This investigation is sponsored by Enlisted. Whether you're fighting
for control of Alpha Centauri in 2339 or Guadalcanal in 1942,
you’re going to need some boots on the ground. Enlisted puts you in the thick of that action,
as you fight across the fircest, most famous battles of the Second World War.
And as someone who's always throwing around words like “realistic” and
“grounded” Enlisted accomplishes something very challenging, immersing players in the
realities of these conflicts, while keeping gameplay dynamic, challenging and fun.
Dozens of soldiers, armored cars, tanks, fighters and bombers give every match a tremendous sense
of scale, while Campaigns like the Battle of Moscow or the Invasion of Normandy allow you
to follow the course of these historical events. But it’s the squad system that to me really sets
Enlisted apart. Being able to seize a position and swap between different soldiers in your unit
that you’ve customized with different weapons and equipment, is incredibly satisfying. So let
the word go out from this time and place, if anyone wants to take the Red October Factory,
they're gonna have to deal with Marky Marc and the Stalingrad Snowmen first.
Enlisted is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5, as well as PS4 and Xbox One
- with cross-platform support. No purchase necessary, once you’ve downloaded the game,
you’re ready to roll. But if you use the link in the description, you’ll get access to a few free
bonuses, including three days of premium time and several orders for soldiers and weapons.
So thanks again to Enlisted for sponsoring this investigation, and I’ll see you on the beaches,
the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets and in the hills.
Introduction
You may have heard the expression that “generals are always fighting
the last war”. The idea being that military leadership, or just human beings really,
have the tendency to prepare for future challenges with an overreliance on lessons
from the past. While at the same time, struggling to understand how evolving
technology, shifting circumstances and other developments might impact a future conflict.
It’s difficult enough to predict what a major war might look like 5 years from
now. Which new systems will prove their worth, which tactics will become outdated,
and who the enemy might even be. Try and predict what an interstellar war might look like,
with space battles and planetary invasions and, well everyone has their own unique take.
SIMPSONS: HIGH MOUNTAINS
But there’s one conclusion out there, that while I can’t prove is wrong, appears to me at least to
be an oversimplification of a complex question. And that’s this assertion that in a “realistic”
interstellar conflict planetary armies, if they exist at all, will be limited to these
very elite smaller units. Under this viewpoint, mass armies of conscripts, or even professional
formations over a certain size, say a division or bigger, are considered archaic and obsolete.
So if that complex question comes down to “how big will interstellar armies be?” In
this episode of Incoming, I want to try to answer it. Not with an oversimplification,
but by looking at how and why armies are the size they are.
The End of History
To begin though, why is it that so many people are convinced that within an interstellar,
futuristic context, bigger armies will be ineffectual and unrealistic. Well,
this isn’t actually that hard to answer. If you grew up in the 1990s and 2000s,
in this reality at least, you got to experience a unipolar world. The Soviet Union had collapsed,
free market liberal democracy had triumphed over everything else and
the idea that there would be another major global or regional conflict seemed absurd.
A book published in 1992 popularized the term “the end of history” and many people took this
literally, even though that wasn’t what the book was actually saying. But there was this idea that
human civilization had kinda wrapped things up, figured everything out. And when magazines were
running photos of dozens of B-52s bombers being scrapped, and in every Pizza Hut around the world
there was a dine-in buffet, it was really hard to argue against that idea that human civilization
had reached this peak it would never fall from. Now as it turns out, history did have a bit of
life left in it. War didn’t completely go away, but it did seem to have evolved into
this hyper-advanced smaller scale exercise. The only major battles would occur during a brief
decisive opening strike, and the conflict would then transition into some type of insurgency.
Punctuated by high intensity actions possibly, but rarely on the scale of anything seen in
World War Two, Korea, or Vietnam. We actually saw this codified in the organization of the
United States Army, which moved from Divisions, to smaller battalions as its primary unit of action.
In this environment, it wasn’t unreasonable to look at this pattern of decreasing intensity in
conflicts and make the assumption that by the year 2300 or so, this trend will have
transformed the way conventional forces look and operate. Maybe you don’t even need an army,
just a fleet and a small Marine Corps. But if you were to ask why armies seem destined to become
smaller and smaller, you might get different explanations. Evolving technology is a big one,
in the future we’ll likely be able to achieve more with less. Or maybe the
theory is that most of the actual fighting will be done between starships and planetary
armies only need to mop things up. But while evolving technology, hardware and tactics can
certainly influence the size of military formations, sometimes radically, I’m not
sure we can count on them to become the principal driver of that change.
More likely than not, I think the size of interstellar armed forces of the future
will be determined by pretty much the same factors that exist right now, here on earth.
The Commonwealth of Sol
To illustrate what perhaps the most important of those are I’d like to introduce the Commonwealth
of Sol. This is an interstellar polity consisting of Earth and its many colonies. It has a mostly
inoffensive, democratic government, a nice blue flag, and a few good hockey teams. And wouldn’t
you know it, in the year 2300, the Commonwealth Army is barely being used. It might have these
massive formations of infantry, tanks and artillery, but in the types of conflicts
it's preparing for we are indeed mostly seeing a reliance on those smaller elite formations.
But hold on a second, because in a different reality, the Commonwealth of
Sol is mostly identical, same inoffensive government, blue flag, and hockey teams,
except now their army and navy is exponentially larger and the battles they’re preparing for
involve formations of an absolutely staggering size. There is a mixture of professional units
and conscripts and the entire state has become increasingly militarized.
And then in a third reality, things don’t seem to make sense at all. The Commonwealth
of Sol is preparing for massive battles involving gigantic armies, and yet the it’s
armed forces are incredibly small, just enough to maintain a reserve of equipment.
So what's going on here? What has caused the
Commonwealth to adopt three radically different sized interstellar armies?
This may sound obvious, but it all comes down to the interstellar-political situation
that the nation finds itself within. The security environment more than anything else,
is likely going to be the deciding factor.
In that first example, things are a lot like the 1990s. The Gorgozian Empire, the hated foe of all
humanity had disintegrated, and the Commonwealth is now surrounded by a bunch of smaller, weaker
powers, unlikely to pose any real threat for the foreseeable future. The security environment is
stable, so the commonwealths defense strategy is mostly based on the idea of power projection. Even
if the armed forces are unlikely to be fighting a major war, as the dominant nation in its corner
of the galaxy, the Commonwealth might still be needed to intervene in smaller scale operations.
In scenario two, the Gorgozian Empire has not only survived, but managed to annex territories
on a number of worlds that also host Commonwealth colonies. The national defense strategy therefore
has to look quite different. A large-scale peer to peer conflict is likely, and its opening stages
are going to involve a number of ground battles across many different star systems. Massive
armies, the kinds able to hold a front that might be thousands of miles long, are critical.
In that final scenario things are real bad. Not only are the Gorgozians back and bigger than ever,
but the Commonwealth is now bordered on the other side by the even more evil Zorgon Dominion. Both
powers are overwhelmingly superior to humanity, and a conventional victory is
extremely unlikely. In this situation, the best the Commonwealth can do is pursue a strategy
unlikely to alienate either potential advisory. So things like projecting power across the galaxy
are out. Instead the Commonwealth is simply trying to make its conquest as unattractive a
prospect as it can, even if either of its enemies could theoretically achieve it.
This might be accomplished by maintaining a very small permanent army, but a rotating force of
conscripts who can be quickly mobilized in the event of war. During peacetime,
the strain of the armed forces on the economy is minimal, which is good if you simply can’t compete
with your rivals in terms of sheer numbers. But in an emergency, it can rapidly mobilize into
an exponentially larger force enough, to give either power pause. This is a strategic gamble,
but it achieves the desired result of deterring both powers, while minimizing the economic burden.
Now these examples are ultimately simplistic. But I think this shows
how depending on the situation a nation finds itself within, both a mass force of conscripts,
and smaller elite formations, are both equally realistic and sensible. It all comes down to
the respective threats and challenges they’re facing, the environment they’re operating within.
Other Factors
Now in an ideal situation this security environment would be the only factor a
nation would use in determining the size of its armed forces, or any other aspect
of its organization and function. The reality is however, that political, economic, and societal
pressures often complicates this straightforward approach. Let’s abandon the Commonwealth and look
at some other alternate worlds. If defense contracts providing hardware to the United
States Colonial Marines are particularly lucrative, Weyland Yutani for example might
decide to fund some political action committees. And they all agree that the armed forces are
dangerously under strength, regardless of whether or not that’s actually true.
The New Republic meanwhile, might find itself in a very dangerous situation surrounded by
Imperial Remnant forces that individually might match the military strength, and collectively
be superior. While a large military would be prudent, memories of the Empire and a lack
of public support makes a policy of extensive military rearmament challenging to implement.
We might even look at New Helghan and come to the conclusion that having been
so soundly defeated in two previous wars, its current armed forces are mostly just
for show. A source of national pride, and more intended to boost the image
of the government than be a credible deterrence against external threats.
Conclusion The end of history was this idea
that the ascendancy of Western liberal democracies would limit future conflicts and in turn, vastly
decrease the size of modern armies. That very well might be true. But with both the unipolar world of
the 1990s, and Pizza Hut buffets a distant memory, I think it’s clear that we just can’t tell exactly
how far away the “End of History” actually is. If we’re lucky, it will occur in this reality before
we establish an interstellar civilization and warfare when it does occur will be limited in
scope and intensity. But I think it’s a mistake to treat that as a certainty. To declare that
the further into the future we go, the smaller armies will be. That to me sounds like someone
overlearning the lessons of the last war, which is one of the better ways to lose the next one.
Thanks again to Enlisted for sponsoring this investigation
into the potential size of Interstellar Armies. Use the link in the description
below to get Enlisted on your platform of choice along with those special bonuses. And if you run
into me and my squad in the trenches offer no quarter, for none shall be given in return.