The Future of War

Having praised Battlestar in my previous post, I'm now going to tear it down in this one. And Firefly, Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Terminator... and indeed pretty much any setting that posits humans fighting in wars in the distant future.

The big problem, as we're already finding, is that the weakest part of an aircraft is the pilot. That squishy human part imposes a painful limit on the sorts of maneuvers that the vehicle can perform - change direction too fast and the G-forces will cause your pilot to black out.

Now, too be fair, a lot of settings posit inertial dampeners, or some other technobabble explanation to get around this limitation. But the big problem with that solution is that it's a hard and expensive way to avoid using a far easier solution: drones. And, later, AI-piloted craft. Indeed, the AI solution is particularly good because then it's a matter of software - you can have 50 copies of your 'pilot' all operating independently of one another for more or less the same cost as 1. Better to get rid of Luke, Wedge, et al, and just have Artoo pilot all the X-Wings.

Now, in fairness, Battlestar Galactica does explain why this is not done. And it also tackles a second problem associated with this situation, in that the fleet does indeed face the problem of running short of pilots to throw into battle.

But what Battlestar doesn't get around, and where Terminator also runs into problems, is that if the goal of the machines is to wipe out humanity, then they keep picking the wrong target. Rather than attacking the human populations, the point of weakness is our food source. They're large, they're immobile, and they take significant time to produce a crop. So a few well-placed strafing runs (or a few bombs planted by infiltrators on Galactica), and we're all starving to death.

And, alas, this means that the Rebel Alliance and Firefly's Independents just never had a chance. Because in the time it takes them to churn out a squadron of X-Wings, the Empire has produced hundreds of shiny TIE-AI craft that just swarm over their enemies. Only, actually, it doesn't even get that far, because actually the Clone Wars had the wrong result - it should be the heavily industrial Confederacy of Independent Systems that should have won with their AI-based robot armies, rather than the Republic and their slowly-grown clone armies. Yeah, the Kaminoans can produce a few million units for you in a decade... but in that time the CIS have not only built billions of droids, they've also implemented Moore's Law to improve the processing capabilities of those droids by a factor of 64 or more!

(Of course, that's part of the conceit - both Firefly and Star Wars, or at least the original trilogy, have roots in the American Civil War, where it does indeed appear that the South never actually had a chance, largely due to lacking the industrial base required to stay in the fight.)

All of which does leave me bubbling away with a good few ideas... After all, we don't actually see any evidence that Firefly's Alliance warships weren't largely automated, that much of their armed forces weren't actually based on AI or drone technology, and that therefore there were some vulnerabilities. And, indeed there are people who would know that secret, and thus represent a weakness in the Alliance's defences...