Limits to skill (pet MilSciFi peeve)

[Norseman]

Now we have often seen settings where you have Super Elite Soldiers, be they a hereditary mercenary class, death worlders, or simply ludicrously well trained. Often these soldiers take down scads of mooks without even breathing heavily, though for the most part they are up against frankly very stupid enemies. Now the question that I put to you is this: Just how much use can you get out of superior skill in a setting that uses combined forces? Assume that the mooks are more in line with Soviet conscripts instead of Arabs and that the enemy generals are all geniuses, while the mook leaders are run of the mill careerist officers. At what point will superior materiell and semi-competence invariably win the day?

[Purple]

Skills still mater a lot in modern warfare. Elite troops like those you described usually have superior strength and endurance to normal soldiers. That allows them to fight harder, carry more ammunition and supplies etc. Elite troops will also have greater discipline, far more training investment in marksmanship etc. And by virtue of their eliteness they will also have superior moral and combat spirit. As such, they are far more likely to accomplish objectives and not just rout at the first sign of machine gun fire. These skills will make the difference. And while this difference wont be the kind of Rambo like stunts you see in the movies it will be noticeable.

As long as the strategists behind the elites are not idiots and know how to fight the enemy either by pulling out their own combined arms forces or by using alternative tactics and the enemy does not have a too great numerical advantage the elites will win.

[Simon_Jester]

It depends very heavily on what you're trying to do, Norseman.

Does the "superior training" of the Super Elite extend to all aspects of warfare? Are they masters of tank combat, artillery, the use of modern communication systems, and so on? Or are they just big rugged bastards who wrestle grizzly bears for the hell of it and don't hold with book learning? In the former case you get fairly lopsided wars; in the latter, you get something like H. G. Wells' The Land Ironclads. Seriously, look that story up; it's amusing.

Are we talking about something that's actually a special forces mission (sneak behind enemy lines, stage a commando raid, and so on) or are we talking about brute-force combat a la Fulda Gap? Because having ten commandos who could theoretically kill 100 enemy soldiers by sneaking behind their lines and blowing up a barracks isn't very helpful against those same 100 men when they're awake, attacking, and about to call for artillery support.

Does the nation which provides the "elite soldiers" also have superior equipment, doctrine, and a better trained officer corps? Because the US, and Western nations in general, have a habit of smugly congratulating themselves on the battles they win by virtue of things like this, and act as if it implies man-for-man superiority in ways that it does not. "Elite soldiers" from a feudal warrior tradition who go up against something like the Cold War Soviet military may wind up getting ground into hamburger because they don't have the attitudes to deal with modern warfare.

[Shroom Man 777]

If you put them on a battlefield against numerically superior enemies with combined arms and basic competence? Your elites are going to die.

The skills of the elite, and all their worth, is only maximized when you use them in scenarios that play to their strengths. Small teams infiltrating the enemy territory, sneaking into enemy facilities quietly, and extracting information (by kidnapping shits, or rescuing folks) or eliminating specific targets (blowing up XYZ superweapon/important fuel/ammo/resources or assassinating specific important person) or gathering intelligence on the enemy (spotting enemy position/base locations/Spud missile sites) and other shit like this maximizes the value of the elite units and through these acts, they give invaluable assistance to the overall war effort.

In terms of direct combat, elites must attack in ways that also play into the strengths of small well-trained forces. Snipers are elite, but they shoot from a distance and avoid fighting "fairly" and face-to-face or in open ground against superior numbers of the enemy. Guerrilla soldiers, ambushers, Green Berets who hide in the woods and ambush convoys and set up traps and bombs before disappearing and avoiding a fair fight and hiding in the woods after, these guys are also valuable. Sometimes, it's not even their skill with killing or fighting that makes them "elite". It is their skill in wilderness survival, or in using electronic intelligence equipment, or in radioing in air support and directing aircraft (forward air controllers), or being good in explosive ordinance shits, or whatever, that can make them elite.

[Connor MacLeod]

I remember seeing/being told (I can't remember precisely where) that having different "qualities" of troops is generally a bad thing from a morale perspective, making it something you want to avoid if you can help it at all possible.

[Norseman]

We are talking about super elites like the Dorsai or that other mercenary outfit whose name I forget but which had telepathic powers etc. Basically troops that are strategic and tactical masterminds combined with absolutely awesome military skills and high morale.

[Purple]

Do you have any particular force in mind? Becouse this sounds to me like a RPG/fanfic/etc. research. If so, give us the detail of the force in question, their exact skills and equipment and the details on their opposition so that we can get into more details.

[Kingmaker]

If it's just direct combat like "assault that hill", elite troops are basically wasted, unless their eliteness is as assault troops (which gets to another point - having elite units which are just the same as regular troops but more awesome is usually a waste of resources). Superior marksmanship and endurance doesn't matter a whole lot when you've still got to cross 500 meters of open ground, uphill, through mortar and machine gun fire. Superior morale will, as will superior firepower, which resulted in units like stormtroopers in WWI.

Elite troops are going to be far more valuable in situations where they can perform tasks regular soldiers can't, or where factors other than the skill and firepower of the units directly engaged are minimized.

As for the OP scenario, if the Super Soldiers intend to give open battle, I'd expect that their superior skill and morale won't go very far. All the conscripts need to do is not die and hold the line long enough for motorized/armored forces to encircle the super soldiers and/or artillery to blow the shit out of them. (I'm basing this on the assumption that most MilSF superelites are light infantry. If we're talking about guys with powered armor and combined arms support, like Space Marines, that changes things).

[Simon_Jester]

I remember seeing/being told (I can't remember precisely where) that having different "qualities" of troops is generally a bad thing from a morale perspective, making it something you want to avoid if you can help it at all possible.

Yeah, it's a common problem, see Viscount Slim's comments on the Royal Corps of Tree Climbers.

Basically, when you make a big production of picking the "best" men out of a unit of ten thousand and sticking them in an "elite" unit of one thousand, you weaken the quality of the remaining nine thousand men. Because a lot of the people who, in a real battle, would have been organizing the troops under fire and attempting borderline-heroic gambits to quickly take out the opposition... they just got moved into the 'elite.' What's left behind is deprived of much of its backbone- so that you don't necessarily get the same performance out of one good division of ten thousand as you would by dividing it into nine thousand regulars and one thousand elites fighting separately.

To deal with this, you have to consciously avoid simply skimming the top 10% or 5% off of your regular troops to staff the elite. Special forces should generally be mission specialized, not "elite OMG super badass;" what makes them different is that instead of receiving X years' training in operating tanks or artillery or communications equipment, they get X years' training in wildnerness survival and infiltration. It's not realistic to make them the "anything you can do I can do better" troops.

If it's just direct combat like "assault that hill", elite troops are basically wasted, unless their eliteness is as assault troops (which gets to another point - having elite units which are just the same as regular troops but more awesome is usually a waste of resources). Superior marksmanship and endurance doesn't matter a whole lot when you've still got to cross 500 meters of open ground, uphill, through mortar and machine gun fire. Superior morale will, as will superior firepower, which resulted in units like stormtroopers in WWI.

The elite high-morale units may succeed, but they take horrendous losses in the process, which very rapidly guts the unit physically and morally.

Infantry engaged in constant intense combat take very heavy losses; it's just a fact of life. In a normal unit those losses are roughly proportionate among all 'quality levels' of the men in the unit: artillery falls on the brave and the cowardly alike.

But when you rely on elite shock troops for all your offensives, and keep throwing them back into the grinder again and again, you will very quickly deplete your supply of high-quality manpower. Storming a hill with two thousand randomly chosen men won't give you twice as many casualties as using one thousand picked men... and half the casualties in the larger unit don't fall among the picked men.

[Kingmaker]

The elite high-morale units may succeed, but they take horrendous losses in the process, which very rapidly guts the unit physically and morally.

Which is part of the reason people stopped bothering with shock troops (one of the others being that regular troops can reasonably perform the same role when it calls for infantry, and tanks being another). Which again gets back to "the same but more awesome" is a waste. As it happens, training a special ops trooper is probably going to give you a guy who is a superlative combatant on top of his specialized skills, but that's not the primary purpose.

If you feel the need to make an elite unit that can do all the stuff the regulars can, but better, you might want to consider just upping the overall level of training for your military.

[Norseman]

Yes, but here we're talking about a unit where everyone is TEH AW3S0M! Not specialized super-elite units, but the sort of super-elite mercenary from a mercenary planet where everyone grows up to be a mercenary and they do nothing else but be spartan mercenary expys. What I want to know is just how far that can go, what you can do to counter it, and so forth. You having industrial and numerical superiority is of course assumed, because these guys are usually "You can hire us for an exorbiant amount when you need us, and therefore not have to build your own military."

[Sea Skimmer]

Almost nothing you can do with super elite training is going to make personally superior to regular troops serving four year terms of duty, nor vastly better then two year conscripts in a competent military. Huge extended training times prior to entering an active duty unit make no sense, you can only learn to fight well when you serve and train with the men you will actually fight with. But that’s exactly how fiction tends to treat super elite units. Modern day Navy SEALs, Pararescue jumpers and fighter pilots can all be trained within a two year period and that still isn't completely solid training time. Making good officers takes a while, but that is because a good officer takes a diverse education and lots of real life experience, not brainwashing toughness training.

[Serafina]

Plenty of Sci-Fi elite-troops do get extensive life-combat training though. 40K-Space Marines are put through genuine life-or-death survival and combat training. Death Worlders would have such experience due to their background, and elite mercenary units see lot's of combat.

Those would make them better soldiers, just like combat experience does. Now whether the effects are portrayed realistically or not, that's a different matter.

[Gunhead]

This sort of "ZOMG SUPER SOLDIERS" thinking is a cousin to "Combat is a puzzle and there is a piece that solves it". More often the said super troops are the missing piece that brings victory from the jaws of defeat or, jaws of incompetence because commander X hates underling Y and sends his unit to a suicide mission and in the end they manage against the odds because they're awesome, badass, yadda yadda yaa.

-Gunhead

[Gunhead]

Plenty of Sci-Fi elite-troops do get extensive life-combat training though. 40K-Space Marines are put through genuine life-or-death survival and combat training. Death Worlders would have such experience due to their background, and elite mercenary units see lot's of combat.

Those would make them better soldiers, just like combat experience does. Now whether the effects are portrayed realistically or not, that's a different matter.

No they're not. Uber lethal training is a fucking stupid idea, since recruits can die from simple bad luck or other reasons beyond their control. Surviving on a death world may give you certain survival skills, but breeds a totally unsuited mentality. Survival is based on risking something for a certain gain. This extends to killing out others to survive yourself. In short, to be a good survivalist you never ever stick your neck out where as in combat you're asked to risk your life for a goal that has no immediate relevance to you or your well being. More often your goal is detrimental to those.

-Gunhead

[Black Admiral]

Plenty of Sci-Fi elite-troops do get extensive life-combat training though. 40K-Space Marines are put through genuine life-or-death survival and combat training.

No, they're not, at least with the exception of some rather stupid Chapters. Once they're actually being trained (as opposed to being selected as aspirants - and even then, not all or even most Astartes Chapters have insanely wasteful recruitment practices like the Blood Ravens and Doom Eagles do), the majority of Chapters will try and avoid getting any killed where practical, since viable candidates for geneseed implantation aren't common enough that they can be casually discarded.

Before you bring up Scout Teams, novice Scouts are aspirants who've completed their training and are getting real-world experience while their bodies adapt to their implants (and not every Astartes Scout is a final-stage aspirant; in some Chapters none of their Scouts are).

[Zixinus]

I'm no expert, but from what I understand, it boils down to this:

"Elite" means that they are more highly trained in the roles they are to fight (and this does include better physical fitness) and preferably are outfitted with both better gear and supplies (stuff that wouldn't make much difference to a more regular soldier). Elites also happen to be people that performed training very well and have seen a lot of combat.

Special forces are misunderstood in their name: they are special not because the people in them are (of course, I wouldn't be surprised that the people in them would say to the contrary) but because they have specilised training: Navy Seals for example are taught explosives and underwater activities. Put them in the middle of a ruined city and tell them that they now do urban warfare, they'll be barely better than regular soldiers.

Part of this is cultural trapping: viewing soldiers as individualist supermen rather than cogs in the war machine. Likewise, looking at a weapon as a great enabler rather than simply a tool to archive a specific end in a specific way.

"Super soldiers" likewise should be pointed at a specific problem: are they super because they can survive easily in an environment that is otherwise hostile? Are they super because they can take more gear, survive without food longer and still move farther without rest? Are they super because they can punch harder, shoot more accurately, take more bullets?
In order: the first superman is a superman because he can manouvre and play tactics that his oppenents can't. The second is super because they can move much faster and more undetected in enemy territory. The third are super because they can make an edge on an assoult.

The same mindset is about the weapons themselves: there is no point in giving super-accurate, automatically-silenced, super-powerful guns to regular soldiers because they can't take advantage of it: they may not be accurate enough to take advantage of the accuracy, they may not be have the training and discipline to do stealth missions so silenced weapons don't give them much edge and giving them super powerful guns is only useful if they face something that they NEED super-powerful guns to bring down.
Otherwise, a less-lethal (but still lethal enough to take down an enemy soldier), louder and more inaccurate weapon may be enough and may save on your purse.

The issue should be approach more as an engineer's mindset: with a troop of these skills, with these properties and qualities, what can I do best?

This is how special forces work after all: they learn how to fight under certain circumstances and certain methods and become very good at doing them. When they succeed, they look unstoppable because they take maximum advantage of the circumstances and methods. When they fail, they'll just die like anyone else.

The idea of a guy that knows evey aspect of warfare that was ever faught is somewhat absurd unless he's a genetically-created super-strongman that had centuries (or the very least, several decades) to study it all.
Consider that and now understand that this guy is not going to be on the front lines, leading the charge on the front of the troops in the most forward attack.

No, that's more in common in medieval warfare where it's important to see your leader attacking and following his lead. Even there, that's a bad idea because then you have have the most important man the most visible target.

What this superguy will do is stand in the back and organize things, training others and only going to battle when his skills and experience would make a big difference.

In real life, training is done from bottom-up: you take a large number of recruits and see where their limits are in basic training. If you have a bunch of people that step beyond those limits, then you move them to a higher level of training. You do this until either you have no more higher levels of training (which is more likelier than you think) or until you meet their limits. Going beyond their limits is an exercise in futility, frustration and waste.

Not specialized super-elite units, but the sort of super-elite mercenary from a mercenary planet where everyone grows up to be a mercenary and they do nothing else but be spartan mercenary expys. What I want to know is just how far that can go, what you can do to counter it, and so forth.

This is a difficult question because there is no such bloody thing. You can't have a mercenary planet because you need more people to make food, houses, tools, etc.

Spartans are seen as elite super-soldiers, but remember this: what we have about Spartans is mostly myth. Not reality, myth. We know about Spartans mostly from writing of other polises (city-states) because Spartans themselves did not write much. What we know is pieced together from pieces from that and some archaeological evidence.
The whole "everyone is made to be a super bad-ass" thing? That's fantasy. Spartan society is simply an oppressive, militaristic society where people that control the large number of slaves. Don't think country of badasses, think North Korea or Soviet Union. The whole "super-rugged living" thing? That's stuff on paper, in reality, it may amount to as much as priest's vow of poverty or a politician's vow of always taking the people's interest first and foremost.
That, and a good deal of stuff is actually fairly typical of Greeks in general. Greek citizen men (who could easily be actually fairly small percentage of the population) were all taught to fight because they could afford the weapons, training and also because they were also the people in power in an age where might and power were closely linked.

At best, you can have an area that has seen lots of wars, where you have people that one way or another learned to fight or die, where everyday culture and military culture is closely linked. Such a society can easily be xenophobic, paranoid, extremely militant and likely totalitarian. To a more average, regular Westerner they may be seen violent, crazy, dominating and ridiculously strict.
Keep in mind that "mercenary" is not necessarily the best mindset you would want. It oozes rugged individualism, it but essentially means that you're playing soldier to rich people instead of a nation. Mercenaries are almost always either hired thugs from some poverty-stricken country(which present an obvious reliability and discipline problem because you're essentially hiring criminals) or ex-military. Why are they ex-military? Because either they didn't want the military for some reason or because the military didn't wan them. Think about that.
Mercenaries want money and they want to spend their money. What you want from a soldier is to fight as long as possible and even when the situation looks like it turns bad, even to the death. Mercenaries can easily change heart and loyalty if it looks like their employer is losing.

Take Mexico for example: it has a large population of mercenaries in the employ of the Mexican drug cartel. Where do they come from? From a Mexican military that, while offers some training, treats and pays its soldiers like shit. Of course they'll take their newly-found skills to an employer that pays better.

Anyway, best way to counter? How do you counter a Mary Sue?

I would wager the best way to counter would be to know their mindset and use it against them. Use "unfair" tactics like gerilla warfare and spy tactics against them, breeding mistrust and further paranoia. Goad them, lure them to fight until they do something stupid. They can take a lot of bullets to kill? Fine, but do they survive without oxygen? They want to fight and establish that they are the biggest badasses in the block? Fine, make them piss off everyone they ever meet and watch them die when they find themselves biting off more than they can chew.

[Gunhead]

One misconception about special forces is that all those hell weeks, doom marches and other similarly named happenings we seen on reality TV are in fact somehow related to training. No they're not really. Those are meant to be tests to see who has the mental and physical qualities to see if this guy is worth all that money and time that goes into training him.
When you're trying to get a person to learn something, it's a bad idea to try teach him something new while he's tired, sore and generally hates your guts. Everything new is taught when you have people whoa are fed and rested, because that's when their minds can be directed at the material you're trying to teach and are not more interested in getting their next warm meal. The next step to this is to increase the tempo and start to seeing how they perform under pressure. Men don't rise to the occasion, they revert to the level of their training. Emphasis on TRAINING btw. Weapons systems we have today take a lot of time to learn properly. Dropping people to a place filled with Batweasels, Ratsnakes and / or spikesquirrels in itself will not teach them how to operate a guided missile system for example.

Specially if it's spikesquirrels. One can kill a man with a single acorn.. a horde can bring down a 40K Titan..
But like we all know, badass = lucky and it'se better to be lucky than good. I guess luckiness can be taught in the future.

-Gunhead

[Simon_Jester]

Almost nothing you can do with super elite training is going to make personally superior to regular troops serving four year terms of duty, nor vastly better then two year conscripts in a competent military. Huge extended training times prior to entering an active duty unit make no sense, you can only learn to fight well when you serve and train with the men you will actually fight with. But that’s exactly how fiction tends to treat super elite units.

Extreme training usually involves a hefty dose of "the Spartan Way," with the prospective supersoldiers receiving 'training' from infancy to make them fit and put them in the desired frame of mind, but which isn't actually combat training.

And yes, overtraining is a real problem with some portrayals of super-elites.

Plenty of Sci-Fi elite-troops do get extensive life-combat training though. 40K-Space Marines are put through genuine life-or-death survival and combat training.

No, they're not, at least with the exception of some rather stupid Chapters. Once they're actually being trained (as opposed to being selected as aspirants - and even then, not all or even most Astartes Chapters have insanely wasteful recruitment practices like the Blood Ravens and Doom Eagles do), the majority of Chapters will try and avoid getting any killed where practical, since viable candidates for geneseed implantation aren't common enough that they can be casually discarded.

Even in chapters that try not to waste viable candidates, some of the training exercises are dangerous enough that there's an appreciable attrition rate- Space Wolves come to mind, from the first 40k novel of that series.

"Super soldiers" likewise should be pointed at a specific problem: are they super because they can survive easily in an environment that is otherwise hostile? Are they super because they can take more gear, survive without food longer and still move farther without rest? Are they super because they can punch harder, shoot more accurately, take more bullets?
In order: the first superman is a superman because he can manouvre and play tactics that his oppenents can't. The second is super because they can move much faster and more undetected in enemy territory. The third are super because they can make an edge on an assoult.

All too often, the answer becomes "all of the above..." [sighs]

The idea of a guy that knows evey aspect of warfare that was ever faught is somewhat absurd unless he's a genetically-created super-strongman that had centuries (or the very least, several decades) to study it all.
Consider that and now understand that this guy is not going to be on the front lines, leading the charge on the front of the troops in the most forward attack.

No, that's more in common in medieval warfare where it's important to see your leader attacking and following his lead. Even there, that's a bad idea because then you have have the most important man the most visible target.

What this superguy will do is stand in the back and organize things, training others and only going to battle when his skills and experience would make a big difference.

Amusingly, they touch on this in the Captain America movie that just came out. They get one prototype supersoldier, with no prospect of more. What do they do? Use him as a glorified circus strongman to sell war bonds.

Of course, it's a superhero movie so that doesn't last.

Not specialized super-elite units, but the sort of super-elite mercenary from a mercenary planet where everyone grows up to be a mercenary and they do nothing else but be spartan mercenary expys. What I want to know is just how far that can go, what you can do to counter it, and so forth.

This is a difficult question because there is no such bloody thing. You can't have a mercenary planet because you need more people to make food, houses, tools, etc.

The classic example is the Dorsai, and yes they are inspired by the mythicized version of the Spartans. Plenty of Dorsai don't leave home as badass mercs, but there's a fairly high degree of universal combat training in the society even among 'civilian' men. The relative minority who go off planet as mercenaries are (like the late-medieval Swiss) notorious for being very good at what they do.

Unreasonably so, if you ask me, of course, but there it is.

Mercenaries want money and they want to spend their money. What you want from a soldier is to fight as long as possible and even when the situation looks like it turns bad, even to the death. Mercenaries can easily change heart and loyalty if it looks like their employer is losing.

Yes. Again, the fictional examples tend to take their inspiration from the 'best' historical mercenaries, who are coincidentally formative in the Western military tradition: the Greek mercenaries who fought in Persia before Alexander, the Swiss, people like that. There's often a dash of the French Foreign Legion thrown in, as well.

[Kingmaker]

Mercenaries want money and they want to spend their money. What you want from a soldier is to fight as long as possible and even when the situation looks like it turns bad, even to the death. Mercenaries can easily change heart and loyalty if it looks like their employer is losing.

The same can be said of any soldiers, though. Most of them aren't willing to confront certain or near-certain death given the choice and without proper motivation, as has been born out time and time again throughout history. Conversely, one can trivially dredge up examples of elite mercenary units performing spectacularly under unfavorable circumstances. Mercenaries are going to range in quality and ethics, from ten-dollar taliban and foreign goon squads up to units like the Foreign Legion and the Gurkhas (with plenty of scum and professionals in between). And I'm not really sure why mercenary has "ooze rugged individualism", considering that a lot of the best mercenaries were recruited in groups, or at least from the same place.

As far as mercenary planets go, the notion makes a lot more sense if you think of it in the sense of a shitty agrarian world with no viable export except warm bodies. Which probably means means laborers or soldiers, and fighting tends to pay better. And once you're in the business of renting out the planetary military to fight other people's wars, you might as well try and be good at it.

Recruiting death worlders makes sense, since it pretty much guarantees a very high caliber of individual, since all the non-badasses wusses got killed. You aren't wasting recruits, since they'd presumably be living there anyway (though why is beyond me). On the other hand, throwing your recruits into a helljungle with a knife and a water bottle is pretty stupid and wasteful.

On the other hand, most special ops units train their recruits pretty hard once they make it past qualification and whatever specialty training they receive (e.g., the various specializations of Green Berets). This includes getting proportionally more resources for training; IIRC, a SF A-team receives some ridiculous amount of ammo for training relative to their size, and has better access to facilities to boot. Throw in better intelligence (sometimes) and more prep time (sometimes), and it's not surprising that a spec ops team might come off looking like super soldiers when everything goes right. When it doesn't... you get Operation Red Wing.

[Connor MacLeod]

Space Marine attrition is more about the psychological/indoctrination side.. they only want "worthy" recruits who fit their (in many cases fucked up, IMHO) physical and psychological profiles (the extremes being the aforemntioned doom eagles.) there's also the attrition rate as a byproduct of the creation process (the need for a certain age range and profile.) STill can be pretty retarded, but they don't actually "learn" many useful military skills (at least not useful to an actual Marine) until they are made into marines.

[Zixinus]

The same can be said of any soldiers, though.

Certainly, but there is a difference for just fighting for money and fighting for a cause you believe in or moreso if fighting for your home.

And I'm not really sure why mercenary has "ooze rugged individualism", considering that a lot of the best mercenaries were recruited in groups, or at least from the same place.

In real life, of course they were. Experienced groups are good, because they are likely already organised.
I'm talking about perception in fiction.

As far as mercenary planets go, the notion makes a lot more sense if you think of it in the sense of a shitty agrarian world with no viable export except warm bodies

I was replying specifically to this post:

Yes, but here we're talking about a unit where everyone is TEH AW3S0M! Not specialized super-elite units, but the sort of super-elite mercenary from a mercenary planet where everyone grows up to be a mercenary and they do nothing else but be spartan mercenary expys.

Yes, it sort of makes good sense if you have a planet that doesn't have much to offer. But not that much.

It would be better viewed like this: 90% the inhabitants who are born on this planet (and are not from priviliged families) have no other way out from their shitty homes but by leaving the planet as a soldier for hire.

But here comes a bit of a kicker: who trains these people? The government? Won't the government want money back after they spent a good deal of resources making these soldiers?
And if the government is hiring out it's military... won't it expose itself that way? Removing the very soldiers that are supposed to protect it? Also, won't it cost a significant amount of money to get the soldiers there?

Then comes the real kicker in the super-soldier bit: you have warm bodies, yeah, but what about equipment? Communications? Tanks? They don't make themselves you know, even assuming super-manufacturing you still need resources, time and energy to make these things. Never mind that you need people to keep these things working.

Because no matter how cheap or super your soldier is, unless he's something like an Astartes Space Marine in full wargear, a tank is still going to be better and more desirable. Probably may end up even cheaper too.

Recruiting death worlders makes sense, since it pretty much guarantees a very high caliber of individual, since all the non-badasses wusses got killed.

Something you can do pretty much the same way by doing a medical check-up on your recruits before you send them off to training.

Having people that survive extremely harsh conditions and makes them develop a strong survival mindset may not be as good a thing as you may think: it means that they have a strong urge to avoid danger and look out for themselves. This means soldiers that are unwilling to go into a dangerous battlefield, soldiers that look out for themselves rather than the mission and soldiers that would rather face court martial than get killed. Surviving is not the same as fighting.

On the other hand, throwing your recruits into a helljungle with a knife and a water bottle is pretty stupid and wasteful.

That depends actually on the circumstances: are you throwing a new recruit just to see whether he survives? Then yes, you might as well throw your recruits into the meat grinder. Are you throwing them in the wildnerness they have seen before, they have recieved extensive and complete training regarding surviving in the environmen and wilderness in general? Then you may just have a test, in which case it does make sense. Sure, you may want to monitor the guy from a distance regardless, but it isn't stupid if wilderness survival is a very important part of your soldier's role.

[Gunhead]

Survival is a nice skill to have for a soldier but if they have to rely on it everything has gone to shit anyway. If a SF group has to start living off the land it basically means the mission is a total loss from there and they are just trying to survive till evacuated.
No army can sustain itself even food wise by foraging let alone for spares and fuel for any extended period. Survival is taught to those who are the most likely to face a situation they indeed need it and their expertise is such that getting them back is crucial to the war effort. Pilots are a good example where survival training is warranted as they need to avoid capture and are valuable enough to recover from the field.

-Gunhead

[Purple]

@Gunhead
I have to argue against you now, nothing personal. This said, my arguments go for 40K and ONLY 40K. They do not apply to any other setting. I believe that your assessment there about the spikesquirrels is wrong in this particular case. This is for two reasons.
1) Considering this is 40K we are talking about luck may be more than just the random chance we have here. For all we know...
2) Future Space Marines/Elite Troops are going to be expected to face off much scarier and nastier things than just spikesquirrels. And exposing them to a madness inducing experience like this early on in training would work rather well to weed out those who would crack at the sight of a newer ending green wave of orks or a horde of chaos demons advancing on his position.

But as said, these only count for 40K becouse the place is as messed up as it is.

[Tierras Quemadas]

Don't forget the psychological impact that elite troops have.

Combat is terrifying enough for your average mook when he's just facing the other side's poor dumb mooks. Throw some Immortal Sardaukar Space Marines into the mix and the better part of valor starts to look a lot more attractive. The mook will eventually see that the elites bleed like everyone else, but that leaves a weakness for the enemy to exploit. Of course, a smart commander will use the elites sparingly and build their reputation through high profile victories.

That's how it works in the Super Soldier fiction I'm familiar with. The elites either have such a fearsome reputation that they don't usually face serious resistance or are only used to strike decisive blows once the enemy has been weakened by regular troops. Raw skill isn't the deciding factor.