Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

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Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by MKSheppard »

I just finished reading the seventh and final book in the "Clone" series by Stephen L. Kent -- The Clone Redemption and the ending fights of it reminded me of Raxmei's "Tactical strawmen" quote in the Posleen thread:
Raxmei wrote:Onto the deconstruction tangent, Posleen are what I call tactical strawmen. It's a military scifi tool of giving man's enemies easily exploited tactical blind spots so the heroes can defeat them with moderately clever tactics within the ability of the author to describe and the reader to understand. In order to maintain tension in the face of stupid enemies it is necessary to increase the threat level in other ways, eg overwhelming numbers, superior technology, or a combination of the two. If the illusion is maintained skillfully then the reader should be impressed at how the skill and determination of the heroes allows them to prevail in the face of such an overpowering foe.

The Posleen war presents a situation in which both the alien invaders and the regular armed forces of the humans are strawmen, both meant to pale in comparison to the comparatively brilliant ACS. The Army's playing dumb here as a foil to the ACS and at the same time their losses to the Posleen build up the Posleen as a credible threat. A competently managed conventional defense would fare better than the one in the books but that would not accomplish the author's goals.
To give you a quick and dirty example of this 'tactical strawmanning' in Clone Redemption:
Spoiler
The Clones land 25,000 men outside the Unified Authority's capital city, and quickly occupy a spaceport.

Despite the existence of large bombardment rockets being shown (and used) in Book Four The Clone Elite -- they're called Surface to Surface (STS) Rockets, and are described as "having enough explosives to destroy a city block" -- the Unified Authority doesn't start using them, even after the Clones have barricaded almost all of their force within the spaceport terminal; providing a nice, concentrated target zone to blow up.

Instead, they hold off on the long ranged weapons, so that their Marines equipped with shielded armor (which is near impervious to hand weapons) can clean out the terminal with minimal damage to the terminal, beyond small arms fire.

This is all explained in book, by one character realizing that the Unified Authority is using this as a live fire test for it's green troops. That's a pretty enormous cop-out; compounded by the fact that nobody in the Unified Authority apparently did any bad weather testing of their Impervium Shields -- the batteries for their shielded power armor last about 45 minutes in a steady state condition, but drain faster if the shield is constantly repelling stuff.

Of course, it starts snowing during the battle, and the impact of all the snowflakes on the impervium shields drains the batteries much faster; allowing our plucky Clones to win the day. Nobody ever did any bad weather testing of the Impervium Shields, and then realized that batteries being drained in a battle was a bad thing; and then reorganized the TO&E of a Infantry Company to have a Battery Platoon that did nothing but recharge people?

Another thing that struck me was that the Hero was using his CommandLink that's unique to his command grade suit to look at video feeds from his subordinates.

That's a lot of data going back and forth.

Wouldn't the enemy be jamming that bandwidth; or trying to insert false data; something possible given that both sides are using the same equipment?

(The Clones have Mk I Armor; the Unified Authority uses Mk IA Shielded Armor as this is a CIVIL WAR situation between the Unified Authority and it's rebellious Clone Military)
It makes Shep a sad man to realize that very few authors have attempted to portray combined arms operations within science fiction other than "we have air support provided by orbiting fighter carriers".

I mean, I can understand the emphasis on light infantry in powered suits of some sort, along with some very light artillery such as mortars, backed up by orbital fighters/fire support for colonial/brushfire wars, or fighting guerilla insurgencies on other planets against Maoists; but when you start fighting against a peer competitor; a lot more thought needs to be put into the combat portions of the story.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Simon_Jester »

When does light infantry become heavy infantry?
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Purple »

Simon_Jester wrote:When does light infantry become heavy infantry?
Its a question of equipment and doctrine. Light infantry in the modern sense usually denotes special forces of some sort or airborne formations. The term light being applied to them since they can only use what ever equipment can be transported to them via helicopters or parachute and that they can subsequently take apart and carry on their backs. Hence light mortars, machine guns and rifles but no tanks, serious vehicles or heavy artillery. So to answer your question. The moment they start lugging around gear they can't carry on their backs. Not that it helps much since in the case of the wanked out power armor in question that might well include 155mm howitzers.

However as said there is also a doctrinal side to it. Light infantry are used in a completely different role than regular infantry. And in doctrinal terms, I am not sure one can call these things light infantry so much as simply completely unsupported regular forces.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by MKSheppard »

Simon_Jester wrote:When does light infantry become heavy infantry?
I think a good dividing line would be when they start gathering assets which cannot be manpacked or moved around via light vehicles; or when individual infantrymen begin requiring regular fuel resupply every day for their suits.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Ahriman238 »

In 40k, Heavy infantry apparently consists of men in carapace armor.

Getting back on topic, an apalling number of authors have little or no idea how combined-arms works. Even authors with military service in theri background, like Ringo, will rarely have fought large-scale battles where serious combined arms tactics were used.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by PhilosopherOfSorts »

I don't see how its so unreasonable to hold off on the rockets in your example, Shep. I would assume the attackers wanted the spaceport in some kind of useable condition, dropping daisy-cutters on it would prevent that. No comment on the rest, though.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Ahriman238 »

PhilosopherOfSorts wrote:I don't see how its so unreasonable to hold off on the rockets in your example, Shep. I would assume the attackers wanted the spaceport in some kind of useable condition, dropping daisy-cutters on it would prevent that. No comment on the rest, though.
That's not so much a problem as the lack of testing for a new model of power armor. And the idea of blooding green troopers by having them assault a position held by seasoned veterans.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by PainRack »

Never read the series but it still doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.

Wasn't there a series of blurbs about how the Apache electronics wasn't fully tested in wet weather conditions and malfunctioned during the Panama or Grenada invasion? Something about IR crossover IIRC......
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Kingmaker »

This sort of writing is not unique to military SF. Most writers don't know what genius looks like in any field, couldn't describe it even if they did, and, even if they could, it might nit look that interesting. Which is why it is common to contrast a supposedly brilliant character with someone who is implausibly incompetent in order to let the genius look good by showing up the idiot. You also tend to see a lot of gimmick solutions.

Also, a lot of ground-oriented milSF is imitating Starship Troopers, so as far as the authors are concerned the military forces have to be dominated by power armored infantry because That Is How Things Are Done. They don't really know anything about combined arms, but get away with it because most readers don't either.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Simon_Jester »

Ground combat in pre-Starship Troopers SF wasn't all that much "better" in that sense- fictional warfare is inherently infantry-centric, except when the story is about Heroic Fighter Pilots or Grim Tank Gunners or something. Infantry combat is the arena where the average person who's not a combat veteran stands the best chance of being able to envision what the heck is going on.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Connor MacLeod »

I imageine the military aspects are pretty much like the technological, cultural/political/economic, or whatever aspects: The writer either doesn't give a shit (like in a shared universe like SW or 40K or Trek), or the writer has a particular paradigm/historical era/concept in mind and writes everything around it. In either case sometimes it might make sense or work out (moreso in the latter than the former, but still) and sometimes it won't.

Personally I've started to think it's simply a consequence of trying to be "predictive/speculative" in sci fi.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

The exciting infantry-centric stories of USMC Ranger Hooahoorah in Space may be a little bit exclusive with a totally comprehensive panoramic view of combined arms postmodern warfare. Like, one kind of war story focuses on Grunt McGrunt shooting people in the face and killing folks with bayonets and entrenchment tools. The other kind of war story reads more like a history novel, or some seminal work by Bart Blade detailing strategic megadeaths over large fronts. It's not easy interspersing the two. On one end of the spectrum you've got stories focused on soldiers holding their guts inside their bodies while everything around them explodes, on the other end you've got dour boring men in suits talking in meeting rooms and discussing general admiral strategic shits. There's a lot of stages between two points, like perspectives of tank gunners, fighter pilots, U-boat captains in space, warship dudes, special forces guys crawling around in the jungles and eating shits. But, you know, the story can only focus on the misadventures of only so many military mangs.

I think I'd rather have an exciting balls to the wall ultraviolent story focusing on some infantry shitpiece fighting cyberdemonoids from space hell, rather than some story focusing on dour guys in suits in a meeting room all the damn fucking time.

It's also a consequence of blending the traditional heroic narrative (farmer boy gets magic sword, stabs dragons in the guts, kills sorceror, has adventures) and tactical strategic military realities. A realistic military story, heck a realistic story in general (not necessarily military fiction), isn't conducive to focusing on one lone protagonists killing the fuck out of all his enemies. And folks like reading about their badass protagonists killing the fuck out of fools.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by 18-Till-I-Die »

Thing is though, it IS possible to do combined arms in sci-fi, I've seen it done from time to time in the 40k novels. A lot of people mainly fall back on dudes in power armor though because a lot of people think that's all there is...ineterestingly, some of the Dale Brown novels (it counts as sci-fi) have dudes in power armor AND fairly good examples of air and land warfare, though mainly to shoehorn in the wiz-bang airforce tech stuff that his novels revolve around.

Really though, I can see how they wouldn't want to fire ICBMs that can devastate city blocks on a valuable piece of infrastructure. That part is perfectly logical--it'd be like burning down a building to keep someone from capturing it, kind of defeats the purpose.

THAT however does not excuse bullshit like: why not send in an IFV or fifty to help the infantry and provide transport. I mean, I have never read this series so correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume most armies have armored transport in any modern military...so send them in. A light armored vehicle, maybe mounting, say, the space equivalent of a 30mm cannon won't cause any real damage to a spaceport that can't be repaired or ignored in a pinch, and they would provide transport and cover fire for the troops. That's not combined arms tactics--that's DRAGOONS, that's tactics 1000 years old by now! Take note this also negates the snow problem because now you can basically drive them up to the door and drop them off like kids heading to soccer practice.

And I won't even comment on the "lets send green recruits against seasoned veterans of multiple battles because clearly this is the ONLY efficient way to train them how to function under fire" thing because that's just fucking silly. I'm serious that's literally silly, as in I'm almost half-incredulous it happened because that's so insane I don't even know how any writer could have even concieved of it. They didn't even do that back during WWI, that I know of, and back then infantry tactics consisted of hurling warm bodies at enemy machine gun nests until the enemy soldiers ragequit.
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Re: Tactical Strawmen in MilSF (also 'Clone' series)

Post by Raxmei »

One narrative advantage of power armor and other super-soldier sorts is that it lets you get more scope out of a lower scale engagement. It's hard to describe higher organizational levels in a single cohesive narrative and if you get too high it becomes increasingly unreasonable for the commanding officer to directly engage in combat. Create some novel troop type that's so awesome a single battalion is a match for a division or more of conventional troops and you get to scale back your chain of command quite a bit and keep things at the organizational level that the general audience is most familiar with. As Simon said it also helps a lot if your super troopers are recognizeably infantry since the infantryman's trade is less arcane than the others. Connection with the Posleen war should be obvious.
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