Realistic effects of Sci Fi weapons on Infantry tactics

[SpaceMarine93]

Military science fiction often explains how futuristic weapons and fighting non-terrestrial environments would affect society and individuals, and how wars are fought on grand scales, but how many actually shows how the presence of futuristic weaponry and technologies affect strategies and tactics of the individual soldiers and single platoons?

Say super-effective energy weapons and cheap super-strong power armor exists, ala Fallout and Starship Troopers; the energy weapons renders most conventional covers useless, whereas the power armor makes even the lowly grunt a walking tank.

Thus, squad and platoon tactics had change; instead of fire teams fighting using covers, flanking, suppressing fire and ambushes to destroy the enemy, all designed to reduce chances of frail soldiers being exposed and killed in mind, you would have future power armor soldiers walking a beeline to the enemy in their super-armor, slugging and whaling at each other with their energy weapons, their training involving maximizing maneuverability and suit utility to increase chances of survival while minimizing energy usage in their suits and weapons.

Or something like that. Heck, I don't know - I haven't seen much military sci-fi lately.

The thing is, while flicks like Star Wars shows massive amounts of fighting with futuristic weapons, it just doesn't seemed to realistically explore how those future weapons would affect the tactics and operandi of the common soldier would fight?

And by the way, how many stories about battle squads and platoons of the future references this guide: http://www.shu.edu/offices/upload/FM-7-8.pdf and the soldiers fights like professional soldiers and squads like the ones you could find in the real world?

[HMS Conqueror]

If you grant FTL space travel then probably infantry combat rolls into policing. Wars won't be decided on that scale. A battleship will sail up and demand the defenceless port surrender, not bother fighting all their ants on the surface.

For less physics-bending things confined to a single planet, it's very difficult to predict future developments, but I can see two forks:

1. Very powerful handheld weapons. Vehicles become irrelevant except for speed and porting artillery guns, so tanks &c. are much less important. This is a comparable development to when firearms displaced the armoured knight.

2. Very strong armour and/or heavy weapons. The most likely development is that long range weapons become very accurate, which may sound quite different, but if you can't return fire on what's shooting you then it has functionally infinite armour. In this eventually, vehicles pre-dominate except where political problems make them unviable (you can't level Baghdad with howitzers and tanks). I think this is the most likely, and it already sort of happened.

I don't think mechs or anything like that will happen. The human body is not a good shape. If you're going to go down that route might as well make a cavalry tank.

[Captain Seafort]

If you grant FTL space travel then probably infantry combat rolls into policing. Wars won't be decided on that scale. A battleship will sail up and demand the defenceless port surrender, not bother fighting all their ants on the surface.

Not necessarily. If the sci-fi verse in question has theatre shields strong enough to hold off a battleship, but without the firepower to kill them quickly enough, then there would be scope for large-scale ground combat roughly along the operational lines of the Battle of Hoth - land forces outside the shield and move inward to disable it and allow orbital bombardment. This would, naturally, be countered by defensive rings within the shield perimeter with the objective of holding off the ground attack until a counter attack could be launched against the attacking fleet.

[Purple]

On the same note. If the setting has both shields and anti orbital weapons but these weapons are too big and expensive to be localized at far off places we might end up with the often seen strategy of landing somewhere in the middle of nowhere and than fighting a planet conquest land war.

Also, tanks are newer going to go away. As science advances anything you can put on a power armored guy you will be able to make bigger and better to put on a tank. The real killer will probably be air power. The defender in a planetary scenario has a huge advantage in prepared airfields or worse yet aircraft carriers that he can keep under his shields and mutilate the attacker with UAV's and maned aircraft. So vehicles become even more important to extend AA fire.

[Simon_Jester]

Aircraft are about as vulnerable to an orbiting platform armed with energy weapons as ground targets are.

[Batman]

That'd probably be where the 'keeping them under the shields' aspect comes into play?

[Imperial528]

It's also important to note that the time when you can best intercept them is when they are deployed away from the shields, which means that your forces have already landed. Now, it just seems likely to me that the sort of low-power weapon you'd use to snipe away aircraft is probably not going to be reliable at mid-high orbit distances where you can sit safe from ground-based retaliation.

Now, using higher power weapons might do it (This is really dependent on a lot of variables though, mainly just how powerful the weapons are, accuracy, etc.), but then you simply force the defender to wait until your troops get under the shields before using manned air support. In the mean time if you have enough you can simply use a combination of cruise missiles, stealthy UAVs and artillery to whittle away the ground troops while they march.

Personally though it is hard to judge these things unless talking about a setting with clearly defined capabilities. A setting such as SW with ground defenses capable of taking on entire fleets would easily experience protracted ground wars, yet one such as ST with starships easily capable of pin-point ground bombardment would be much better off with more ships in the fleet than a ground warfare force greater than occupation and police forces.