Despite great efforts, war has been a part of the human experience for all our history. Over
the millennia, it has been refined to incorporate increasingly advanced and sophisticated tactics,
strategies and institutions. Yet when looking at the great battles and terrible conflicts fought
across alternate worlds, especially those that take place in what we might consider the future,
there is a bit of a disturbing trend. All too often, the complexity of warfare,
the intricacies of how armies are organized and the realities of combat
are replaced by bland imitations lacking any sense of practicality or realism.
Far be it from me to speculate on this degradation
of humanity’s military capabilities across these alternate realities,
but at least in most cases the armies involved are actively trying to achieve victory. We can poke
holes in their tactics and strategy, but their objective is at least comprehensible. It is rare
however to come across a military institution so incompetent, whose objectives are so confusing,
that I can not entirely dismiss the idea that they might have been actively trying to lose.
In the late 2040s, an alien race known as the “Whitespikes” emerges from the wilderness of
Northern Russia and in the span of only three years, wipes out the majority of
the human population. The annihilation of the last isolated strongholds is imminent
and the extinction of the human race is seemingly inevitable.
But in 2051, the means to establish an artificial wormhole through time is discovered
and a bridge established with the year 2022. With the knowledge of the grim future that
awaits mankind the world’s national governments establish a military coalition, and send their
armies to 2051 to eradicate the Whitespikes. Only a fraction return through the wormhole,
and a worldwide draft is implemented to maintain the supply of reinforcements into the future.
There are already a bunch of issues with this plan, but the first bit of evidence that the
future human resistance really didn’t know what it was doing was clear from the first moment it
arrived in the past. I’m already starting with a bit of a tangent, but let’s say you could go
back in time to inform the world of an impending disaster, say the emergence of an unknown alien
species about to whip out all of humanity. What would you say? I think the way this warning is
delivered would be of the utmost importance, you would want to be clear, concise and leave
no room for misinterpretation or doubt. But the resistance in 2051 handled this a bit differently.
Half of those statements are so overly dramatic as to just be confusing. This is supposed to be
the military, not poets. We are you? What does this mean? Not human? Are we fighting aliens or
some kind of disease? 11 months? 11 months from now? Or 11 months in the future? Time travel is
by its very nature confusing and this weird announcement doesn’t exactly clear things up.
If a plea for help instead comes across as a deliberate attempt to foster a sense of dread,
maybe rethink your recruitment strategy.
Okay, so future humanity botched their first message to the past, but having
some kind of stable time bridge has gotta give the future Resistance a pretty clear advantage.
The most fundamental consequence of time travel, it seems to me, is that armed
with the knowledge of future events you can work in the present to alter their outcome.
The obvious move I imagine would be to mobilize the world of 2022 and prepare for the arrival
of those Whitespikes. Humanity has suddenly been given 20 years of advanced notice. But no, this
whole situation is poorly explained and apparently the world of 2051 is an alternate reality,
and changing the past in 2022 won’t affect it. Or its the same reality, but time is moving without
interruption in both so, as long as the wormhole is open, the future is doomed in 11 months no
matter what happens in 2022? Either way the humans of 2051 just want extra manpower from 2022.
But why only manpower? Keeping up a steady supply of munitions would probably be much
more important. If the resistance is forced to fight a war in the future rather than able
to prevent it in the past, they should be asking for bombs, tanks, equipment.
Against an enemy like the Whitespikes, what is really going to be more useful,
1000 guys with small arms, or a single Multiple Launch Rocket System and the ammunition to keep
it firing. The resistance of the future seems to lack anything bigger than a humvee so why not ask
for some tanks or something, anything that won’t just get knocked over by a bunch of Whitespikes.
And while we’re on the subject, why are they still using humvees in 2051?
They are already in the midst of being replaced. Very curious.
It’s not long however before most of the active military personnel from 2022 have been killed
in the future and civilians are drafted in their place. And here is where things really go off the
rails. I feel like it shouldn’t be necessary to explain this, but becoming a soldier is just like
training for any other career. It takes time to become proficient in the necessary skills.
Depending on the service branch, there is about 2-3 months of basic training, followed by more
advanced training that can last many weeks more. But the future resistance makes it clear that even
for drafted civilians with no combat experience, they’re not interested in any of that training.
They’re given 7 days to learn basic skills and then sent into the future. These people aren’t
even equipped with uniforms, they go into combat with whatever they happened to show up wearing.
Okay, so then the question is, what does the future Resistance hope to achieve with
that extra manpower. What are they trying to accomplish. Well, obviously they want to
eradicate the Whitespikes. But realistically, the opportunity to do so has already passed. Sending
in a few thousand soldiers every few days into a world where only 500,000 people are left alive,
is not going to alter the outcome of that war. So there must be some sort of other reason to
send in these soldiers right? Some sort of more feasible intricate plan to win the war
where a few thousand troops can make all the difference. Well kinda.
A bioweapon is being developed in the future with the potential to wipe out the Whitespikes,
but this seems to be an entirely separate project, independent from the wormhole to the past.
I can’t find any evidence that the success of this project is in any way dependency
on the arrival of soldiers from 2022. During one deployment, a group of people from 2022
are sent to 2051’s Miami to recover information needed to create the Bioweapon, victory in the
war is dependent on this mission apparently. Except at the same time, Miami has just been
lost to the Whitespikes so the Resistance is about to carpet bomb the entire city.
It’s now a race to get this information out of the city, before the bombs hit.
This seems like a case where the left hand of the Resistance doesn’t know what the right hand
is doing. They have two operations in Miami, directly at odds with each other. And what is
the big rush to bomb the city? The entire planet has been decimated so what does it matter if Miami
has fallen, why risk destroying potentially war winning information. And just as a side note,
the bombers launched to destroy Miami are F-22 air superiority fighters which are entirely incapable
of saturation bombing. They blow up a few streets and that’s about it, so again, what was the point.
Eventually however, the bioweapon is developed but during the subsequent operations undertaken
to complete it, only a single soldier from 2022 is involved, with the remainder being native to 2051.
So again, what was the purpose of bringing these untrained conscripts into the future?
The only plan realistically able to destroy the Whitespikes had no clear need for them.
It gets almost dizzying trying to pinpoint all the various ways in which the war against
the Whitespikes makes no sense. Did nobody think that by draining the world’s military
forces to fight a war in the future, they would become correspondingly less able to resist the
Whitespikes when they first arrived? If that theory about the two alternate universes is
correct then universe A in 2022 has just wasted all its military power defending
universe B in 2051. How were they were not planting the seeds of their own defeat?
But I think the worst aspect of this war is the criminal negligence displayed by the resistance
of 2051. The tragedy of war is that so often, human life is wasted in pursuit of meaningless
objectives or within hopeless situations. There is a responsibility of leadership within any military
to work to limit such needless carnage but those who directed the war against the Whitespikes
abandoned this duty. They thought nothing of taking the lives of their own parents and
grandparents, and quite literally dropping these unprepared people into a meatgrinder
A very big deal is made of how few people return from the future war, but nobody seems
to have put in too much effort to try and change that. And it’s not like this in 1916,
there were plenty of other options beyond just “well, send more bodies through the time tube!”
I can’t help but feel a sense of wasted potential.
The human race has spent so much energy figuring out better ways to fight and win wars,
and when we finally have a chance to put all that knowledge to the test
against an alien enemy completely guilt free, we suddenly revert back to paleolithic era tactics?
But that of course, is just my opinion, and even though I am actually from the future, I’d like to
draft your opinions from the past. Did the plan to defeat the Whitespikes actually make sense?
Was going up against monstrous creatures in light utility vehicles instead of 70 ton
main battle tanks actually a really smart move? Is the name “Whitespike” really dumb?
Let me know in the comments below, and until next time, this has been incoming.