Prozac the Robert wrote:Transporting civilians: Doesn't have to be done instantly. Can take as long as nescesary.
And meanwhile the campaign which you have launched will continue to consume resources at an extremely high rate; your troops of all types will become exhausted, your shipping will require maintenance. If you have the luxury of unlimited time in a campaign, then it can only be against the weakest of enemies. In real life against a decent enemy you need to defeat him, you cannot simply wait for the enemy to throw in the towel. You must finish one battle so you can move onto the next planet, and then the one after that until he is completely defeated. Take too long doing that and you might find your fleet is suddenly outnumbered and under attack since you enemy has taken that luxury of time to rebuild.
Strongly defended positions: Bomb 'em from orbit if they refuse to surrender. If that isn't an option, just starve them out, and zap/transport out any patrols or scouts they send out.
See the abovce.
They are effectively useless unless they are right on top of somewhere the federation really wants, and even then the feds can probably wait them out.
If the enemy is denying you the surface then his ground force is being effective. If you don't even want the world then any attack is simply a waste of resources, and those ships parked in orbit waiting to shoot at anything which moves out of cover ought to be redeployed. You might notice that in WW2 when the US bypassed islands it didn't leave a ring of warships around them firing constantly. It simply destroyed there ability to strike back by air or sea and moved on.
Cities: Cut off their power and food suplies, prommise not to kill civilians who leave. If it's not working fast enough, start taking pot shots at transport inhibitors.
Great Plan. Once more you utterly fail to grasp the importance of time in warfare. So what do you do when a natural ore in the ground blocks you from transporting out defenders in the sewers and the hostile population gives them food? Wait for them all the die of old age?
Large concentrations of enemy forces: Stun 'em or kill 'em, depending on your preference and their level of protection.
I'm sure your enemy will be cooperative and will fail to disperse its forces in the absence of an effective defence, just unlike every remotely competent military organization in history.
Protective gear: I'm not convinced a peice of plywood would protect a soldier from a starship phaser, even if it is set on stun. Helmets and sholder pads are not enough if the soldiers plan to walk or move their arms around.
Your personal opinions on such things have already been shown to be lacking.
I think they would rapidly demoralise the enemy, and make it very hard for them to do things like scout, obtain supplies or enjoy any form of outdoor recreation.
A demoralized enemy can still lift his rifle and gun down a bunch of pajama clad morons, which is what matters. Lowering your enemies moral through bombardment is only become relevant if its also combine with the shock effect of a ground campaign to force him to move. But your 'brilliant' planning is utterly devoid of that.
If nothing else you could completely wreck the planet's economy. After a while there would be shortages of fuel and amunition.
No there won't be, because your forcing your enemy to remain static, which means they have little need to expend fuel or ammunition. The fact that with the Federation's technology level you could easily get energy in the form of deuterium extracted from water makes easy anyway, will your plan now involve removing the planet's water table via transporter?
I still think most planets would just surrender as soon as they lost control of space though.
Perhapes, but that would depend on a vast number of factors. You still need to be prepared to deal with those worlds that don't surrender, and in a realistic timeframe.
If they don't surrender after all of this stuff, some men will need deploying, but they still have a massive advantage due to ships in orbit. They can get immensly accurate artillery support, they will know exactly where the enemy armies are, and if they get surounded they can just leave the way they came, and beam down somewhere else.
So your planning is once more based on perfect intelligence and a single infallible tactic? I'm not surprised.
The area they were occupyuing could then be flattened if it would be helpful, and the enemy would be out of position and have wasted precious fuel anyway if not.
What you forget is you're the attacker; the enemy is already defending what he considered important. If your forces arrive to attack on the ground then the enemy simply needs to occupy his firing positions, which is probably going to involve little more then scurrying out of a tunnel, into a basement and manning a firing position. Then he switches on one of the sensor jammer's you've stowed away and massacre the unprepared assault force which was deployed on the assumption it could be instantly withdrawn (Remember certain events in 1993 in Somalia?)
It doesn't matter what the Federation parks in orbit, there still is no substitute for a large, well equipped ground force, even if its job generally just involves garrisoning a planet that surrendered once its orbital defenses where destroyed.