Most Realistic Military SF

[General Mung Beans]

What are the most realistic military science fiction in terms of tactics, organization, strategy, numbers, and so on?

[Bottlestein]

Do "near - future" Sci-fi with a slightly upgraded modern military count?

Also, depending on you win/loss rate - Starcraft has good tactics

[Zor]

As far as Sci-Fi Television i am going to go with SG1.

Zor

[Sarevok]

As far as Sci-Fi Television i am going to go with SG1.

Zor

But only for the good guys. To be realistic both opposing factions need realistic tactics. The levels of incompetence in Goul'd armies in unbelievably bad.

[Shroom Man 777]

I do not think reverse-engineering alien tech and getting big honking super-spaceships on par with galactic standards in, like, under ten years from first contact with space civilizations is realistic. I'd say in terms of aesthetic, nBSG certainly has a more realistic "feel" when it comes to military matters, although not necessarily in terms of actual-factual technology (haha, cord telephones in space) or story.

[adam_grif]

I do not think reverse-engineering alien tech and getting big honking super-spaceships on par with galactic standards in, like, under ten years from first contact with space civilizations is realistic.

What are the most realistic military science fiction in terms of tactics, organization, strategy, numbers, and so on?

He's not discussing technology or the stupidity of opponents.

I always wondered why there wasn't some sort of Stargate Fighting Vehicle that they rolled out, a Stryker esque thing with goa'uld shields, MG's and shit that would be designed to roll through the stargates onto hostile worlds. Every single gate they encountered that I can remember either has a magical force field or is lightly guarded by some infantry.

AFV's coming in hot doling out red hot 105mm death to Loyalist Jaffa? Awesome!

[Ford Prefect]

He's not discussing technology or the stupidity of opponents.

No, but he's also not talking about specific factions, either: it should be clear from the OP that he's asking for the most realistic series or book when it comes to military matters in science fiction.

[Shroom Man 777]

I do not think SG is really realistic in terms of tactics, organization, strategy, numbers and so on. It's about as military sci-fi as Star Trek. Yes, it is sponsored by the USAF, yes their P-90s have trigger guards, but in terms of story and plot? It's four plucky space adventurers saving the day by themselves, not actual big military space battles. It's more of SG-1 dealing with episodic challenges and strange happenings and situations, anyway. Just like Star Trek. The times where the adventures and actions of four badass plucky space heroes saved the world/universe far outnumbers the time in the show where military tactics, organizations, strategy and numbers did anything at all. It's pure pulp with USAF rank insignias!

Every single gate they encountered that I can remember either has a magical force field or is lightly guarded by some infantry.

No it's not. From what I saw, well-defended gates are actually rare. Their gates are usually unguarded, located in middles of nowhere that look suspiciously like Canadian forests and back yards. In Space.

[adam_grif]

No it's not. From what I saw, well-defended gates are actually rare. Their gates are usually unguarded, located in middles of nowhere that look suspiciously like Canadian forests and back yards. In Space.

I was speaking of the sub-set of gates that were actually guarded

I do not think SG is really realistic in terms of tactics, organization, strategy, numbers and so on.

Neither do I, but the point is you don't support that position by saying that it's unrealistic that they got their hands on super alien tech.

[JointStrikeFighter]

I do not think reverse-engineering alien tech and getting big honking super-spaceships on par with galactic standards in, like, under ten years from first contact with space civilizations is realistic.

What are the most realistic military science fiction in terms of tactics, organization, strategy, numbers, and so on?

He's not discussing technology or the stupidity of opponents.

I always wondered why there wasn't some sort of Stargate Fighting Vehicle that they rolled out, a Stryker esque thing with goa'uld shields, MG's and shit that would be designed to roll through the stargates onto hostile worlds. Every single gate they encountered that I can remember either has a magical force field or is lightly guarded by some infantry.

AFV's coming in hot doling out red hot 105mm death to Loyalist Jaffa? Awesome!

I seem to recall the gate is big enough to fit bradleys and abrams should the need arise. General Hammond requested armoured support to go rescure SG1 when they were captured by Hathor also.

[Sarevok]

I do not think reverse-engineering alien tech and getting big honking super-spaceships on par with galactic standards in, like, under ten years from first contact with space civilizations is realistic. I'd say in terms of aesthetic, nBSG certainly has a more realistic "feel" when it comes to military matters, although not necessarily in terms of actual-factual technology (haha, cord telephones in space) or story.

nBSG felt "real" ? They seemed like a bunch of hormonal teens from The O.C given fighter planes and guns. The biggest threat to a Colonial soldier was another Colonial soldier. I think onscreen we saw more humans get killed, tortured or abused by a Colonial soldier than Cylon centurions.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

How realistic do you really want it to be, given that it's science fiction?

What I mean is- look at an example of what I think is fairly good mil-SF, David Drake's Slammers series. Drake's a veteran, and he writes the shit and grit- but looking at what they do and don't have the capability to do, I would actually expect more to have changed. Never mind that the powerguns are pure technobabble, the Slammers are still basically a Vietnam-era armoured cavalry regiment writ large. With zap guns, and stranded in political circumstances that would make Machiavelli weep most of the time.

Which is a damn' sight better than no grounding at all, but- what do you think? Is this too just round the corner, too consciously modelled on reality and not enough on the ways things are going to or likely to change? Military SF seems to be allegory, a way of talking about questions we don't want to look square in the eye of, much more than it does speculation or prediction.

It's unfair to single Drake out for criticism, he's one of the best- but I'll unload this one now anyway. The thing that really bugs me about the Slammers is that they're not mercenaries. They have the group mentality, most of them, the discipline, and the unit identity and loyalties, of a regular- no, elite unit in a formed, legitimate army. They don't look like mercenaries and they don't think like mercenaries. John Hawkwood would be ashamed of them.

[Sarevok]

The problem with writing realistic mercenary units is a different one. A mercenary unit with shiny armored vehicles and gunships is hard to form. Because you have the money most smaller countries dream of. Why are you risking that in combat when you could live like a Russian oligarch ? I imagine realistic mercs would be over priced security guards like Blackwater or raping and pillaging thugs like third world militias whose loyalty is bought and sold by bribing the commander.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Well equipped mercenary forces can exist when a state lacks the expertise to operate advanced equipment itself. It was pretty common for the airforces of African countries to operate this way back in the day.

[Zor]

The problem with writing realistic mercenary units is a different one. A mercenary unit with shiny armored vehicles and gunships is hard to form. Because you have the money most smaller countries dream of. Why are you risking that in combat when you could live like a Russian oligarch ? I imagine realistic mercs would be over priced security guards like Blackwater or raping and pillaging thugs like third world militias whose loyalty is bought and sold by bribing the commander.

Maybe its an economy of scale thing. Lets say you have a thousand planets colonized by man, each fairly well industrialized, has a population in the billions and reliable FTL transportation between them, and throw in lets say three thousand more boarder worlds with populations in the millions with less development, and both of these are divided. Something the size (in land, rough level of development and population) of the US would be insugnifigant in such a scenario if there were multi-system states. It might be possible for mercenary companies to exist, fighting the equivelent of small scale brush wars (which could be comprable to the Great Patriotic War in scale) for small scale governments using divisions of advanced railgun armed tanks.

Zor

[Stark]

A network of arms dealers and commercial logistic backend would make that pretty trivial.

[Shroom Man 777]

nBSG felt "real" ? They seemed like a bunch of hormonal teens from The O.C given fighter planes and guns. The biggest threat to a Colonial soldier was another Colonial soldier. I think onscreen we saw more humans get killed, tortured or abused by a Colonial soldier than Cylon centurions.

In terms of aesthetics, not plot, technology or characterization.

I mean, the way they depict their ship operations was certainly more reminiscent of real-life carrier or warship operations, when compared to something from, like... Star Trek. Your fellow milwan... military enthusiast Sheppy-pooh thinks so. I think he can provide 1950s graphs from Maryland military archives to support me too.

You'll agree with me that it's more so than SG-1. I mean, remote the BDUs and P-90s and give them campy retro brightly colored costumes and pew-pew space guns, and SG-1 would be no different from something like Buck Rogers, or Flash Gordon, or Star Trek.

The problem with writing realistic mercenary units is a different one. A mercenary unit with shiny armored vehicles and gunships is hard to form. Because you have the money most smaller countries dream of. Why are you risking that in combat when you could live like a Russian oligarch ? I imagine realistic mercs would be over priced security guards like Blackwater or raping and pillaging thugs like third world militias whose loyalty is bought and sold by bribing the commander.

With MiG-36 Facemakers too. And no goddamn VTOLs!

African mercenaries like Executive Outcomes was formed by former SADF people. They had gunships (a couple of Hinds). And they DID kick the asses of people (RUF) that smaller countries (Sierra Leone) couldn't.

They do this because a mercenary unit with shiny armored vehicles and gunships is hard to form. Because they need to pay for that shit. How can they live like a Russian oligarch without income? To live like a Russian, say, oil, oligarch, one would need contracts from governments. Perhaps contracts gained from kicking the asses of uprisings and militias and shit that the government couldn't handle.

That's what happened all over Africa.

[MKSheppard]

The thing that really bugs me about the Slammers is that they're not mercenaries. They have the group mentality, most of them, the discipline, and the unit identity and loyalties, of a regular- no, elite unit in a formed, legitimate army. They don't look like mercenaries and they don't think like mercenaries. John Hawkwood would be ashamed of them.

If you had read the story about their founding; it was that they started out as a legimitate military unit in a national/planetary army; and when the planetary governor felt that Col Hammer had been getting too much power and tried to arrest him, the Slammers stopped that attempt cold, and then made for space and a life as a merc unit.

[Shroom Man 777]

They sound a bit like those SADF guys from that unit that got disbanded by Nelson Shroomdela, who went on to form Executive Outcomes or something.

[MKSheppard]

I mean, the way they depict their ship operations was certainly more reminiscent of real-life carrier or warship operations, when compared to something from, like... Star Trek.

The first two seasons of BSG were pretty good at that. The third and fourth seasons, less so. What stayed constant through the show was its bleak depressing outlook -- which worked far better than Star Treks' perma-happy people.

[Stark]

I'm not sure how being sad alcoholics makes it more realistic scifi.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, these guys did suffer a nuclear holocaust. If your whole race nearly got wiped out, and you have a readily available supply of starship parts that can easily be converted to alcohol-brewing thinggies, then you don't need to be a pointy-eared Vulcan to figure out that giving yourself cirrhosis is logical.

Seriously though. A bunch of people who've lost friends and loved ones, who are full of regret, and whose existence is miserable. Alcoholism is pretty understandable.

It's just like in Russia!

[MKSheppard]

I'm not sure how being sad alcoholics makes it more realistic scifi.

I like how Hav pointed out that not once during the show, was any character's alcoholism effectively solved.

Some may have gotten on the wagon temporarily, but it was always a quick fall off for them.

Another reason or two why BSG worked decently, was that it had actual non-commissioned officers and enlisted in the show; as something other than hangers on who show up in the background.

Also, bit characters could become supporting characters, and then killed off, making their deaths a bit more impactful than "Oh my god, random redshirt who we just got introduced to in the transporter room five minutes ago died!"

[Imperial Overlord]

Hammer's Slammers tech ends up working in a very Vietnam era manner because one of the reasons Drake wrote them was to help deal with having gone to Vietnam so he deliberately designed the tech to support those kinds of stories. Its worth pointing out that there is a fair amount of variation between mercenaries, a range going from Gurkhas to guys like Hawkwood. Hammer's boys and girls were the best that an advanced planetary power could hire and were looking for new homes, not a quick buck, and then had a brutal counter insurgency campaign and their employer betraying them because they were too successful to bond them together.

[Simon_Jester]

Which is a damn' sight better than no grounding at all, but- what do you think? Is this too just round the corner, too consciously modelled on reality and not enough on the ways things are going to or likely to change? Military SF seems to be allegory, a way of talking about questions we don't want to look square in the eye of, much more than it does speculation or prediction.

Honestly, yes. Think about the constraints a military fiction writer operates under. He wants to write stories about modern warfare, not ancient warfare- he wants radio calls for fire support, not heroic charges by men who spend more time on close order drill than they do on weapon practice. But the modern context is too constricting for that; nations capable of waging modern war mostly lack reasons to fight each other, or convincing ways to keep the conflict from going nuclear if they did fight.

You can't stage your war in the present. You can't stage it in the past because the technology wasn't there (and most fantasy settings are "in the past," technically and socially). By process of elimination, you move it into the future.

What I mean is- look at an example of what I think is fairly good mil-SF, David Drake's Slammers series. Drake's a veteran, and he writes the shit and grit- but looking at what they do and don't have the capability to do, I would actually expect more to have changed.

Would be interested to hear you expand on this, but I'm more interested in addressing the social aspect: how do these mercenaries function, and why are they so un-Hawkwood-like?

---

If you had read the story about their founding; it was that they started out as a legimitate military unit in a national/planetary army; and when the planetary governor felt that Col Hammer had been getting too much power and tried to arrest him, the Slammers stopped that attempt cold, and then made for space and a life as a merc unit.

No, ECR still has a point. That explains where they come from, but the Slammers operated for at least ten years on that business model, as mercenaries. That calls for an explanation.

...Its worth pointing out that there is a fair amount of variation between mercenaries, a range going from Gurkhas to guys like Hawkwood. Hammer's boys and girls were the best that an advanced planetary power could hire and were looking for new homes, not a quick buck, and then had a brutal counter insurgency campaign and their employer betraying them because they were too successful to bond them together.

This the first half of the explanation: how an elite military unit of the sort normally seen only in national militaries wound up as mercenaries in the first place.

It's unfair to single Drake out for criticism, he's one of the best- but I'll unload this one now anyway. The thing that really bugs me about the Slammers is that they're not mercenaries. They have the group mentality, most of them, the discipline, and the unit identity and loyalties, of a regular- no, elite unit in a formed, legitimate army. They don't look like mercenaries and they don't think like mercenaries. John Hawkwood would be ashamed of them.

So let's look at the situation. What kind of social constraints do the Slammers operate under?

Bear in mind that they began as an armored cavalry regiment; when Colonel Hammer woke up on his first morning as a mercenary leader, he had to make certain decisions about how best to lead a mercenary armored cavalry regiment. He never really got the chance to decide whether to lead a mercenary armored cavalry regiment, though. He started with most of the capital equipment he needed (the tanks), and with the core of personnel he needed to run the regiment.

The most interesting aspects of the Slammers' universe, as applicable to mercenaries' business model, are the following:

1) Many worlds have planetary or continental governments; in absolute terms each government has control of a large economic base, by the standards of Earth circa 2000.
2) Because of (1), they can easily draft large armies and equip them with 20th century style weapons, just as could a nation like, say, Poland.
3) Despite this, most planets have "third galaxy" levels of technical infrastructure; they cannot produce the most advanced weapons for themselves. Artillery and tracked vehicles they can do, but zap guns and hovertanks they cannot do. Continuing to use the example of Poland, as they move from the 20th to the 21st century, they are already finding that developing the latest military hardware is beyond their means. Poland already buys most of its advanced hardware from elsewhere, and does development as part of collaborative projects.
4) Many worlds have limited military experience; they have experienced decades of peace and only now, suddenly, find themselves needing to fight a war.

Now we have to ask, what kind of mercenaries can operate under these conditions? Big armies of troops armed with basic weapons are right out, because any government rich enough to hire mercenaries from another solar system has enough control to conscript large forces and arm them with automatic rifles (see 1 and 2).

What is possible is to hire relatively small forces which are well armed (see 3) and have much more combat experience, both tactically and strategically, than your own forces (see 4).

This is the first critical difference. The Italian city-states were effectively incapable of raising large armies and relied far more heavily on mercenaries to fight for them. This led to a continuous, high condottiere presence throughout Italy, which in turn made it easier for the mercenaries to act like bandits, as Hawkwood did. The Slammers' continent-states usually can raise large armies, but those armies are of relatively low quality. A force that is both well equipped and highly experienced will be far more effective than the armies of their "third galaxy country" employers.

All in all, as an environment for would-be mercenaries, this universe doesn't look like the medieval Italian city-states at all. It looks more like the classical world in the century or so before Alexander, where any Oriental despot worth the name could assemble a big army... but where Greek mercenary phalangites were the gold standard of warfare because they could smash through just about any other infantry force in the world, even defeating forces much more numerous than themselves, as long as they had the support of local forces.

We shouldn't be thinking in terms of John Hawkwood and the White Company- we should be thinking more in terms of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand*.

---

And that's the second critical difference. Most of the wars of the condottiere era were relatively small potatoes. You paid Hawkwood as much because you didn't want him working for your enemy as because you wanted him working for you, and you generally didn't hire him because you urgently needed a war decided in your favor, because the survival of the city states involved in those wars were usually not at stake.

Whereas you hire Hammer's Slammers to decide a war for you, hopefully in a matter of months. Their typical campaign lasts less than a year and there are repeated references to how ruinous their fees are by the standards of governments that control roughly as much territory as circa-2000 nation-states on Earth. They are not cheap, and when you hire them you aren't just hiring an armored cavalry unit; you're hiring a victory, much as Cyrus hired the Greeks to give him a critical advantage against the Persian emperor- that didn't work out for him, but not because the Greeks lost their part of the battle.

That's their reputation, that's their stock in trade, and incidentally that's probably why they can afford to charge enough to keep their tanks running. They're being paid on a scale that is based on the assumption that they will act decisively and aggressively to win whatever battles are put in front of them; if Alois Hammer were John Hawkwood he wouldn't be able to secure the kind of contracts he does, not at the rates he gets.

And that leads into the third critical difference between the Slammers' universe and almost any historical environment where mercenaries found much employment: the Bonding Authority. In effect, they are for mercenaries what Underwriters Laboratories are for electronics; they're the ones who certify that your product will perform as advertised. Hawkwood wouldn't have lasted six months under the Bonding Authority regime, and that's the whole point of its existence- to quote the author:

Employing mercenaries adds new levels of uncertainty to the already risky business of war. Too often in history a mercenary force has disappeared a moment before the battle; switched sides for a well-timed bribe; or even conquered its employer and brought about the very disasters it was hired to prevent.

Mercenaries for their part, face the chances common to every soldier of being killed by the enemy. In addition, however, they must reckon with the possibility of being bilked of their pay or massacred to avoid its payment; of being used as cannon fodder by an employer whose distaste for "money-grubbing aliens" may exceed the enemy's; or of being abandoned far from home when defeat or political change erases their employer or his good will. As Xenophon and the Ten Thousand learned, in such circumstances the road home may be long-or as short as a shallow grave.

A solution to both sets of special problems was made possible by the complexity of galactic commerce. The recorded beginnings came early in the 27th Century when several planets caught up in the Confederation Wars used the Terran firm of Felchow und Sohn as an escrow agent for their mercenaries' pay. Felchow was a commercial banking house which had retained its pre-eminence even after Terran industry had been in some measure supplanted by that of newer worlds. Neither Felchow nor Terra herself had any personal stake in the chaotic rise and fall of the Barnard Confederation; thus the house was the perfect neutral to hold the pay of the condottieri being hired by all parties. Payment was scrupulously made to mercenaries who performed according to their contracts. This included the survivors of the Dalhousie debacle who were able to buy passage off that ravaged world, despite the fact that less than 10% of the populace which had hired them was still alive. Conversely, the pay of Wrangel's Legion, which had refused to assault the Confederation drop zone on Montauk, was forfeited to the Montauk government. The Third Armistice intervened and Wrangel's troops were hunted across the face of the planet by both sides; too faithless to use and too dangerous to ignore.

Note that last bit. This is what the Italian city-states (and the classical Persians) lacked: a neutral escrow agency that on the one hand assures the mercenary outfit that they will be paid no matter what happens to them, and on the other allows the employer to withhold payment in the event of a breach of contract.

That's the third critical difference between the Slammers' universe and the Italian city states, right there: the Bonding Authority. The Authority guarantees that your elite unit will still get paid even if they suffer heavy losses (rather than being betrayed and left with no money to restore combat effectiveness), and they impose loyalty to your employer as a condition of doing business with them. No one will hire mercenaries not underwritten by the Bonding Authority, for fear that the will betray their employer a la Hawkwood, just as no one will buy electronics not UL-certified, for fear the insulation will fail and burn your house down.

And that explains how Hammers Slammers can function:
-They are a heavy combat unit relative to their enemies, which is made possible by the fact that they work on behalf of worlds who lack the industry and military experience to duplicate their capabilities.
-They are employed for short, decisive campaigns, and the pressure to produce such campaigns makes it impractical for them to hang back from combat.
-The Bonding Authority restrains them from most of the complicated gambits used by men like Hawkwood (or, in military SF, Captain Kaff Tagon ) to get paid large sums of money for delivering very little

---

*Drake himself exploited this with The Forlorn Hope, which follows a different mercenary unit in the same setting through a situation partly similar to that faced by the Greeks in the Anabasis.