a secondary rendezvous location, and fled the planet.
Actually I don't think ANY Star Wars land war matches your objections. Except maybe the Battle for Naboo, but even then I think that's mitigated by the fact that the Naboo had not formal military, and the invading force were droids, AND that it started with a seige and attempt to force surrender. AND EVEN THEN there were (in legends anyway) resistance forces as you said which in the end contributed to the battle which lost the war for the Trade Federation.
The Battle of Geonosis wasn't to conquer the planet, it was to rescue the Jedi and destroy the droid factories on system, and I suppose capture the CIS leadership.
The Battle of Coruscant wasn't to conquer the planet, it was to kidnap the Chancellor.
The Battle of Utapau was different as the planet had already surrendered to the CIS, but was sympathetic to the republic, all that Republic needed to do was drive off the CIS from their main military installations to win that battle.
I'm not going to get into The Clone Wars because not even I'M that neurotic.
Battle of Yavin was to destroy the planet
Battle of Hoth, see above
Battle of Endor was to destroy a target objective, not to subjugate a populace.
Same with Battle of Starkiller base
Battle of Crait - crait was uninhabited, and the invading force had a singular objective which it failed due to misguided leadership
and I hate The Last Skywalker so my memories of those battles are too flimsy to mount a proper defense of. Not to mention a lack of motivation.
I feel like the battles in The Clone Wars might be better examples of what you're talking about, but for Star Wars at least I feel like the objections don't quite match the demonstrated material, not in the movies anyway.
"you can´t never send men after men for decades"
Imperium of Man Warhammer 40K: "we don´t send wave after wave, we send ocean after ocean for centuries"
What about the idea of a planetary shield, where massive weapons can’t penetrate and in order to strike the planet, ships need to enter the planets atmosphere but would be exposed to anti ship weaponry from the ground; I think that would be the standard defense for any advanced space civilization and in order to capitulate the enemy you would to send an army or task force to get rid of the planets shield generator to allow for orbital bombardment. So the idea of a ground invasion would still make sense in future scifi warfare in my opinion
what about anti-orbital weapons, basicly SAM sites on steroids
also self replacating matchines, can be a clanking self replicator, no nano tech needed
One does not build ships on planets and launch them into space to fight, one builds weapons of mass destruction that will bomb the ships in orbit back.
Asteroid belt ship printer goes brrrrrrr
Yeah... the only time planetary forces would be needed is in small contained engagements even if massive armies seems cool. The only exceptions is in things like civil wars... where the planet is essentially fighting itself and an outside force shows up with an army to help one side of the civil war or another. Mass Effect does the first one pretty well, the "First Contact War" only had like 1200 casualties all around, so it was presumably limited to a very small part of Shanxi. Edit: As for Halo... the Covenant is more realistic then most since their main strategy IS just to bomb or "glass" the planet, and we're given the impression that they only invade to get forerunner artifacts or for "glory" or whatever.
One thing that might make orbital bombardment difficult would be a defensive grid of high-powered lasers. Also, you'd need in the tens of millions of troops to garrison a world like Earth, that and a fleet in orbit.
Counter point
The imperial guard from Warhammer have defenses capable of annihilating any ship above hive cities. Or at least make ships nervous.
The defenses are needed to be taken out to re take the world.
Or sometimes annihilation is simply not possible as they need to retake the world, or take specific people. Or to kill specific targets.
Replace every single use of "orbital bombardment" with "nuclear strike" and see how well the argument holds up in the real world.
Would it be effective? Of course, but there are numerous reasons on-top of reasons why the first war that nukes were used was also the last war where nukes were used.
Imagine the logistical nightmare it'd be trying to supply troops on another planet millions of KM or even light years away from your own. Unless you could directly open up a portal on the surface of whatever planet you're invading it'd be an absolute fucking logistical nightmare invading other planets
Just to be remember, invading a planet need Alot of manpower, you cannot just send some 100.000 or 1.000.000 soldier to invade a planet, probably need 100.000.000 soldier or more
Actually at least in Warhammer 40k orbital bombardments aren't that effective, unless Exterminatus grade weaponry is used, even then it may not be a guarantee. For example most heavily defended worlds in 40k have Void Shield Generators covering major settlements such as Hive Cities and Fortress Monasteries along with anti-orbital defense cannons with extremely well defended worlds such as Ryza possessing orbital battle stations. Even after disabling the Void Shield orbital bombardment may not cut it, properly built Imperial fortresses are ridiculously durable, for example the Dark Angels legion/chapter's home world Caliban was subjected to severe orbital bombardment to the point of mass scattering the planet but the Fortress Monastery was somehow still intact. So orbital bombardment in 40k is not very useful in forcing a surrender unless you're bombing a feudal or feral world.
3:50 The IJA would like to have a word with you
Better reason why they'd never happen:
You probably don't need planets if you're advanced enough to mount a planetary invasion
You said Hoth invasion wouldn't happen? But they had a deflector shield to protect them from bombardment, and and Ion cannon to disable the orbiting ships so they needed to do a ground invasion to disable the shield.
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
- some old dude.
Tho the example used for Star Wars, the battle of Hoth actually did require a ground battle. This was due to the fact that the rebel base initially was protected by a strong energy shield that need to be disabled before the battleships could do anything.
3:06 I think you might be very wrong here. Take a look at sea battles in WWII and how many ships surrendered.
Like I said, first attempt to invade Wake Island the USMC drove off the invasion fleet. If they had be able to be resupplied or more realistically evacuated, they wouldn't have been captured in the second attempt.
In regards to the "You never see retreat or rout in a Sci-Fi setting" comment - I recommend reading/listening to "The Lost Fleet" series by Jack Campbell.
The entire premise of the series is that a fleet becomes trapped impossibly far behind enemy lines and must make a fighting withdrawal through dozens of hostile systems, with their supplies and morale slowly dwindling, and trying to avoid being cornered by superior enemy forces. It's not even really "contrived" how the fleet manages to become trapped behind enemy lines - it makes complete sense in the context. The battles also are highly realistic - taking into account things like the speed of light affecting reaction times (ie if the enemy fleet is one light minute away, they could already have made a move that you won't see for another 60 seconds) and so on. Overall, great series for Sci-Fi fans on the 'harder' end of the spectrum.
Be forewarned though: one thing this author wasn't was a master of dialogue. It ranges from decent at best to downright Jar-Jar Binks at worst.
MBTs since the Cold War have NBC protection as standard, making them highly resistant to nuclear weapons. The Soviets in particular designed heavy tanks that were designed to stay intact and upright relatively close to a nuke. It isn't a stretch to me then that in sci fi militaries could deploy protected vehicles and EVA/powered infantry armor that can protect their operators from radiation and bombardments from tactical yield weapons. A system similar to the Terran marines of Starcraft which can flexibly operate close to nuclear weapons while staying mobile. Or the shielded and nimble Mantis from HALO.
"nobody will fight for castles", "nobody will fight for cities", "nobody will try to invade a continent", "nobody will invade a planet"
How about taking strategic points, useful infrastructure, valuable ressources?
War isn't changing to reduce casualties, it is optimized to reduce loss in infrastructure and to become cheaper.
See reluctance to accept casualties and dead soldiers is mostly a thing in developed countries where there is no real understanding of warfare anymore.
Less developed countries/cultures don't have that so much. And their soldiers stand and fight and don't retreat even in the face of a far superior enemy.
the reluctance is borne out of a superior position wishing to minimize losses is a luxury one only states in supremacy can truly appreciate but it's also been shown when those states are at risk suddenly alot of people are willing to step up to the plate
I broadly agree. In most cases, the attacker would only send down commando teams to attack or occupy key objectives which would quicken the surrender of the defender.
I always found it interesting that the devs of Xcom EU/EW felt they needed to create a complicated story as to why the aliens just didn't invade and take over Earth. In reality, the explanation is very simple.
In Xcom, we can assume that the aliens want to take over Earth intact if they can. So they don't want to launch a planetary bombardment. I would also assume that the manpower and supplies of the forces is limited and not capable of conquering Earth by full-scale invasion.
So what do they do. They launch many small scale commando and terror missions. These have the objective of destabilising the national government and demoralise the population in an effort to make them believe the aliens are so superior they can't be defeated. As the attacks continue and the aliens infiltrate the echelons of of power, the governments eventually surrender, or allow the aliens to bring order.
Another Sci-fi series which depicted an alien invasion more correctly was V, where the aliens first came as friends and then gradually took over the governments.
I can see only a few reasons why a full scale invasion would be feasible:
- Neither side has capital warships that can siege or bombard a planet
- The attacker feels culturally obliged to conquer by ground combat for some reason
- The attacker is reluctant to bombard the planet for some reason (e.g. for ethics reasons, to stop destruction of resources, prevent deaths of non-hostile population, etc)
- There are only a small number of settlements that need be attacked and occupied.
- The attacker invades mainly to demonstrate it's superiority to its enemies, both in combat ability and tenacity.
- The attacker is 'liberating' a planet where most of the population is either friendly, or at worst, neutral, to the attacker.
- The attackers wants a long drawn out war for some reason
This is a very simplistic take. There could be tonnes of reasons for ground invasions and situations where straight orbital bombardment wouldn't work. There could be planetary defenses so that you can't just hang out in the orbit casually bombing it. The planet could have valuable infrastructure you don't want to ruin. Indiscriminately bombing an entire planet into submission might be bad PR for some regimes. The might have the support of a significant portion of the planet's population etc. etc.
Your analysis is on track. But what about taking it a step further? Why even bombard the surface of a planet?
The anime series Crest of the Stars has this funny scene in episode one where a spacefaring empire just destroyed the defending fleet and orbital defenses of this planet. Effectively conquering the planet.
The President of the planet sends a transmission to the invading fleet commander hoping to express his people’s defiance and willingness to fight to the last.
The fleet commander cuts him off and says they weren’t planning on landing anything on the planet, nor even bombarding the planet. As far as they were concerned, the planet’s space trade facilities where under there control and so where the shipping lanes the planet sat at the center of, and that’s all the empire wanted.
The President is flustered by the lack of hostility and expresses confusion.
The fleet commander points out that his people are purely a space dwelling people who are powerful by controlling space travel and trade. He explains: “the idea of actually ruling your planet is what we would consider the furthest thing from elegant.”
Basically saying - why would we want to actually run your ball of dirt and resources? You can do that yourselves. Just keep that trade going.
Isn't it feasible to conclude that anyone or anything that possesses the technology to travel here will also be so advanced that we couldn't even conceive their ability to wage war (as we know it to be?) It's pretty safe to say that their entire existence would be on another dimension?
This sounds like how stellaris meta works... Bombard until it's over, land some guys to occupy. Rinse, repeat.
A whole planet´s worth of gun emplacements shooting into space from the surface is realistic and big ships couldn´t dare approach. - Unconcerned with mass, you can put massive generators and massive guns on the Surface. sending small landing craft to take those out makes sense.
I think you should check out SFIA for why it would not only be necessary to invade a planet, that it would be impossible to bombard any equally developed planet into submission. The Planet always has the advantage of resources.
At about 2:00. People might have a build-in self-preservation instinct, but they are also so tribal that it might be more likely for everybody to die than for everybody to agree.