BigJKU316 wrote:
I don't know that a draft is impossible, but you would have to have a damn good reason.
Aye, that's more or less what I was getting at. You'd need a reason good enough to convince the public that they
should put their lives on the line. Needless to say, such a reason would be pretty hard to come by even when fighting a serious war.
BigJKU316 wrote:. Hell, the UK waited several years into WWI to put one in place. The US needed populist incidents just to get into both World Wars and get the draft supported. Even in the Civil War it was unpopular though.
I'd be hesitant to use anything pre-Vietnam to really gauge how the UFP might respond to the institution of a draft. Even in WW2, warfare was very "sanitised" to the people at home. They didn't see the horrors of war, nor did they truly know how lethal the battlefield was. All they saw of the war was propaganda, most of which was staged or edited, and all they heard was how it was their patriotic duty to sign up and defend their nation.
Compare that to friggin' Afghanistan, which has one of the lowest body counts for any real war the US has been in. Do you think anyone could have put a draft into place without being kicked out of office? Not a chance. Hell, there were even members
of the military itself trying to weasel out of being deployed. Good luck trying to get the public to take a trip east.
The UFP would most likely be much like that. It appears to be an
extremely pacifistic and self-indulgent nation. What we see of their military is a bad enough sign - think of what the civilian populace must be like! I can't see many of them taking the prospect of being taken from their homes, ferried across space to fight and probably die against fanatical aliens all too well.
BigJKU316 wrote:More than that though there are practical problems.
*snip*
Excellent points. Particularly on the seeming uselessness of large numbers of troops. I hadn't actually thought of that before.
Well, planets have to be conquered in
some fashion, so I suppose there may be large troop transports we've never seen. Hell, take something the size of a GCS, strip out everything but engines and life support, fill the rest of the ship up with cryo-stasis pods (so the troops don't need room to eat/sleep/etc) and you could probably ferry a few tens of thousands of people. Though that's still incredibly low, and I doubt the UFP has the resources to build large fleets of such ships.
That's one hell of a puzzle you've just unveiled.
BigJKU316 wrote:One of two things will happen. Either the enemy will simply dispose of your soldiers from space if they really want the planet or they will just obliterate the infrastructure and leave. I can't see a single scenario where ground forces make sense.
Actualy, ground forces make quite a bit of sense. The introduction of starships doesn't make a ground force obselete any more than fighter jets did.
Let's say that two space-faring nations are waging a war with each other. What's the one thing they both want? Resources. Where are these resources located? On the enemy's planets.Now, let's say one side achieved space supremecy, while the other has a large force of troops and tanks on a planet that's about as built up as modern Earth. The planet refuses to surrender. What does the attacker do now?
Well, sure, he could just level everything from orbit (assuming he doesn't have a problem with causing the death of billions). That'd also wipe out all infrastructure on the planet. Thus to exploit the planet's resources (assuming they haven't been destroyed in the attack) the attacker would then have to shuttle his own work force to the planet, move in or construct the necessary machinery to extract those resources, build facilities to process and refine that resource, build facilities to turn those resources into usable goods, set up landing/take-off sites to ferry those resources off-world to their destination, construct power plants to power all the facilities, construct habitation areas for the work force to live in, construct ammenities to keep the work force happy and set up an administration system and emergency services.
That's a
hell of a lot of work, as well as cost. The war would probably have ended by the time the attacker could actually exploit the planet's resources, meaning that you've sacraficed a lot of time, effort and money for something that's effectively useless during a time of war. There's also the fact that some nations (the UFP, for example) would simply never just glass a planet like that. So some other sollution must be reached.
So what other options are there?
Well, there's the possibility of attempting to attack and occupy the planet and use the already existing work force and infrastructure to exploit the planet's wealth for you. It also means a nice boost from tax money when you get a few billion extra paying you.
So how would the attacker go about a ground assault? Well, firstly, any military unit or facility that's in the open would be anhialated by orbital fire immediately. The only facilities and forces that would survive unscathed would be those located inside population centres. So the attacker is now left with the choice of either causing serious colateral damage and blasting those units from orbit, or a lengthy ground campaign. Choosing the latter would lead to a lengthy and drawn-out struggle, while choosing the latter would piss the population off and cause damage to the planet's infrastructure. In either case, the planet's wealth could be exploited far quicker than if it had just been blasted into rubble.
The third, and most likely, option is that of blockade. The defender refuses to surrender, so the attacker stations a task force of ships in orbit with the objective of preventing any ships from landing on or taking off from the planet. This doesn't gain the attacker anything, but it saves him from wasting time and effort on pacifying the planet while its resources can no longer be used by the enemy. At the end of the war, assuming the attackers triumph and dismantle the opposing government, the planet (and all other planets the defenders had) will again be given the option to surrender. If they refuse, then it's back to the option of a ground assault.
So overall, a good ground force is still a necessity, even in Trek.
BigJKU316 wrote:So I guess my question is this, even if you can do a draft and you have all these people at you disposal what exactly are you going to do with them?
Damn all, most likely. As you correctly pointed out, there's simply no way of moving so many people to so many different locations in such a short amount of time.