Why Interstellar Armies Might Be Bigger (Or Smaller) Than You Think

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[@Donald5557_]

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[@jkjkrandom]

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[@DavidNaval]

I play this game and I cannot escape the ads or sponsorships gaijin is hunting me

[@pipebomber04]

Roughnecks!

[@gnaskar]

One point that wasn't brought up: On the offensive, you have the bottleneck of interstellar travel to deal with. If interstellar travel is expensive, complicated, or risky, you're likely to see smaller, more elite units used in expeditionary forces. Your mobile forces are going to be the best you can make them on a ton for ton basis.

[@reganator5000]

The risk and unreliability is also responsible for 40k's tendency towards... weird amounts of military. The Guard have effectively unlimited men to feed into a slowly progressing meat grinder, to the point that in some theatres they sub out food reserves for more guardsmen and let the orks do the food processing. Marines, on the other hand, deploy fast and in numbers so much smaller as to be otherwise absurd, but are capable of more rapid reaction as a fully mobilised patrol force that is generally making much shorter, more reliably interstellar trips. In short, marines are unlikely to arrive a decade after (or before) the conflict they are responding to, which can be a problem for guard/crusade fleets covering significant distance.

[@pougetguillaume4632]

Agreed offensive armies WILL have spaceborn firesupport and will be limited by supply and carry capacity of transport, you do not want a bunch of conscript on the ground and knowing how strenuous on logistic a landing is you want your cream of the crop, the guys that hit the hardest pound for pound. Offensive warfare is incredibly more complex than defensive. Holding a trench or a bunker is easy compared to mobile warfare. If you are underequipped, you won't have the vehicles to move in the first place and will get mowed down, if you are undertrained you will run away or let yourself be pinned at the first trouble in sight, if you are ill commanded you will break your teeth on the first line of defense since you won't move as part of a formation but rather as a singular individual. Usually it's much better to have a well supported and supplied army than a larger and less supplied and supported one especially offensively. Offensive warfare is a completly different beast from defensive an untrained conscript CANNOT go on the offensive unless it's human wave you're after (don't) Planetary invasion is like a beach landing you need to be as light as humanely possible and carry as much punch in that package, what mass you lack need to be supplemented by extensive fire support. Even once you're dug in you still don't want conscript, because your ennemy probably has ways to shoot down your transport and there is diminishing returns: the more weapons and grunts you have on the ground the more supply of all type they consume and don't expect to get refueled at a local gas station. You only start needing conscript when you've managed to rout the ennemy on a continental scale and therefore cleaned most of the nearby ground to space defenses for your transport. Then You start holding ground and conscripts free your actually good troops to go elsewhere. I honestly expect attacking armies to be considerably smaller than defenders. The point being that the attacker only needs to be strong enough at the single point it chose to land (probably tried several landings tho) whereas your ennemy is relatively static due to your space force's firepower and their own lack of combat ready units. Early on you can have only 100 000 attacking soldiers vs 25 million defenders and still win because there's only 1 million defenders with simple guns and conventional powered tanks where it actually matters vs the attackers in 100 000 killbots/cyborg/supersoldiers in power armor and nuclear powered tanks When it's 1vs10 but the one guy is a spartan II with orbital bombardement support against 10 ODST and their pelican i don't care how good the ODST are they're in for a rough time. Assuming there are 10 ODST and not just 1 with 7 marines and 2 civilians with ak 47 instead I think the number of attacker only starts catching up with the defender when they start securing planetside logistics, like deploying ship factories on the ground powered by a ship fusion reactor and getting access to farming goods by local producer (big if). The problem of your transport getting shot down is less of a problem as you gain ground and destroy air to space facilities and vehicles but the total tonnage is still a huge problem, when you talk about quadrillions of tons the slightest inefficiency adds up to costing you the ability to maintain 100s of thousand of additional troops.

[@westphalianstallion4293]

Stargates as bottlenecks or basis for your interstellar logistics (and communications) is something thats pretty underused. Being able to deploy all the ressources and abillities of an entire imperium, instantly to every part of it. And there is no more modular weapon you can have than having a stargate on your ship. It can become the deathstar or troopdeployer in an instand. Dont focus on the guard and marines in 40k exclusively, different formes of FTL travel make a lot of the power scaling in the bigger lore. Making FTL travel only inaccessable for machines/AI.(warp/slipstream etc.) really balances the dynamics between machines and organic organisms.

[@nizam5568]

Personally I thought it would be the other way around, as if it takes a huge amount of energy to move between systems you might as well pack massive armies and armadas rather than small strike teams

[@shorewall]

@@nizam5568 I think it's a little of both. Planets have access to way more resources than most fleets, and can use the planet itself as armor. And they can generate power for gigantic anti space cannons and guns. So a planet isn't a sitting duck. Depending on the offensive aims, you would need a spearhead to land and take out those anti space cannons, or planetary shields, or capture leadership, etc. That would require special forces and fire support. If that's all, then that's all. But if you want to control the planet, then you need a lot of grunts to hold the key parts, like space ports, resource extraction operations, leadership, etc.

[@dogloversrule8476]

I’ve imagined interstellar warfare as basically being the US island hopping campaign during World War II on a galactic scale

[@twisted_fo0l]

That's belt combat (Read unincorperated war)

[@rayhans7887]

Great crusade

[@enigma3383]

Same basically

[@shep9231]

the sheer scale of numbers you would require for such a campaign is utterly insane. yoiu'd need numbers so high its not worth it or you would need other options.

[@enigma3383]

@@shep9231 I mean in an interstellar war you have whole planets worth of people to recruit from so I mean it would definitely balance out

[@DubGathoni]

One other thing to consider: the inertia of combat formations. As the formation gets smaller, the loss of any one part of that formation is greater than if the same loss had been incurred by a larger formation. With a smaller, more highly trained force, any loss gets increasingly hard to replace. Thats why for example on US Navy ships, all crew members are taught skills like firefighting, even if there are specialist teams trained for that role. Even if that team is lost, then effective firefighting can continue regardless.

[@SudrianTales]

And to see what happens when there's no backup, see USS Forrestal. The crew was corageous but without the damage control team, they almost doomed the ship with their efforts

[@shadewolf0075]

Personally I think interstellar militaries will be like earth’s in the killzone games. One really advanced force will all the best tech that responds to threats and incursions and a lot of less advanced forces designed to defend planets long enough for earth to respond

[@Brother_O4TS]

That is basically how the Imperium operated in the Great Crusade

[@sagenod440]

Sounds exactly like the Imperium in 40k, the worst possible timeline

[@firestorm165]

@@sagenod440Or how the soviet union set up their satellite states

[@MrMarinus18]

A lot of the idea comes from WW1 where heavy infantry was shown to be obsolete. Despite what many people think "heavy" infantry refers more to tactical role than equipment. In the past you had heavy infantry who fought on the front lines on the battlefield and light infantry who fought along the sides of the rear. In WW1 it became obvious that large infantry formations out in the open were unviable and that light infantry was the way forward. Instead of heavy infantry formation you had squats of light infantry and support personal for the tanks and for artillery and the like. But large static units were just too vulnerable. This mindset continued into WW2 where even though the total size of armies was very large the maneuver units continued to shrink.

[@Hyde-dg7ef]

That's literally how the imperial military operates The imperial guard is the "weaker" army meant to hold line while the astartes are the super elites

[@alasiadarthe001actual9]

According to one military theory main reason for ground troops is to occupy and control territory. If your after mineral or agricultural resources you need a garrison force. If your not concerned with the territory or its resources you can deploy a smaller force to achieve your objectives. In my sci-fi setting different armies have different structures for what their overall objectives.

[@geeljire9247]

Qem

[@gokbay3057]

@@VunderGuy I don't agree with the idea that Spaceships become the infantry in an interstellar setting. That is the same sort of mindset that gave us the irrational idea that just an Air Force would be enough to win all wars and that Ground Forces have effectively become obsolete. Which is obviously not the case. Even if you can win a war solely with air power you can't control territory solely with aircraft and same goes for spacecraft as well.

[@AkselGAL]

@@gokbay3057 yea, but an advanced civilisation could just park some robotic capital ships in orbit, bombing military resistance. Letting some AI control the economy and communication. And who cares in such a szenario, when a world far away gets glassed by fusion bombs, because they were to stupid to kneel. It is a completly different game, when you don't share a planet and as such don't share the consequences of the usage of weapons of mass destruction.

[@pogwog5309]

I've been working on a military sci-fi project for a while now, with my background being hobby level, if obsessive, defense economics and military history, with me now going to university to do military history. Keep in mind, the take I came up with also reflects what I think is cool, because I'm not gonna write something I don't enjoy The size of interstellar armies compared to our day has, of course, expanded. I mean by the late 28th century, where most of the setting is time-wise, we're talking about countries controlling thousands of worlds, trillions of people, and with GDPs measured in numbers like "sextillion". Thus, while land armies have moved somewhat towards a more amphibious focus, they have, in the end, expanded, and further mechanized, and further become more densely supported by artillery and combat air power, and further integrated naval assets, now spaceborne. The reason orbital bombardment in this world doesn't completely override the existence of land armies is severalfold. Firstoff, no one wants to be the guy that orders the death of 10 billion people by glassing an urbanized planet. Humans, and humanlike aliens, tend to avoid having to kill others, see me not having killed anyone, and this still applies to soldiers and commanders. Two, things on planets tend to be the things we fight over. A planet means people, it means industry, it means culture, things your country is most likely a lot more interested in capturing intact, or at the very least battle damaged, than as a molten rock. At the end of the day wars are generally still fought over territory and resources, destroying the thing you're trying to capture isn't a strategically sound move. Also, if you glass a planet, glassing is now fair game, its an escalation. Which means, if another country say takes some of your territory, its considered a fair play for them to start glassing your shit. The longest lived empire in history fell after making this mistake and the people they were fighting glassed a three digit number of their planets, killing a respectable portion of their population, and therefore waging a lightning naval campaign not having to worry about taking planets, sending a message they take no shit, and threatening to glass the capital world unless the empire surrendered. However, planets are a problem, because if the enemy has a planet in your supply lines, they can use it as everything from a listening post to a place to conduct airstrikes against your supply lines from. Either you endure constant attacks on your rear lines, or you take the planet. Most planetary battles are rather fast, involves landing a few divisions of marines against a lightly defended world that does something like farming. It's the equivalent of the entire 82nd Airborne Division landing on a random town in rural Iowa and taking the county. The real issues is when you get to large, populated, defended worlds. A battle for a major planet might involve a number of soldiers in the billions, not including spaceborne assets, which includes most logistical assets, a lot of air power, naval support, command assets, things like that. And, for countries who's standing armies might reach 12 digit numbers, there's no real way you can run out of soldiers to put on planets as such, you have to fight until, through quantity, quality or tactics, you push back the enemy and they start to withdraw. The armies of the future in quality are just as varied as those of our day. Many forces tend to go for a middle ground, high quality yet numerous troops, with a few specialist units. The Endari Empire formed its army out of peasants to use as cannon fodder to take hits for the noble-led Marines and Telanir (religious paramilitary), and thus has very low quality army troops, though high quality Marines. The Expharnian Sovereign State conversely has been under near complete galactic sanctions for several centuries and hasn't been able to build up the defense industry necessary for a high quality force, they can produce astronomical amounts of weapons but they don't have what they need to make weapons well, resulting in a force overreliant on vast amounts of armour and artillery combined with cheap troops for holding the line, hoping to use advantages of overwhelming supporting firepower even if no piece is directly that good. The Njaran Confederation maintains a relatively small standing army, incredibly small compared to its standing navy and air force units, but these forces are very high quality and, in the event of another invasion of Njara, are supported by mobilizations of Njaran citizens into militias in the trillions, with entire cities turning into fortresses as their citizens put down the tools of their trades and take up arms. But these are all strategies we've seen in our world over the centuries, none of that is new, just the scale and technology is.

[@comentnine1574]

Where can we see this project of yours?

[@trevormiller7527]

Why was the expharnian sovereign state sanctioned?

[@vyran7044]

my problem with the "small hadfull of elites" aproche is twofold. 1) Yes you can fairly effectively strike a single target. (per squad/formation) but anything even remotely larger than a mining outpost WILL have multiple points of importance. Small groups in this case means delays and time for the enemy to reinforce/fortify these positions. And that is ignoring the logistical nightmare that comes with transporting small insergence groups across a still mostly hostile planet to strike the next target. (Imagine a russian speznatz team with the goal to strike the white house, pentagon, fort bragg and fort cambell it would be a nightmare and take forever... and that is within a single country. Now imagine that same team having to strike against targets in china, japan, germany, and the kongo...) 2) All you can do with a small team are raids, seek and destroy or similar small scale/objective mission. What you CAN NOT do is HOLD any terretory. let alone keep an occupied population under controll. And again this problem scales exponentially with the size of the target. Can a 5 man squad hold a single remote mining outpost? sure. A medium sized space station? tricky. A modern industrial planet? in your dreams. A Scify metropolis (Think 40k hivecitys on the small scale or Star Wars Corrusant for large scale)? Not even in your wildest dreams...

[@sombodi200]

Exactly why I think most armies in space will be large. 10 to 100k. Because an army also have to account for loses. What if this small elite force fail in their target and take too many loses. That means all ground operations have to stop and the ship have to return all the way home to get more troops.

[@highlorddarkstar]

@@sombodi200depending on the constraints, 100k IS the small, elite force. On a planetary scale it is a tiny number.

[@skepticalmagos_101]

​​@@sombodi20010k ? You mean 10 million. 😂 you're NOT going to hold a planet with thousands... unless you orbital fire support at 24/7. 😂

[@vyran7044]

@@skepticalmagos_101 And are willing to commit warcrimes... Pretty much any kind of orbital bombardment will be indiscriminate large scale destruction.

[@bright_light6474]

@@skepticalmagos_101 There's approximately 27 million army personnel in the world, as of 2020, according to the World Bank... You gotta pump that up even more... Maybe, 30-50 M will probably do, with a 100 M on reserve... Per planet...

[@quinnsoutar2196]

I think a key factor is an extension of the tooth-to-tail ratio. All martial hardware takes some amount of resources, capital, and labor to produce. The performance of hardware relative to the investment to produce it, and its efficacy against a foe places constraints on the force you can equip. Similarly, the amount of support it takes, and ability to meet that limits what can fielded at a given time. So if you have a form of warfare that totally outclasses any alternative but is very intensive to produce and support, armies are likely to be much smaller. Great example are medieval armies, where supplying forces larger than several thousand is extraordinarily difficult (nevermind how hard it is to kill a knight in his extremely expensive yet effective armor). Alternately, there's WW2 - wherein hardware is comparatively cheap and cost doesn't really equate much to how effective it is. So you get titanic armies with huge industrial mobilization (since you don't need 80-90% of your population farming anymore). Whereas today, the jury is out. Its not clear how much our far more specialized industries can be mobilized, and uber-expensive hardware is highly effective but can also be knocked out really easily by far cheaper gear. Yet old mainstays like artillery and infantry remain crucial and effective in large numbers. However, with enerything that's new trench warfare somehow keeps cropping up. And that's before nukes become a question - "why waste money on an army when we can unleash a mutual apocalypse on an invader?" (Not the best idea that, but it could make for a fun story with tense decisions on where the doomsday line is drawn with an aggressor) For creating worlds, I think this is a really fun corner to explore in order to arrive novel/interesting military dynamics.

[@jonathanpfeffer3716]

Slight point of disagreement, in that nowadays I think it’s still pretty clear that technology gaps (assuming somewhat competent militaries) can make really really outsized differences in war fighting capacity, and the margin only seems to be growing. Modern equipment can really create a see it shoot it scenario, assuming somewhat deep ammunition reserves.

[@charleshurst1015]

It all depends on the context. If you're talking about an Interstellar Raid, you're gonna want as small a force as possible to maximize mobility. If you're invading a planet to forcibly subjugate it, you're talking about a long-term occupation, so you want as many people and as much stuff as you can get. More importantly, the logistics of Interstellar travel (or even Interplanetary travel) will determine EVERYTHING!! 😂

[@damonedrington3453]

Assuming interstellar travel is (probably) very difficult, an invasion of another planet would be similar to D-Day with a smaller elite force securing a beachhead, probably on a moon somewhere in the system where their navy has superiority. Then you bring in the more standard ground troops

[@charleshurst1015]

@@damonedrington3453 The Normandy landing Force was enormous - 7 Divisions on the beaches and 3 Airborne Divisions. Granted, there were a lot more Divisions in the Army at the time, but a force that requires 3 Corp level headquarters to provide C2 isn't small no matter what 😅. I think you're picturing something more along the lines of a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is (typically) a single Infantry Battalion that's got a massive amount of artillery and air support behind it. Three MEU trains specifically for forced entry, amphibious operations and can (theoretically) hit any beach in the world within 24 hours of getting the greenlight. If you're conducting an Interstellar Raid, that MEU might be all you need. If you're planning to stay on that planet indefinitely, then it would be what you describe.

[@damonedrington3453]

@@charleshurst1015 well no, I mean small because normandy, while definitely big, involved about 150,000 allied troops in the initial beachhead, which was a small portion of allied forces of tens of millions. Much like my example, an objectively sizable expeditionary force that is overall a small portion of the army meant to secure a beachhead for said army to land on afterwards

[@charleshurst1015]

@@damonedrington3453 Fair enough - it's still going to come down to end goal though. If the end goal is the invasion and subjugation of a planet, then your example is exactly what would have to happen. The beach head might not be a moon, but there would be a beach-head that serves as your staging area for subsequent invasion waves. If the end goal is to destroy 1 or 2 key installations, then your attack force is going to be much smaller, to better facilitate infiltration and exfiltration. I think we're on the same wavelength about interstellar conflict being a logistics nightmare though 😅

[@damonedrington3453]

@@charleshurst1015 well to be fully truthful, in a universe of interstellar empires, the interconnectivity of our world is likely to scale up. If you wanted to invade Japan today for example, you wouldn’t do a massive land invasion and costly land war. You’d destroy their navy and Air Force and essentially siege the island. In a solar scale, planets are basically giant islands in the sea of space. Invading a planet of billions would take armies numbering in the tens of millions easily- why do that when you can park in orbit and starve the planet? The future of warfare might, ironically, loop back into siege warfare of the medieval period

[@mcintoshpc]

I think the biggest problem is trans-orbital deployment and recovery, *especially* of larger assets. Moving dozens of tanks, SPGs, other AFVs, trucks etc. down to a planet’s surface and especially back to orbit has gotta be a colossal pain

[@carboneagle]

I would expect vehicles to be made with the expectation that they're staying on the planet. Unless you have multiple Orbital elevators (or equivalent) it's probably cheaper to build a new vehicle in an automated facility already in space.

[@SlavGod47]

This is one of the biggest issues I have with the massive mechs and tanks a lot of scifi universes seem to really like. Imagine trying to ship a Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte to, say, an M1 Abrams or T-90 halfway across the globe.

[@Jiub_SN]

@@SlavGod47just put it in a space plane, by the time we fight interstellar wars I doubt we'll have an issue with getting things off of the ground. Honestly I'd be surprised if warfare wasn't focused on true ATVs that can function as fighters in space/the air and hover tanks in the ground, or art the very least hover land combat craft that can enter and leave orbit

[@AGoodOldRebel]

​@SlavGod47 Space transport is actually one reason you might invest in massive high-performance vehicles (assuming the technology and terrain allows it). A planet is likely to have larger and well fortified forces during the opening phases of combat, because they are right next to their factories and cities. Having extremely powerful vehicles not only reduces casualties during the initial landing (the riskiest part of Amphibious Assaults), but also counters the cheap standard units of the enemy with something the enemy likely can't afford to deploy on every at-risk world. Basically, while giant tanks and SPGs are unlikely as standard units, a handful of hyper-powerful breakthrough Tanks and Howitzers would make sense (obviously asjusted for setting/time period).

[@OneOddFellow]

The third situation you posited reminds me a lot of Cold War Sweden and Finland (or modern Finland, for that matter, at least until very recently, sorta) with a relatively elite standing force coupled with a significant pre-trained reserve of conscripts. As you alluded to, an aspect of both IRL examples is that during the cold war, both attempted to maintain a position of neutrality between two major rivaling powers: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. While they did maintain some connections with either faction, with the Swedes maintaining relatively cordial relations with NATO during the Cold War and Finland operating a significant amount Soviet Equipment in spite of their historical disdain for Russia; both refused to take a hard stance with regards to the Cold War, resulting in both being wholly committed to being responsible for their own defense, not wanting to rely on any outside help to ward off an invasion. The challenge defending oneself against a military superpower as a relatively small nation necessitates the adoption of very _unconventional_ doctrines, with associated equipment, planning and strategy. To use the example of military equipment, take the Swedish S-Tank or Viggen strike aircraft; both incredibly unique designs conceived to suit the demands of a incredibly specific defensive doctrine. This, I think, posits a wonderful opportunity for worldbuilders, in fleshing-out the doctrine, tactics and strategy of the powers of their setting.

[@LENZ5369]

An extremely important factor was nearly completely omitted: the requirements for higher tech weaponry -namely the much higher resource/cost of manufacturer/use/maintenance and the increasingly intellectual/technical skills and knowledge to do so. You just have to look at the evolution of military aircraft and tanks -they have only gotten increasingly expensive; we went from being able to repurpose car factories and seamstresses to needed dedicated chains of factories and specialized experts. With some training; someone with experience operating/maintaining/repairing heavy vehicles or machinery -used to be able to do the same with tanks (and early aircraft), modern tanks (and aircraft) increasing need to be sent to special facilities. Even infantry will not be spared; new optics and 'gun systems' are getting increasingly complex/expensive, tactical drones and electronic warfare are increasingly vital, there's also all that real time command and intel networking stuff. The higher and more complex your military's tech; the fewer resources, manufacturing capacity and people will be eligible -for said military.

[@duitk]

For now yes, but we don't know how technology will affect industrial production and ease of use of future weapons. AI and robotics may make production increase massively, improvements in technology may lead to easier and faster learning of new skills. For example what if in the far future you could download information into someone's brain? Training time could br massively reduced. Truthfully doing these sort of predictions is impossible.

[@EyeOfMagnus4E201]

⁠​⁠@@duitkTo build on your AI and robotics, besides production, if a civilization can mostly or fully automate its military like the CIS from Star Wars, personnel issues aren’t a problem because you can produce as many “soldiers” (with self-aware vehicles and even starships perhaps counting as “soldiers”) as your resources allow and download whatever skills your soldiers need into every soldier/vehicle/ship. Hopefully the you don’t end up with a Cylon/Skynet situation, though….

[@Jiub_SN]

That's what asteroid mining and ai/robotics is for though isn't it? True AI would mean adjusting assembly lines would be super easy, and I doubt our descendants won't develop things that make factories capable of producing literally anything that's needex

[@Jiub_SN]

@@EyeOfMagnus4E201honestly I doubt humanity will go full AI for combat, we've had too many horror films and other media at this point. Either that's psychological and we'll always be terrified of that situation and thus it'll never happen or those initial anti-AI media have made the caution last

[@LENZ5369]

@@Jiub_SN If by 'true AI' you mean 'general purpose AI' (and not LLMs), AFAIK; no one has solid evidence that such a thing is even possible -and TBF; even if it is; it would be a 'technological singularity' class development, think near infinite energy, immortality drugs or startrek replicators. ...these types of tech change what it means to be human, so our very concept of 'war' or even war itself will be unrecognizable/obsolete. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a 'god tier' advancement to have such a small/insignificant/restricted impact on a 'lower tier' near future setting.

[@MrMarinus18]

4:30 Though it's more than that though. While the total size of armies in WW2 was very large the units within those armies was much smaller than in WW1. Divisions existed mostly as a strategic unit rather than a tactical one. This had continued to be the trend of ever smaller and more autonomous units as large formations out in the open were easily wiped out by modern technology. So there was a real sense that in the 21th century large formations of tanks were as obsolete as large formations of infantry were in the beginning of the 20th century. WW1 was the end of heavy infantry as they just were too vulnerable to machine guns and artillery. Infantry switched roles from fighting on the open battlefield to securing objectives and capturing ground. It were usually the tanks and other vehicles that did the fighting in pitched battle.

[@MM22966]

But then you have cases like the fall of the Bronze age, or the Napoleonic Wars, where that trend reversed itself to favor much larger "cheaper" units.

[@MrMarinus18]

@@MM22966 The Napoleonic wars actually saw a reduction in unit size combined with an increase in army size. Something later wars saw as well. A large but decentralized army is by far the most effective fighting force but it's very difficult and expensive to operate, especially in peace time. WW1 though saw large formations being abandoned entirely as they were too vulnerable to artillery.

[@MrMarinus18]

@@MM22966 It's important to keep in mind I'm talking about units, not total army size. While army size kept expanding in WW1 unit size kept shrinking. They just had more and more units. Even within units the armies became more and more decentralized with lower ranked officers being given more and more autonomy. With modern technology the power of a small unit was expanded massively. In the past small elite units weren't really used as they couldn't do that much. However with machine guns and vehicles a small elite unit in the right place at the right time could easily defeat a force many times it's size.

[@mikh4815]

You are very wrong. Perhaps what you are writing about took place in the Pacific Theater of Operations due to the peculiarities of local geographical conditions, but this was not observed on the Soviet-German front. The size of the main formations did not decrease here, and strategic operations in Germany were carried out by army groups, and in the USSR by fronts. Each of these strategic formations included dozens of divisions and armies, and their total number could reach several million people, the divisions were purely tactical formations. You are confusing the density of battle formations and the number of personnel of the units. With the development of weapons, the density of combat formations is indeed decreasing, armies are fighting in an increasingly sparse formation. This is a very clear and obvious trend. But the size of the divisions themselves does not change much, there is no such trend. Their size is getting bigger or smaller, but there is no military logic here, everything is determined by the political situation and economic constraints.

[@Knightmare919]

Fun fact: In Warhammer 40k the imperial guard are actually the imperium's special forces recruited from planetery defense forces they don't look like special forces because they get throw in the shittiest wars imaginable all the time figthing overpowered enemies.😅

[@ThatSpecificIndividual]

To paraphrase a comissar, the Lasgun is so good it killed 99% of mankinds ememies. Unfortunately, the imperial guard has to fight the 1%.

[@dashiellgillingham4579]

A closer model might be that the PDFs are national guard / territorial defense forces / whatever-your-country-calls-them, the Imperial Guard is their actual army, and Space Marines, Sisters of Battle, and others are all special forces.

[@cocacola4blood365]

Logistics will also play a hand, an army's size depending largely how much of it can be mobilized and moved at any given time. Unless you can move sizable portions of it at a time, a large army is mainly going to be a defensive garrison. And a bloated one if your enemy shares your troop movement limitations.

[@Shinzon23]

Well, considering that you can fit a lot of people on a troop transfer ship now, i dont see that changing much for interstellar war. The main issues would be life support needs to sustain the troops on their way to the battlefield and munitions concerns; if its a slow FTL ship, cryostasis sleeper ships ahoy, if faster FTL, something like the Roger Young from starship troopers. Odds are if you have the tech and jamming isn't a massive issue, i see "expeditionary armies", those sent on interstellar campaigns would be a few brigades of infantry, armor, and aerospace forces, with legions upon legions of drones to act as force multipliers, as you could theoretically harvest local resources to repair or even manufacture drones and other automated systems, but unless you have a way to tranfer consciousness' between bodies with minimal loss of continuity and replacement bodies for them to inhabit, your not replacing your organic troopers anytime soon..

[@mattstorm360]

I like the idea of the transfer consciousness. Reminds me of Dust 514. The immortal soldier that has lived and died in battle.

[@AsmodeusInflect]

Things get real fun when you include future-tech ideas like suspended animation/cryostasis/whatever. All our logistics right now are based on shipping humans involving a logistical train to support N humans the whole time your travelling. So travel time *matters* as does size. But if you can "suspend" logistics in transit, then that changes the dynamics pretty seriously in both directions: moving a huge infantry force can be done over a long period of time with a marginal increase in supply requirements, can be mothballed indefinitely if needed (which would have "fun" political/social consequences), and even impact things like CasEvac - after all, you don't need a hospital if you can just stasis you're wounded until you withdraw (so a world where the war was won 10 years ago, but the winner/loser is still unfreezing and treating casualties for it would be a likely thing - why overwhelm your hospitals, or risk people dying from things you'll be able to treat later).

[@bottasheimfe5750]

well that all certainly explains why the Imperium of Man in 40k has such obscene Numbers in its Imperial Guard, there is literally no peace, there's always conflict somewhere and it happens in enough disparate places with radically different foes that the Imperium literally cannot afford to voluntarily reduce their armed forces

[@ArmorCast]

You also neglected to mention one key point - armies create jobs... LOTS of em! Many nations today maintain a sizeable armed forces despite the lack of credible threats, because it creates jobs for their population and export potential for their national economy

[@sirunklydunk8861]

40K in particular can be really dumb with scale. Entire solar system wide engagements done with less troops than individual WW2 battles

[@gabrielandradeferraz386]

well that is because GW has no clue what any of the numbers in any of the lore mean

[@jacksonhoiland2664]

A rule of thumb I was told to us is just to multiply numbers by 10, so there would be 10x the combatants in any given fight but the same amount of space to better fit how the stories actually go.

[@myduckisonqauck7227]

Common trend in sci-fa, and sci-fi

[@chimera9818]

Normally modern armies has around 1% of their population in reserve at all time, at war time (assuming they don’t conscript anyone capable) it will be around 1/6 of the population in age range of conscription. In empires of trillion it would mean reserves in around ten of billions and active armies in hundreds of billions in war. But some how the imperium and empire with their trillions of people can master armies in the millions at most that most modern military are larger

[@UnknownSquid]

@@myduckisonqauck7227 Also endemic in sci-fi, are countless examples of starships that are 10 to 100 times larger than the largest real warships on Earth, with a total internal volume big enough to contain all the cities on Earth, and yet are crewed by the same or less number of personnel than an IRL naval warship.

[@michaelnmaunder]

I think the main reason that SciFi armies are portrayed as small in TV and movies is due to budget constraints on CGI, actors, or props. SciFi militaries in books tend to be significantly larger. I think that's part of what is giving rise to this notion that future militaries will be small.

[@evildude951]

I think a big factor in military sizes would be the realities of warfare with high-powered artillery and orbital bombardment. Any kind of concentration of force in that situation represents a big attractive target. Smaller, more numerous and elite forces make it more difficult to present a target big enough to justify bringing artillery to bear on it.

[@ryank5424]

I've always assumed that they would be bigger due to the size of the area they would be operating in. And the natural scaling up that would occur when a nation now spans multiple planets and star systems. Then the security situation would help sort out the details.

[@flandomaltrizian4603]

Can confirm: Pizza Hut buffets were the peak of human cultural achievement, against which all else is just a pale shadow

[@damonedrington3453]

I would imagine interstellar invasions would be very similar to naval invasions akin to D-Day or Okinawa- an invasion by more skilled expedition forces to secure a beachhead and allow more standard ground troops to be brought in. You’d also have to gain at least some semblance of naval superiority (preferably supremacy) before trying to invade so the enemy navy isn’t harassing what forces you can bring immediately

[@leesnotbritish5386]

Also consider how tech changes things: dune’s shields bring us back to melee which incentivizes a small amount of elite troops

[@MrJameslupien]

The imperium doesnt have a size probelm because they're more then willing to send troops somewhere drastically undersupplied and with barebones equipment or support

[@Mike5Brown]

I was under the impression that all members of the Imperial Guard were considered elite compared compared to the PDF. Everyone of them would enjoy a nice vacation going though US Army ranger school.

[@ashishchoudhary6982]

It depends on the planet these Imperial Guard are coming from like for example catachan jungle fighters will be a highly effective unit but on the other hand units like Afriel strain suck badly (even when equipped well and made from DNA of heroes of IG [ Imperial Guard ] ), and then there are regiments from feudal planets, regiments which got killed off and forgotten entirely. Yes, IG consists of some of the best fighters of a PDF but that also means that while there are well trained, well equipped regiments present there but there are just as many or more regiments which are less equipped and not trained to a standard you would expect IG to be. PDF of a planet can be trained and equipped well so that would mean special forces level soldiers or it can be a feudal or exceptionally corrupt world with badly trained and badly equipped PDF which means IG regiment drawn from them would be just regular grunts. Useless soldiers can't be sent to serve in IG as that would mean brutal end of the ruler (s) of that planet.

[@MM22966]

There are costs associated with doing something that. As an example, your average new Ranger costs roughly three times what an average 'leg' infantryman does to train & equip. You also drain soldier quality from larger formations as the better soldiers tend to migrate to the elite units where the pay/privileges/missions are better. That's why the US Army only has three (small) battalions of Rangers in its whole force.

[@ashishchoudhary6982]

@@MM22966 Aye, that's why there exists the difference of quality between various regiments of IG.

[@MM22966]

@@ashishchoudhary6982 So some guys get bolt guns, and other guys get bolt guns with scopes, and the first group just seethes with envy?

[@ashishchoudhary6982]

@@MM22966 Yep, some get standard lasguns, helmet, vest and uniform. Others get better lasguns, more armor, better explosives. Ofc both backed up by artillery and tanks. Rich worlds provide much better equipment to their regiment, normal worlds make due with standard gear.

[@JustABalrog]

one reason you might factor into having a smaller army is because trying to maintain an army that can function in the different conditions of planets could prove to be tricky. Things like higher or lower gravity could seriously effect troop performance and the ballistics of their weapons, the lack of an atmosphere means brining along extra equipment and wearing protective suits, and extreme weather could mess with technology calibrated in vastly different environments. Because of this people might stick to other forms of combat instead of focusing on ground battles. Of course you still need to hold territory, and so you still need an army, but it might not be the most effective to have a large army that can't go most places.

[@akotarakz]

Army size depends on the setting. For example: 1) No planetary (or city / industrial zone) shields and no planetary defence cannons - Your fleet is your best weapon. Destroy the enemy fleet, level their cities with the ground. Deploy your small Marine Corps to mop up. Create job opportunities for your population rebuilding your new colony. 2) Planetary / city shields and cannons that can hide beneath those shields and shoot into orbit - Your army is your best weapon for siege. Still, your fleet must be strong enough to destroy the enemy fleet, suffering some ships from planetary cannon fire in the process. After gaining orbital superiority, withdraw your battleships from the side of orbit that is in range of enemy cannons and deploy your million strong expeditionary force to break through the shield and engage in urban warfare. Casualties are expected to be very hight, so you will need to bring reserves to the planet. Your total strenght of your planetary invasion force would be in the millions or around a billion (for average planet, like Earth). Factor in you will be fighting on multiple space fronts (multiple planets) at the same time - your interstellar army should be a few billion or around a trillion (if you are big enough to afford that recruitment pool).

[@argokarrus2731]

Planetary shields and defenses make armies even worse of an option for the attacker, and shields keep the defense network online, defenses (of which are more likely to be missiles or lasers) which will more than annihilate landers trying to bring brave and very suicidal army men to the ground that's poked full of guns.

[@akotarakz]

@@argokarrus2731 Bakhmut begs to differ. With enough men, the army will eventually gain a foothold. Once that is established, reinforcements start poiring in. The Navy just needs to make sure enemy ships don't retake orbit.

[@argokarrus2731]

@@akotarakz Are you truly willing to burn millions in the grinder to secure maybe one landing site from a city's spaceport or sufficient patch of grass? Is your nation and doctrine able to accept the losses? Can your space force even convey that many soldiers and land wave after wave of doomed assaults? Mind you none of this matters since while you feed defenders thousands of men per assault their lines of logistics and wartime production output factories, shielded from orbital attack by a planetary shield, are making more munitions using a planet's resources than you can reasonably bring to bear with a constellation of ships. Moreover a planet's army can still engage dropships coming down, no rule prevents MANPADS from shooting down dropships or SAMs hitting a predicable target. You can't expect your landers to make it when the space force cannot provide ortillery support, nor any aerospace forces (assuming those exist) can suppress air defense of all forms.

[@CatastrophicDisease]

Can I just say that I very much appreciate you noting that Fukuyama didn’t literally mean history is over or no more war. The people who dismiss his theory out of hand without ever reading his work are frustrating.

[@samk522]

True. He was still wrong, but not in the way that people think.

[@doombringer175]

To add another point, the nature of the target/defensive point is going to have major sway over the forces size. Are you attacking/defending a mostly autonomous mining facility operating out of a building about 1 cubicle in size. A small group is fine. Are you trying to attack a world with a population of millions across thousands of miles, it doesn't matter how elite the unit is you need forces to be everywhere.

[@lordofthepies]

I think the main decider comes down to the tech and industrial levels of the governments at war. Equipping a interstellar army with some amount of standardized gear will be a nightmare no matter how you attempt to accomplish it

[@phreakazoith2237]

The good thing about this limitation is: an enemy is about to have the same problem

[@MM22966]

A good example of contrasting army sizes is Europe before the Napoleonic Wars. Europe at that time had relatively small professional militaries that were detached socially and politically from the mass of people they nominally fought for. The officers were the aristocracy and the ordinary soldiers were criminals, destitute farmers, urban poor..anybody that wasn't really useful or were desperate enough to enlist (or were easy to shanghai), Wellington's "...scum of the earth, enlisted for drink". Those armies were instruments to fight semi-formalized wars between the reigning monarchs. Those monarchs did not want or need a huge mass of peasantry armed for total war. They fought for limited objectives, such as trade routes, colonies, or thrones. When the French Revolution occurred, the French Republic did precisely the opposite, and huge masses of nationalistic conscripts (the Levee en masse) swept over the well-trained but far too small professional forces of their rivals, until those rivals started imitating them, and the Napoleonic Wars were fought with armies the size of which Europe had not seen since the days of Rome. But arming their own lower classes simply spread the idea of freedom and revolution further. But that is a sorry for another time.

[@samswann3727]

I think one of the things that sci fi enthusiasts often underestimate is how crucial land based warfare will continue to be, whilst the engagements between fleets will be critical, you cannot simply bombard planets into submission, we have seen that in the real world this doesn’t work, you can always dig deeper, disperse and use defences, and it will always be easier to build ground base defences and weapons than in space where you are less limited by power or size (obviously there is less space on a planet than in space but space ships can only be so big and have so much energy) at some point you will have to deploy ground forces. On our planet there are around 25 million soldiers, and that’s at (mostly) peace time rates. To defeat a force of that size you are looking at needing to deploy a force significantly larger, and even if you can overwhelm it, a massive occupation force is needed, in Iraq it was about 1 nato soldier to 1500 civilians, but on a planet with billions of people you still need troop counts into the millions. Yes technology means you can do more with less but 1 person can only ever be in 1 place at a time, you need sufficient numbers to have a presence.

[@yugioht42]

I think it’s more of a mix of sizes. You must consider the possibility of naval and planetary invasion and also planetary defense. Halo showed this off a little in the books they released. Also Star Wars the clone wars had a huge army for planetary insertion or defending a place. Halo might have had the magnetic accelerator cannon satellites but they didn’t really change much on the battlefield. Star Wars used planetary shields and city shields but it didn’t change the rules of engagement. Small four man combat units were mostly used for certain missions like in and out and taking out certain targets without being seen. The point is the four man team which is the smallest unit is designed for a single mission then getting out fast. Two man teams are exclusive to sniper teams.

[@nathanielmeade5731]

Interstellar army sizes: I'm the true point of the video. Worlds best pizza hut commercial: Are you sure about that.

[@EdricLysharae]

And the combat drones say, "Hi! You're being liberated: Please don't resist."

[@complexemotions338]

One also should consider a few things that could shrink armies, namely the tactical realities of combat at the time, and logistics. If space travel is difficult, you'll probably see defense forces being made larger, while invasion forces are kept smaller and more elite, to compensate for the fact you're struggling to move as many troops. Another thing might be that smaller, more well armed troops may be better at evading modern battle field threats in an environment where conventional grunt work is made obsolete or done through automation, and only special operations find human actors on the ground to be particularly necessary.

[@rachetforsic4442]

Can we get a follow up discussing the "Martial State" continuing on from your last video "Why The Proud Warrior Race Is Doomed To Extinction"

[@Nomadith]

So you either get the Imperial Guard and solar auxilia circa 30k, millions of marines and garrison troops, or you get essentially a mix of naval armsmen and the expanse's marines?sounds amazing either way

[@kerianhuertas1586]

Great video ! As usual the worldbuilding depends on what we want to show.

[@ryanwaits6733]

Everything about speculative militaries in Space Sci-fi depends on how traveling through the vastness of space is dealt with. A setting with Star Wars like hyperspace where distance and time is hatdly a factor is going to look completely different from a hard setting where the speed of light( and practically muxh less)is a hard cap on speed

[@occultatumquaestio5226]

It will be curious to see how the first interplanetary/interstellar might be fought. Though, big or small; if you want peace, prepare for war. And do one's best to have good logistics.

[@jonatand2045]

All we know is that superintelligent machines will be the ones in charge of the war. Their reasons and strategy might be impossible to comprehend, but logistics will remain. They will need fuel and spare parts, but no air or food.

[@thedragondemands5186]

“There might be more full scale Tyranid Hive Fleets than there are planets in this galaxy”

[@EvelynNdenial]

there the saying that quantity has a quality all its own, but in the future where extreme automation, AI, VR training, and/or mind uploading the quality of those mass produced units will be nearly as good as the elite units. you'll be able to conscript your whole population and your AI run planet factories will be able to continuously equip them with kilotons of gear and drones per soldier while the orbital shipyards start spitting out more shipyards that spit out millions of ships.

[@Jagrofes]

TBH I think the wonky numbers for interstellar armies like Star Wars and 40K is mostly because the original numbers were made by writers and artists who had no sense of scale. You can see it a lot in their old work. Like Star Wars/40k used to describe an epic massive war across multiple star systems with front lines stretching for hundreds of kilometres each… fought by like 200 regular infantry on each side. And sometimes it goes the other way, like the old Star Wars books with a single shot from a star fighter outputting energy comparable to multiple kiloton nukes… that just knocks a single guy over.

[@RomusSixgriffe]

'Marky Mark and the Stalingrad Snowmen' goes SO HARD.

[@ckl9390]

I feel that left out of the equation is the use us defensive militias. Relatively inexpensive to train, equip, maintain, and, depending on societal involvement, attacking forces would be met with a defensive force approximately as large as the defender's entire population. This would force the enemy to resort to using large and expensive armies for anything more than "surgical" strikes. Small elite teams could theoretically still fill a role as infiltrators or to assassinate leadership, but any well designed command structure would just have new leaders ready to take their place. This use of Militias or Local Defence Forces was, as far as I am aware, largely what stopped Russia's advance in Ukraine. They were expecting to blow through a single defensive line and for the population to scatter. Instead of capitulating the population in general fought back, town by town and block by block in cities, forcing the attackers to exert considerable effort and spend inordinate cost to gain any ground. With the attackers slowed to a near stop, bogged down by local civil defences among other factors, the regular army could use a smaller mobile force to make significant strikes against a larger foe instead of being committing to a pitched battle they'd likely loose. There is also the Swiss approach where, for most intents and purposes, every adult in the country is a trained marksman ready to be called into active service with minutes warning. Although, I think most Sci-Fi actually focuses on small elite units because it's fundamentally telling a story. Stories are easier to tell about a smaller group of people. Larger groups of people make a setting.

[@tristanlucy5795]

Economics is also a major factor in any armored forces, they can determine how a nation can equip and supply its forces and distribute those means. As if a nation has a need for armed forces is also important.

[@aldraone-mu5yg]

To be honest the ability to move faster than light indicates technology’s that might make conflict obsolete, let alone ground troops.

[@trollsmyth]

The big argument I've heard for smaller armies (or, at least, operational units) is that orbital bombardment makes clumping together as bad an idea for your army as drones and artillery make clumping up you squad. Everything needs to be more spread out to avoid being taken out in a single bombardment; being spread out means each individual unit needs to be able to act with greater autonomy; needing to act with greater autonomy means highly trained individuals empowered to seize the initiative and smart enough to know which initiatives to seize. Short of a huge leap forward in training tech, this means you might be able to use conscripts to hold territory that is unlikely to be threatened by orbital bombardment, but they'd be useless on the front lines.

[@TheMajorActual]

1. Technology can radically change the shape of forces, and what they are capable of. 2. The US and NATO have discovered, much to their horror, that concentrating on _Low Intensity Conflict_ to the near-exclusion of everything else, for two decades, causes a loss of institutional memory - and when a "near-peer opponent" suddenly flexes its conventional, large-scale muscles, those small, very elite teams can only do so much against an opponent that can contest the full spectrum of the battlespace. 3. As well, as both NATO and Israel have rather rudely discovered, the old saying remains true: _Quantity has a quality all its own._

[@AdotLOM]

The other issue is that "elite" and "low-intensity COIN" warfare training literally falls apart as soon as opposing infantry with a modicum of modern training is on the other side. Everything from room clearing, breaching and movement that is covered in western manuals doesn't work to provide any advantage when a persistent and well-organized opposition is putting down a similar volume of effective fire in your direction - much of this is down to the ignorant assumptions that the enemy doesn't know how to spot you out in the open and exposed, doesn't know what suppressive fire can achieve, and doesn't know how to hold angles and plan movement. None of this applies to said "near-peer opponent", because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to take ground in urban areas of this specific "Eastern-European country". That and the fact that trench warfare, which consists the majority of infantry combat, completely invalidates all these skills and has become completely alien to western planners to the point of being caught in a rutt when Leopard and Challenger tanks with Bradley's were unable to affect what essentially amounted to mobile light defenses crewed by outnumbered motorized rifle brigades in the south of said country. As much as western OSINT has been forced to admit the superiority in "near-peer opponent" industrial firepower, they still can't bring themselves to accept that the training of their soldiers has not translated into unit-level tactical supremacy either, even in the urban environments of this conflict when looking at how many of these have fallen and continue to fall. The fact that western mercenaries quickly stopped gloating about what little they achieved in the field, and started running away to "rear guard" bar and brothel batallions or returned home in body bags also goes to illustrate this point.

[@zhcultivator]

Please make a video on why Archaeological Explorations don't happen a lot in fantasy settings regarding the prehistory and protohistoric origins/cultures in the protohistory of Fantasy races in fantasy settings generally.

[@RiceWD05]

There is the one thing that a lot of Sci-Fi writers tend to ignore: to hold a planet you need more than just the hold the high oribitals, you also need to put boots on the ground. And 'small elite formations' aren't going to cut it

[@boosterh1113]

True, but that mostly falls into the realm of police work. The idea is that your Space Navy pounds any large, conventional ground force and their supporting infrastructure into dust from orbit, while your highly trained, lavishly equipped Special Forces (Space Marines, Drop Troopers, Mobile Infantry, etc.) strike key nodes where you want to minimize collateral damage, and then surround and eliminate any conventional remnants too small to be worth an orbital strike. After that, you don't need soldiers, you need police officers. You need beat cops to walk the street and knock on (or kick down) doors to monitor the populace, you need detectives to uncover and track the resistance networks to eliminate their leadership and logistical capabilities, and you need SWAT teams to defeat any small group of insurgents that get their hands on enough firepower and training/experience to be too dangerous for your beat cops to handle. If the resistance ever gets big and capable enough to defeat the SWAT teams and push the beat cops out of a defined geographic area (like a town or large parts of a city), then it is time for the Navy & Drop Troops to come back and treat them to another round of Shock & Awe. The middle ground of the regular army is less necessary, because the roles of the regular army (to take territory in the face of resistance, and to hold territory in the face of attack) is obsoleted by the existence of a Space Navy that can both control all access on and off world and dominate any ground-bound forces with orbital forces. The only things I can think of that would necessitate the creation of a large scale regular army (as opposed to small elite special forces or lightly equipped paramilitary gendarmes) is if either: A. There was some way of attacking a planet with ground forces without them being subject to interdiction in space (e.g. a large scale Stargate-type network, or when all space travel is provided by a scrupulously neutral third party, like in Dune). In this case, the army's old job of "take & hold ground" becomes relevant again, because they can attack/be attacked without the Navy doing all the heavy lifting beforehand. B. Ground Forces have access to sufficiently powerful and widely available ground-to-space weapons that they can realistically defend themselves against a foe that has orbital dominance, even in the absence of their own space forces. The existence of gravity, and the speed of orbital movement vs surface movement would argue against this, but something like the Bug's Bio-Plasma Beetles from Starship Troopers might exist. C. There exists some incredibly large and reasonably resilient, but very important infrastructure. Something so big that it can conceal/protect entire brigades or divisions, so important that you aren't willing to destroy it from orbit to get at those troops, and so tough that it will survive the high intensity urban combat that will result when you send your own brigades/divisions in to deal with those troops the hard way (e.g. the Hive Cities from 40K).

[@henryward5457]

​@@boosterh1113you are missing the situation of an insurgency. An armed and hostile force mixing with/supported by the local population. Bombardment is too destructive and police too weak. You need a moderately protected force that can defeat freedom fighters without causing genocide. In other words, an army.

[@V.B.Squire]

The reason we only see small units in Sci fi is because the plot focus on characters, but I can see war in space being so completely dependent on Ships even more so than current Marines depend on the navy that the ability to crew, capture, defend and repair them means soldiers would need to be Sailors more like seal teams and boarding parties than Marines. Although I like 40k SW and ST in that order Starfleet Security and belter pirates is probably more likely than the other 2 armies

[@rpk321]

Depend on the objectives, threat environment, and political landscape in short. Also adding another one Logistic and lift capacity.

[@nsr-ints]

Warp rushing a planet might be the best tactic for me. Drop out of warp within a gravity well with an old ship, using the entire dang thing as a drop pod, and beaching the thing on the surface, using it as a fire base, and by dropping out wihtin minimal range. This is what happened during the Cardassian border wars.

[@nsr-ints]

But then we see that during the Dominion war, massed formations, fleets numbering in the hundreds, and the number of fleets numbers in the thirtys. During the Cardassian border war, the UFP is a superpower. The Cardassians was basically fighting a bunch of 2nd rate ships of peacekeeping forces. However, during the Dominion war, they're facing an equal, or even slightly superior fleet, so Starfleet, normally having a few hundred ships on active patrol, so Starfleet fell back, trading territory for time to mobilise reservists and get the ships refitted on a war footing.

[@nyeti7759]

Dear Templin analysts: "exponential" describes a rate of change, not a difference between two numbers. If you want to highlight how big a difference is you can say something like "orders of magnitude larger". That pedantry aside, excellent video. I always appreciate your focus on geopolitics (exo-politics?) as setting the stage for the cool battles with lasers.

[@TemplinInstitute]

In common language and informal communication, people sometimes use the term "exponentially larger" to convey a significant difference in size or magnitude between two objects. While it may not be the most precise usage of the term, it is a common way for people to emphasize that one thing is much larger than another. In such cases, people are not necessarily discussing mathematical or scientific exponential growth but rather using the term loosely for emphasis.

[@boobah5643]

@@TemplinInstitute Well, if you want to literally kneecap words by smearing their definitions across vaguely similar concepts, instead of preserving their unique definitions, I can't stop you. (Eww. And now I need to go take a shower...)

[@levitschetter5288]

Another factor is occupation. The us military currently estimates around 15? (idr the number, may be much higher) civilians to 1 soldier, and while some technologies may increase this, but it's hard to maintain the moral high ground if your glassing cities from orbit. So if you want to capture and hold territory, you need a large force to defend and counter insurgents

[@DanielSan1776]

*Marky Mark and the Stalingrad SnowMen* I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a better ad

[@Viguier89]

Nice video. But I also think army size in a case of an Interstellar conflict would also depend on transport capacity. Nowadays Russia has a large army, but they cannot project forces too far from their countries. Having a large army could be useful for defense, but useless for attack if you can't transport them to a different planet. I agree when you said that future armies will probably be composed of combat ships with limited extra professional marines. (Like Star Trek or Mass Effect.)

[@avsbes98]

I think one of the most important limiting factors is also the scope of the setting and the technological limitations inside the setting. If getting people across space is still quite difficult and resource-intensive that will vastly limit the size of ground forces and thus also what objectives they can achieve. If we look at the early SGC for example (ignoring the rest of the US mIlitary for the Moment), it simply can't field a large army, because its transport option is an extremely limiting factor. they can only open this small wormhole and keep it open for a few minutes. if they really really hurry, they could probably get a few hundred people through with somewhat light equipment (looking at Atlantis). Getting even a tank platoon through this would be a nightmare. Heavy Airsupport is also pretty much a no-go. thus it is almost completely limited to these small-scale low-intensity strike forces the SG teams are. something like a D-Day style invasion and securing a bridgehead is essentially unthinkable. If we look at Star Wars on the other hand we have an entire (actually multiple) relatively densly populated galaxy(/ies) with Interstellar Travel being commonplace enough that it is easy enough to access that it's an option for refugees. Fielding Large Armies in this universe is entirely possible and leads to Elite Troops like the Stormtroopers numbering in at least the millions, likely the billions (considering the ISDs alone, if each does actually have their standard troop complement would need 1.1 Billion).

[@boobah5643]

One can get far more than "a few hundred" people through a stargate in the thirty-eight minutes you can keep the door open. The SGC's limitation to infantry is a self-imposed one, since no one made them bury it under a mountain. The problems with holding a beachhead is more about the fact that you can't secure all the other places that might choose to dial that stargate and get you taken in the rear, unable to bug out because the gate only goes one way at a time. Which doesn't even get into the difficulty imposed by the SGC's lack of conventional spacelift (a lack their opponents do not share.)

[@stephenwood6663]

So, one thing I found myself thinking about while watching this video was the style of warfare seen in Rogue Trooper. Both the Norts and Southers have big armies, but we don't often *see* forces of more than about company-size - or at least, not all in one place. The reason for this is the proliferation of orbital weapon systems: big formations are just too good a target, the result being that many battles are decided by relatively small groups of soldiers - and, though it's never stated in so many words, the suggestion seems to be that the difficulties in safely amassing the force to make decisive strikes is a large contributor in why the fighting on Nu Earth has been so long and bloody.

[@adrianrafaelmagana804]

Absolutely stellar content, this channel is such a treat. Thank you for your time and creativity.

[@LordCrate-du8zm]

There are about 4 quadrillion Imperial Guardsmen. That’s pretty in line with the standards I have for interstellar armies.

[@klaxxon__]

I think it all depends on how hard all the hardware is to make. IRL armies got smaller because we can't make F35s by the tens of thousands. If you can have automation so advanced that you can drop an automated seed factory on any large asteroid and it rapidly builds itself into a fully integrated shipyard and then starts churning out top tier battleships by the thousands (imagine Supreme Commander but bigger)...you will have armies/fleets of an utterly absurd size, consuming entire star systems to throw at each other in the form of ships and other hardware. On the other hand, if top tier hardware is incredibly hard to make and your mass produced battleships just get erased from reality in seconds by a planet sized quantum technobabble beam projector from a billion miles away, it might be these top tier capabilities that are the truly decisive factor (and might get smaller armies/fleets as a result).

[@Boomerrage32]

Logistics might have to be taken into account as well. One elite soldier eats and drinks as much as one conscript. If you're operating an interstellar army, logistics may or may not be more difficult than they are here on Earth, which might lead to smaller armies emerging.

[@bouhbouh9408]

something that makes armies smaller today is that weapons are more destructive, and kill at longer ranges, and you can now detect the enemy from very far. When one weapon can cover dozens of km of the front, and you can see the enemy coming from km away, and bombs and weapons would kill anything in a large radius, you need your men to be spread enough that a weapon would not kill them all at once, and you need less weapons to cover the same ground. On the other hand, you need more people for support (maning drones, intelligence, building defenses,...) With spacecraft, the battle for the sky becomes very different. It means the artillery suddenly has perfect vision everywhere and can hit everywhere. This means that if you don't have control over the sky, you can only fight a guerilla. A large scale battle would require powerful ground to space weapon to protect your space against vessels and projectiles and weapons, so the invader is forced to send ground troups through this shield. supreme commander style seems the most probable imo if a large scale land battle was to happen.

[@clintcarpentier2424]

One must also take into consideration, how the ground-pounders see their combat effectiveness. America discovered that their humvies were woefully under-armored and under-powered for the conflict they were in. So when the R&D department got the troops the vehicles they needed, why are the troops bootin around on ATV's and small trucks that are little more than roll-cages on wheels? Because they wanna get in and out of a hot-zone, and not fight with doors in the process. Likewise, everyone touts "one shot one kill" is a great line. However, military studies have shown that troops claim to have performance anxiety with one shot at a time. This is proven by the Machine-gunners who spray&pray being more active on the battlefield than their semi-auto counterparts, but... also improve the confidence of said counterparts. Thus more troops are being issued infantry automatic rifles instead of semi-autos.

[@robo5013]

The U.S. military using semi-auto weapons was only for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to minimize civilian casualties because the soldiers couldn't just spray and pray but had to pick their targets carefully. They always have been issued and trained with fully automatic rifles, since Korea, to be prepared for conventional warfare.

[@misterbrit1493]

I'm surprised that Altered Carbon wasn't mentioned The Envoy Corp is a pretty good example of a plausible execution of the smaller unit thesis.

[@Expeor7970]

I think the main factor on the armies' sizes would be the technology in the setting, if it's really hard (realistic) to bring stuff into orbit that means transporting millions of people is probably not economically viable, it would also mean most spaceships are built in orbit, meaning the enemy's military infrastructure can be conquered without having to land. On the other hand how would technologies like automatization affect warfare? If you can build a half meter tall droid that can be stored as a box and has super aimbot wouldn't it make more sense to bring a hundred thousand of the little buggers.

[@shanenolan5625]

I believe in battlestar galactica the colonial army and marine Corps had 600 million personnel. Over 12 planets and a a couple of dozen outer colonies. ( not including the colonial fleet , navy)

[@TotallyNotAFox]

I always wondered how realistic the Clone Army size in Star Wars was -1.2 million soldiers. That seems a rather low number for a whole galaxy. (Comparison: That's 1/3 of the active NATO force)

[@reeyuh526]

Put in context though - the GAR was a highly elite fighting force. People joke about it, but given the individual clone's abilities to independently think and adapt as needed, 1 clone was clearly equivalent to more than 1 B1 battle droid. The GAR never really needed to occupy the planets they fought over, as the planets had pro-Republic/Separatist indigenous forces that could perform that role. Not to mention, the GAR was augmented by the presence of a force of magic wielding space wizards in their ranks. Palpatine's political machinations aside, the GAR never really had to be all that big to fight its interstellar war.

[@alterego9082]

To m, it depends on the setting or the power of your units cause you could have one where your soldiers are so ultimate that a team of 10 can do reasonably everything outside of emergencies, like imagine having army of C'tan, a single one can generally be enough

[@paulthenotsogreat8118]

Yeah, no definite answer for this. The size and sophistication of the military is affected by the type of government, culture of the nation, nature of threats, among several other factors. I imagine an expansionist society/empire aiming to subjugate other civilizations would have a massive military especially if they are anticipating to besiege an ecumenopolis or something. While a civilization who hasn't discovered another intelligent lifeform may opt to focus more on research and maintain a military just enough to keep order in their existing territories.

[@myrandomcorner3460]

I want to see you guys make a build your battlegroup using the entire imperium of man units in a custom made army Combining all imperium of man factions [ Imperial guard, Astarties, Imperial Knights, Adeptus mechanics, along with a armored regiment

[@CollinBuckman]

I would prefer something like a specific chapter or regiment, the premise of building your battlegroup doesn't really work with Crusades because these forces are all highly independent of each other- it's not like an Imperial Guard general can just ask high command to give him a few Space Marine companies, at best he'd need to personally ask the Space Marines for help and at worst he'd have to just pray some Space Marines are in the area and decide to join of their own volition. Similar can be said of Knights and the AdMech, they can't be ordered and organized as you wish, they need to be negotiated with as equal partners in a campaign.

[@myrandomcorner3460]

@@CollinBuckman Granted you are correct on that I suppose I should have mentioned that I my self have made an army the miniatures called the Ceramite Legion which its main body is guardsman with Space marine support along with Imperial knights, multiple imperial guard tanks, Dreadnoughts and a few other things I have yet to order but its my own custom what if the imperium of man was more organized and militarized with all its factions.

[@MrJameslupien]

Most of the battles the Imperium fights is almost exclusively the astra militarum with naval vessels to shuttle them around. Anytime they're supported by any other faction within the imperium in a conflict is almost always because they happened to be in the same area as the guard not because they were sent to support the guard.. The imperium has so many citizens they can just hulk smash their way through everything wihtout man power concerns. @@CollinBuckman

[@anjetto1]

I drop rocks from space and everyone dies. It literally almost would never make sense to have a large standing army. Fleet combat, small unit insertions and policing actions and ROCKS FROM SPACE.

[@TemplinInstitute]

you have fallen off the escalation ladder

[@bradwolf07]

A Book Series (or at least the first series of books in the same Universe/Continuity) called the Lost Fleet Series did the Space Military size thing well. At the very start of the War, both sides were relatively small but highly trained. By the time of the series proper, they were huge and less well trained (since it became a meat grinder and life expectancy dropped).

[@charvolth]

Some factors I would consider for Interstellar War: What is the overall level of development, environment and population of the territories being fought over, what are the combatants transport and logistical capabilities. If the territory being fought over has strategic resources a low population, and hostile environment, then a small scale special forces operation would make the most sense. You secure the world, its resources, and try to avoid any damage to valuable infrastructure. You can still have a good punchy fleet engagement, and need a relatively small, elite ground force. This type of action makes sense in a setting where space colonization is fairly new, the most realistic to me. If you are dealing with worlds that have a higher population, a more friendly environment (or terraformed) say with populations less than 50 million, but scattered over a near earth sized planet. Then you might need something comparable to current modern militaries. Depending on how well defended the world is you might need combined arms formations of 30-50k each hitting areas across the planet. Perhaps a total force of 500k-1m if the two sides are peer to peer. Perhaps even more if we are dealing with civilians hostile to the invasion, and willing to be part of an insurgency. You might take vital logistical and strategic areas, but still need extra forces to deal with that insurgency. Go too light, and it becomes a meatgrinder, too heavy, and you waste resources that might be needed for other targets. This is where I wish Star Trek operated at where you have very established interstellar governments. I remember Babylon 5 had Earthforce ground units organized into divisions, even though the Earth Alliance numbered a few dozen worlds, and many were not heavily populated. Though many other powers in the setting were older and had more developed colonies. Hitting a very well developed world with a population of several billion, in a peer to peer war, this is where I can see the scale getting nuts. Depending on transport capability, a possible hostile civilian population. This is where you might need to 'soften' a target with orbital bombardment (use very sparingly on purely military targets), and then hit a planet's spaceports with ground units numbering in the 10s if not 20 million, and be prepared for continual reinforcement as you try and advance outside initial zones of control. Essentially a series of possible encirclement breakthroughs from the occupied regions.. Orbital bombardment, or the threat of it could keep defensive forces from bunching up, but that could lead to an acceleration to an insurgency phase. Too light, and it turns into a meatgrinder, there is less risk with going too heavy though. Any interstellar polity that can deploy 20 million ground troops could likely exceed that and might view an invasion with massive, overwhelming force in hopes of knocking out a planet's defenses relatively quick could minimize casualties. Using orbital bombardment on civilian population centers could easily lead to a harder insurgency to fight (besides the obvious moral implications). Be prepared for occupation armies to remain at the 10's of millions. This is the sort of scale I view Star Wars and Warhammer 40k would have to operate at. Imagine having to field a ground invasion force pushing a billion to take a hive world. If anything the current conflict in Ukraine has shown that armies of mass in this day and age still have a place. A country with 35 million people, using a lot of the same equipment, is going to need a lot more than an invasion force of 150-300k to take them, especially if that population is very hostile to that invasion.

[@RayleighJones]

I like the point of view adopted by David Weber's Honorverse, it's a good example of how it's dealt with in a setting with mostly civilised star nations, who mostly adhere to certain rules of warfare. Chiefly, if your orbital assets are defeated and an enemy has taken your space, you are expected to surrender the planet, as the invading force could then start dropping kinetic weaponry on your governmental and military assets (wholesale destruction or civilian massacre is a no-no though, as it might make the local Big Power smash you). So most of the action shown in the novels are about the navy and the marines. But the armies exist, and in the context of the story, their role is mostly long-term occupation of hostile planets, and anti-insurgency work. Not many mass-scale land action. But it's also the result of there not being much defense against rapidly accelerated projectiles in this setting, and this is a big part of how your star nations would balance navy/marines/army: how efficient are your spaceships to smash planetary forces. If tank columns are helpless against spaceships, then it's no use having a big army tailored for invasion, you might still need it to keep the civilians in check later. But if you can fortify planets and planetary forces against spaceship weaponry, then your need for marines might increase. If it increases past a certain point, you might want dedicated army invasion forces, rather that whatever marines fit on your ships.

[@warmachine5835]

I get the Pizza Hut buffet reference, but given the... context of the 90s in this particular reality, I really feel an opportunity was missed by not using the Gorbechev clip.

[@kingshermanii]

This was something I was struggling with in the SciFi universe I was making. I was fleshing out the Main human factions Army and I struggled as to what size it should be. At its current level it has around 14 million active personal. With about double in the reserves. I came to that level due to three factors a civil war that ha denied about 30 years prior, a local Galactic conflict that ended 10 years prior and a population around 55 billion. Which told me that they would have a military that was large and capable of fighting on multiple planets with large formations. So I agree that the sizes of future militaries are subject to the geopolitical, or galactic political climate

[@MM22966]

For writing purposes, it depends on what kind of characters/story you are writing. Is it a man or men as a vast cog in a machine (think Saving Private Ryan), or are they some of super-trooper/tech that decides whole conflicts by showing up? (Halo/Spartans, etc). Many scifi writers arrange things so the enemy is a huge horde, and the hero a small group or individual to automatically give the story an underdog/peril dynamic.

[@Cas-Se78.97]

I feel like there is a balance between forces driving up and down sizes of armies. On the one hand, the cost of interstellar travel might create a bottleneck, where taking full advantage of advanced technology to supplement the boots on the ground is optimal. On the other hand, an interstellar civilization can support a larger army for a longer period, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. Obviously a population of trillions can support a far larger army than a population of millions, but it's also the case that new technologies (AI, robots, megastructures, etc) will allow a population to support a far greater proportion under arms. In the medieval era, any larger of an army than maybe a couple hundred mercenaries or knights had to be sent home for the winter or people would starve, because 95% of the population had to farm. During WW2, the US had around 10-12% of its population in some part of the military and still had the largest economic boom in history. It is entirely possible that a vast interstellar nation could support something like half its population fighting across the galaxy while an automated economy keeps them equipped and fed.

[@boobah5643]

Don't forget, as you make the warfighting gear more advanced you generally end up with fewer shooters as a proportion of your militarily dedicated population, whether they're involved in maintenance, logistics, or production.

[@jrking4980]

Interstellar warfare falls to one thing more than anything else, as have most wars in human history--logistics. The bane of every warrior who thinks winning a war is based on killing the enemy, not on supplying the food and weapons necessary to do so.

[@georgehilty3561]

one important point that wasn't brought up was logistics! if you can't supply a large army over those kinds of distances then you definitely can't build one. army's live and die by their logistics, they aren't sexy, but if they're neglected the army will fail.

[@be-noble3393]

Comrade, you don’t need to invade planet, if there is no planet. Ehhhhh!

[@yjlom]

but then why the hell do you bother fighting the war if you're just gonna destroy the loot?

[@theinquisitor8112]

That's the first sponsorship ad that wasn't GamerSupps that I've watched in a loooong time. You made a good one.

[@this_isnt_patrick]

Imagine a Star Wars game in the style of Enlisted. So much potential.

[@SlavGod47]

Another thing to consider about interstellar armies is the tech and training scaling. For example, the price of an M4 Sherman is equivalent today to $550,000 USD. The M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams MBT costs about $4.6 million per tank. The price of an M1 Garand in 1945 was equivalent today to $338. The price of an M4 Carbine is about $700 Even NBC ran an article in 2007 saying that the cost of fully equipping a GI in WW2 was about $17,000 today (or $170 then), but the cost of equipping a US soldier "could be an estimated $28,000 to $60,000 by the middle of the next decade" (which, as we all may know, has very well come and gone)

[@MaximusOfTheMeadow]

One this is most likely to remain true for a long time, It's cheap to get one bloke to shoot one other bloke with a tube that goes boom, and the first bloke can even do deferent tasks then use a tube that goes boon, or use different tubes that go boom I don't how difficult it is to adapt a cold-weather drone to a tundra model, but I can feel my taxes going up just thinking about it Or change a drone with a long distance tube that goes boom module, with a big boom tube module. Just the r&d wil cost more a couple of good houses

[@twisted_fo0l]

The idea that super- soldiers would make large armies obsolete is idiotic because the second your enemy pulls together to send three spartans at your one, your dead, your one spartan cant be everywhere at once and who keeps track of your super soldiers combat stimulants.

[@Isometrix116]

One thing I expect in the future is AI development to be key. There are 4 likely scenarios in my opinion: 1. AI/Automated defenses hold the front line while elite human soldiers tackle more complex objectives such as attacking enemy lines or completing objectives. This is because more complexity = more variables and therefore more chance for unexpected scenarios to which the AI cannot properly respond. Expect some AI assistance with things like ISR, transport, setting up and defending temporary camps, etc. 2. Humans hold the front line, doing the simple tasks, and so on. This is because training humans is harder than training an AI. Expect some elite humans on the missions with AI to help with 3C and more complex scenarios, likely with an AI or two helping. The AI would be like the senior NCO while the human would be the officer. 3. Elite forces and line infantry are AI. Humans only exist as officers to guide the AI legions to victory. Likely with advising from competent AI. 4. AI is very limited in usefulness, so we just use them as we do now. They are great at a few things, but it is all done with extreme oversight by humans (human-in-the-loop systems).

[@paincult7121]

I reckon that essentially the logistics and ridiculous amounts of manpower required to occcupy an Earth-like planet makes invasion a near impossible feat. It really depends on the technology and the ethics of the invading force-ethics being a big one in that it would be far more effective to simply blast a planet to pieces than to make landfall and potentially face a guerilla-style campaign of resistance. Though I'm sure you could handle all of these problems given any near-magical(at least relative to our current perspective on future technology) explanation using technology.

[@tycodow4904]

Like the video states, the size of the army will vary depending on the intended use but in my opinion I feel they will all follow a similar layout in terms of there will be a small offensive side which will prioritize smaller, faster, focused, and concentrated formations that still posses the firepower needed to get the job done, and a large defensive/occupation side that will probably focus on larger, slower, and more dispersed formations with firepower geared more towards crowd control. The reason for this is because the population is likely to resist on the basis that without occupation forces the only threat to keep them in line is the threat of orbital bombardment which is only a true threat if the population actually believes you would do it. You don't drop a nuke to kill one man and as such you "shouldn't" bombard a planet just because some of the population gets uppity. Even if you are the kind of person to bombard planets into submission you have to gauge exactly how much is enough to push the population into line, too little and the threat isn't credible enough, too much and you might push more of the population to resist, and outright glassing the planet only escalates the war to a war of genocide because as soon as you wipe out a planet the enemy might start doing it too.

[@JWelsh07]

I’ll admit it’s been about two decades since I read The End of History but I’m pretty sure the book isn’t arguing that major conflicts are over, just that History - defined as humanity’s search for the optimal political and economic systems - is over now. The author is arguing that liberal democracy and capitalism can’t be improved upon. Two capitalist liberal democracies might be less likely to fight, but they could still go to war.

[@camfunme]

The limiting factor for army sizes is and always has been logistics. If your sci-fi futuristic empire doesn't have some hand-wavey technology to remove these bottlenecks of resources then the resulting force might not be small by todays standards, but it will be by a percentage of available population. The material to build and fuel large numbers of combat space ships; the material to build and fuel ships to transport the army, the food for the army and materiel used by the army and other combat ships; etc. There is also the time delay in moving resources, understanding what resources are required, and the time spent protecting the supply convoy between planets that will limit the size of force that can be deployed. IMO realistic futuristic wars will be fought with primarily ship-to-ship combat and bombardment from space, only resorting to tactical strike forces to clear resistance that can't be bombed from orbit, and potentially an occupying force deployed later (if they aren't intending to commit mass extermination, which I find highly likely that they would if they can't communicate with them).

[@AkselGAL]

Sorry, you neglect aspects. 1. Exist fully autonomous combat/logistic/production units or not? 2. Costs of interstellar travel? 3. Speed of interstellar travel? 4. Capacity/size of capital ships? 5. Is there any technology to prevent orbital bombardment? On an high level of autonomous software, an AI can just colonize barren planets, build factories, produce stuff and store it on moons without atmosphere and radiation. It would be a shadow military industrial compley without people involved. Such shadow AI fleets could be parked between systems to react fast or counter attack fast. SciFi like "Renegade Legion" from FASA or the german Perry Rhodan series (running since 60 years) ventured into "large" militaries.

[@AB-gk8cs]

I understand the argument for smaller armies if you consider the costs for armament and the increasing complexity of military jobs. While the equipment get more and more advanced and effective (but also more expensive and with higher demands for the operator) and the increase of use of drones or even full autonomous weapon systems I think it is not unrealistic that smaller armies would be more typical. Especially in societies which have neither the means to force their population nor the ideological/religious backing for mobilizing large numbers. At least any halfway prosperous post-heroic society would have a hard time to find enough men and women to risk their lifes if there are better jobs...

[@Wastelandman7000]

A lot depends on the technology you have and how many force multipliers you can bring to bear. A bunch of cruisers sitting in orbit giving pinpoint (insert sci-fi weapon of choice) fire is a massive force multiplier. Your ground forces can be reinforced by swarms of drones or platoons of war robots. (think the droid army from Star Wars only not idiots with competent leadership, provided by humans) would work too. Stealth technology would likewise multiply your troops effectiveness. An army of battle armor with Predator like stealth systems would be very difficult to stop. All the above in a coordinated assault would be many times more difficult to stop. And the deployed force would not have to be huge. At least compared to say the Imperium of Man