Launching Your Planetary Invasion | Orbital Bombardment, Dropships, & The Escalation Ladder 

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Because of this I was able to successfully pull off a planetary invasion with minimal casualties. Thank you so much!

Damn, first ships, then tanks, now orbital bombardment? This guy is going to be the reason an Interstellar empire conquers us

Your discussion on Orbital Bombardment is one of the reason I love Halo so much, because they go down the checklist of reasons why not to bombard. Do you require the planets resources? No. Do you have to worry about military consequences? No. Do you have to worry about Diplomatic consequences? No. The Covenant only deployed ground troops when there was something on the planet they wanted. Otherwise they just glassed it.

I find that the "escalation ladder" metaphor works even better if the order is turned upside down: Peacetime at the top, annihilation at the bottom. It illustrates the danger of what happens when some steps are missing, and how easy it is to slip into escalation vs. the effort of deescalation.

This is why Halo still does interstellar war really well. The Covenant only invaded planets that had relics they wanted. Otherwise, they just sat in orbit and glassed the planet.

"This is a goddamn dangerous ladder and it's very easy to fall up" is a brilliant metaphor.

Covenant vs brazil would be a decisive victory for Brazil. The covenant decided to go to Brazil, and now they’re stuck in Brazil. They cannot leave and therefore have lost.

For reference: excessive use of exterminatus is one of the few things that can get an inquisitor reliably excommunicated.

Man, imagine having to launch a planetary invasion of an ocean world. Full-sized battleships and aircraft carriers being deployed from orbit... Majestic

Spacedock: Planetary invasions are stupid! Just blockade and bomb the planet into submission. The Templin Institute: ...and I took that personally.

The fact that EVEN The trigger-happy Imperium of Man would consider Orbital Bombardment a last resort option is terrifying food for thought.

I can imagine the institute taking note when someone a long time ago in a land far far away said "The Ballista. The weapon to end all wars!"

"In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good." -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Ch. III "Attack By Stratagem", §1). If it works for countries, it surely works for planets.

Battle-tech during the age of war shows how effective orbital bombardment is,but also how ineffective it is when you actually want a planet and not a burning and radioactive waste land.

My favorite dropship example was "Project Meteor" from Gundam Wing, in which space colonies, wishing to declare independence from the United Earth Federation, secretly developed an advanced type of mobile suit using a metallic alloy that could only be produced in zero gravity. They plant the trajectories alongside meteor showers so that the units could safely make landfall without being shot out of the sky. Then, once on the earth, the pilots would hide in plain sight during the day and take out key military targets at night. The overall objective was to diminish the Earth's capacity to exercise military control over the colonies, while at the same time obfuscating which colonies which actually involved in the attack against the Earth. Aside from the fact that this was a giant robot anime, I thought that the entire premise was extremely realistic.

"We don't need swords! The bow and arrow has rendered them obsolete." Me in every medeval game.

17:32 All points on the escalation ladder - Unrestricted use of WMDs - Unrestricted orbital bombardment - Limited use of orbital bombardment, WMDs - Mass use of conventional forces against military/economic targets - Mass use of precision strikes against military/economic targets - Grounded use of precision strikes against military/economic targets - Grounded use of precision strikes against military targets - Assembly and transfer of WMDs - Complete mobilization of all forces - Precautionary WMD alert - Complete infliction of damage on immaterial targets - Limited infliction of damage on immaterial targets - Military blockade - Reinforce key military units and stockpiles - Partial mobilization of military forces - Unconventional convert offense campaign in core territories - Unconventional overt offense campaign in outlying territories - Unconventional convert retaliation - Selective mobilization of military forces - Military signaling, test exercises - Pre-crisis maneuvering, gestures, diplomacy

I love the Maginot Worlds in stellaris. A whole planet gets converted into a sprawling defensive platform with all districts dedicated to planetary defense and basically every citizen exists solely to defend the planet. And, if somehow the planet falls, the planet acts as an antimatter bomb and annihilates the whole solar system

That opening with the speech to the soldiers about to depart for Normandy with all the scenes of the beach landings will never get old

I love the calling out of the more impetuous among 40k fans, and how accurately they'd be regarded in-universe

One of the other things we can learn from World War 2 is that having a fleet of ships in a location known to the enemy for any significant length of time would be INCREDIBLY dangerous in any situation where the enemy has ships that can respond: one of the hardest things to do to even have a battle at all (space or sea,) is to find the other ships, but if you know where your enemy is (like, say, in orbit,) and they don't know where you are, you can launch a massive first strike against their fleet and gain a solid upper-hand. If the planet has its own defenses as well, the attacking fleet would also be immediately flanked, and usually with no means of retreat. As such, many planetary assaults would need to move *fast*, so the most valuable ships involved can retreat to a safer location, and the ships you would leave behind to support the invasion would likely be weaker and expendable, and thus unlikely to be able to support each army beyond wherever the planetary defenders might have a dead spot in their defenses.

Another problem with orbital bombardment is that you're assuming that the enemy will never challenge your space superiority, and that your fleet will be able to stay over the enemy planet forever. You should never assume that your opponent is passive.

I'd like to point out the Siege of Vraks, where orbital bombardment would have destroyed the armories the Imperium needed to capture. Orbital bombardment is not a possible solution when irreplaceable resources cover the target zone.

This is a superb video, not just because of the content, but also to drill in the fact that reality is almost infinitely, fractally complex. Simple answers are always wrong and even complex answers are necessarily incomplete, yet we can each handle only so much complexity. The universe is full of patterns - intelligent thought would be impossible if it wasn't - but they interact in such infinite combinations that every historical event is a special case. All we can do is strive to understand as much as we can, prioritise our mental effort and maintain awareness of just how much we don't know and are forced to gloss over. A great aspect of the Templin Institute is how they strive endlessly for classification, systemisation and pattern recognition - whether they're dealing with mundane pieces of military materiel or whole pantheons of mind-breaking horrors - yet also acknowledge the limits of that approach. It really feels like the kind of applied scholarship you'd get out RAND or a similar high-end think-tank; briefings prepared for heads of states by experts who understand both the frustrating imprecision and the vital necessity of their work.

The siege of Terra in 40K is proof that purely orbital attacks aren’t enough if the enemy has shields, orbital attacks are extremely useful strategically eg localised lance attacks etc the issue is with bombarding a world to dust you lose its resources and at the extreme ends you lose a planet strategically

As we in the US Army are fond of saying, "Normandy. The greatest amphibious assault in the history of the world... And not one Marine in sight."

Gordon R. Dickson's novel 'Dorsai' actually looks at this in detail. In that universe, it is well established that invading a planet is impossible, yet by the end of it the hero proves that maxim completely wrong. Excellent video - subscribed!

I feel the sudden urge to start up Stellaris, glass enemy worlds and roach in fortress worlds.

Cool, might learn how I could have beaten the Rebels faster on Hoth.

An example of a planetary (well, starbase) demonstration: In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "By Inferno's Light", the Dominion made a lot of noise about retaking DS9 from Starfleet and the Bajorans, even faking warp signatures to suggest an inbound fleet, prompting Starfleet, the Klingons, and even the Romulans to deploy a huge task force to defend the station. Turns out the real plan was to trigger a supernova in the Bajoran sun, which would have destroyed the entire fleet, along with the station and Bajor.

I would also like to add that there's two types of orbital bombardment. Strategic and Tactical.

For an aspiring author, videos like this are a godsend. Thanks for the breakdown. We are a long way away from an event like this occurring, but this explanation's focus on precedents brings believability to the concept.

In Battletech, warships became obsolete when the the great houses finally realized that using indiscriminate orbital bombardment as a standard procedure against an entrenched opponent might be counterproductive to their objective of actually taking over a planet. you dont steal a car by setting it on fire.

Extermanatus is the tool of last resort, however, it is often the first proposed solution to a planet-wide issue. But, as anyone who has played Space Marine (2011) can see, it's often shot down quite rapidly. They weren't even willing to use heavy capital-ship class weaponry on the planet. The options are whittled to one advance SQUAD of ultramarines, and their whole job was simply to secure one manufactory while a proper fleet response got underway. That's what makes Inquisitor Kryptman get excommunicated from the Inquisition (right or wrong is still hotly debated), his unabashed use of exterminatus as a firebreak was seen as heinous by imperium of man standards. Let that sink in.

slight correction at ~ 44:00 : most astartes drop pods have an integrated automated sentry gun in addition to the astartes payload it carries. these are used to clear the area in addition to the explosive release of the pod doors in order to give the astartes within a bit of room to maneuver in the case of a hot battlefield drop as well as to give supporting fire during initial ground operations.

I feel as if the Acclamator-class was closer in role to an amphibious assault ship used by Marine Expeditionary Units than a troop transport.

'Orbital bombardment renders invasion obsolete' is an argument that's rooted in the idea that collateral damage doesn't matter and a sledgehammer is the tool for every job. I'm reminded of this little saying from the 19th century, when machine guns were the weapon to make all other weapons obsolete: "whatever happens we have got the Maxim gun and they have not." That lasted about 25 years.

One example of an interstellar crisis response was when the Republic showed up on Aleen in the Clone Wars after a bunch of earthquakes. They deployed troops and fixed up a bunch of stuff, and provided humanitarian relief, and then packed up and left.

I hope the Stellaris team takes notes one day!

Here's the thing: There is no advantage to the high ground in space in most sci-fi settings. If you have the tech to bombard a planet with lasers, then ground based laser cannons can also bombard you. And ground based installations can install thicker armor, stronger shields, bigger power plants, etc, for a lot less cost than a starship can, so the ground forces are going to outgun you. Same is true for railguns/rod from the gods style weapons. the extra 10km/s or so the gravity well gives you are simply insignificant compared to the bigger arrays you can build on a planet. Any weapon you can mount of a ship can be used for cheaper to a planet. Any defensive system you have is going to be used on planets, and at a larger scale. Attackers are going to stay out of weapons range, only darting in for brief fire runs when they think they can catch a vulnerable target, facing flak and fighter assaults whenever they do. Think the battle of Britain during WW2. However, this also applies to planetary invasions. Two similar sized powers with similar tech simply cannot manage to take each other's planets. Simply put, the attacker has to transport his army, and the defenders don't. That means the defenders can field more and heavier units, on top of which they are already fortified with stockpiled supplies. On top of that, the attackers have to expect heavy losses during landing operations, and whatever support they can get from orbital artillery is nothing compared to the firepower at the local's disposal. Which means that aggressors are likely limited to either technologically advanced civilizations picking on low tech ones, or massive empires going up against single world nations.

"Sometimes nuking an enemy city makes as much sense as spanking a baby with an axe" -Sergeant Zim, Starship Troopers

The most important factor of a planetary invasion, or ANY exertion of force, is to know beforehand what your goal is. Do you want to own all the territory? Do you want to wreck the other side's stuff? Do you want to kill or kidnap the opposing leadership? Do you want to rescue someone? Do you want to simply prove that you CAN do something, so other future enemies think twice about confronting you? So many options.

It's interesting to see how to escalation ladder of violence depicted at 17:24 can be easily applied to the current conflict in Ukraine. It really is easy to climb it, and hard to come back down.

This of us who actually read 40k lore would know that exterminatus was a last ditch effort, it was often viewed as defeat.

One thing I like in the Warhammer 40k universe is that the attacker almost never waits to gain space supremacy to land ground forces. Meaning that orbital bombardment is a factor, but not an automatic win button

A massive fleet in orbit cannot occupy a city, a bombardment of hypersonic projectiles cannot capture a mine intact and ready to use, and a giant death laser isn't going to help you retake your own territory from an enemy power. Only personnel on the ground can do that.

The "corporation" Star Force in the book series of the same name covers planetary relief in a few parts of the books. Truly massive scale but the Archons are ageless and have the time to implement these relief efforts slowly.

Another amazingly informative and well designed video essay! You could convince someone you were reading a history book from the future!

In my own personal worldbuilding project, which is on a massive extra-galactic scope, the notion of full planetary bombardment is still highly controversial. One of the main reasons is that it is ludicrously wasteful. The vast majority of planets within the universe I'm working on are completely uninhabitable, which makes terraformable planets extremely rare, and beyond that, finding a naturally inhabitable planet is like finding a needle in a mountain range. The more you bomb a perfectly livable planet, the more effort and resources you're going to require in order to make it livable again. Not to mention, you'd be destroying most, if not all of the highly refined resources and technologies already established on the planet by your enemy. Why destroy absolutely everything your enemy has built, when you can capture and repurpose it for yourself? Obviously, this is just one reason among thousands, but I feel as though it is a strong argument against orbital bombardment.

Grand Admiral Thrawn pulled off a couple of operations that were pretty close to what you're describing as "planetary demonstrations." There were a number of times where he redirected the New Republic's resources by threatening a raid or assault against a particular target, thus keeping them off balance and allowing his smaller force to strike devastating blows wherever the Republic's forces were redirected away from.

One type of strategic support ship that be used would be a factory ship. The thought being you need a way to repair and replace damaged equipment.

You don't reference the show anywhere in your video, so I would highly recommend watching the 90's animated series Exosquad. The entire show is built around more or less what WWII would look like if played out across multiple planets using futuristic technology. They show all of the types of combat scenarios you list and do a great job of showing how much work goes on in preparation for a large scale space military campaign... from recon and intel to rehearsal and execution. One of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time it is definitely something any sci-fi nerd has to watch.

I agree completely with the point about orbital bombardment. Now if I ever hear anyone say “don’t have an army when you can just bombard from orbit”, I’ll just point to any recent war and ask “so we should just nuke the enemy into oblivion?”

The evacuation of Romulus in star trek was a massive crisis response situation.

It drives me mad every time someone suggests that instead of invading a planet, you'd simply level every major population center until the resistance stops, so I'm glad you covered this topic. Destroying cities from orbit and massacring millions (or billions) of civilians in the process... why do that? Unless genocide is your war goal (see: Earth-Mimbari War and Human-Covenant War) it's contrary to your interests. If the planet has no value, why are you attacking it? If it does have value, why are you destroying it? But more so than the utilitarian question, I'm glad you also highlighted the moral question. Today we regard nuclear ICBMs as our most terrible weapons, an absolute last-resort because of the dire costs involved (human, political, economic, etc.). I see no reason for equally (or more!) devastating weapons to become normalized just because everyone's in space now... unless the setting presents an utterly depraved empire ruled by monsters. I feel like even in such setting, the mass deployment of WMDs would be a horrifying event that shows the danger of the aggressor, not just a casual thing that happens every day in wars.

I absolutely adore that you featured the Raven from Elysium, i love that craft so much, it's ridiculous, but that's what I'd want to arrive in. It's just too damn cool.

So far we've gotten Starships, Ground Vehicles and Invasion Craft. I would really like to see an Incoming dedicated towards Starfighter/Interceptors, as well as one reguarding firearms that militaries would use in the future.

If anything, an orbital invasion should be a combination of D-Day and the landings at Okinawa. A heavy bombardment on a target location, small teams of airborne, fast-attack troops targeting orbital/ AA installations followed by the proper landings and seizure of roads and pathways near the beachhead. Get as much men and equipment on the ground as possible and spread out as much as possible

The words "orbital bombardment" could never lose their meaning for me, no matter how many times you say them.

On the Dropship section, I was wondering whether you would talk about tackling the delta v requirements to lift back out of the atmosphere in a way that Earth 1 science and capabilities currently understand things.

I like two things the most in this video: Orbital bombardment might not be an unbeatable tactic, with sufficient shielding and anti space weapons, it might turn into a siege, or require ground troops to demolish planetary defences. Planets are big, and it might be possible to raid or attack one city because enemy forces need time to move.

I want to say you could count operations on Ryloth both in Clone Wars and Rebels as crisis response. Especially the latter, where there was blockade running entirely focused on delivering humanitarian aid to the population of an occupied world.

This video expertly explains something I learned in business school, the trough of expectation. Every new invention many military, brings high hopes that are cut down to size when it’s limits are discovered.

Regarding the threat of naval invasion during the gulf war, during an Interview General Schwarzkopf mentioned, that if the Iraqi forces had redeployed from the coast the US forces might have used the opportunity to launch a naval landing. Military plans are not set in stone and are adapted to the situation. In this specific case, the iraqi army had two choices: 1) commit large forces to coastal defence to prevent/oppose a military landing or 2) redeploy their forces and allow the enemy to land a large force in th rear of their army. Edit: Regarding 40k Drop Pods, there is a version which can deploy a single dreadnought (armoured walker). Just a minor correction

I would think that glassing a planet would be the exception rather than the rule, because doing so inevitably destroys biological, economic, and even cultural resources worth preserving. And with sufficiently high mountains or deep enough tunnels, there is no guarantee that you will wipe out the enemy either. You might just eliminate all their restraint, and open up new resources for them to exploit that wouldn't be economical otherwise, that they can use to exact their revenge decades down the line. The interesting thing about planetary invasions that really wasn't touched upon is that they, theoretically, truly happen in three dimensions. Unlike amphibious assaults, which are limited to chokepoints by waterways and suitable beaches, or airborne assaults, which are limited by the volume of material that can be moved and the airspace you have access to, once you get to the planetary level, you can land anywhere. And flying into the teeth of the enemy defenses, for all it's cinematic glory, actually makes less sense. It actually makes more sense to land in the most isolated, or geographically inaccessible regions as possible to the defenders. Those easily defensible bastions that we all hate in Risk, like Australia, and Madagascar. Take your time, build up your forces, your logistics, even local production, so the locals will have a hard time striking back and ultimately dislodging you. All the while, surgical strikes can work on a global level to whittle down the locals ability to move to your position, and strike back in any capacity, and build up for the fight ahead with minimal collateral damage. Military bases, air and naval ports, military production and active units can be struck early and often to keep them off balance and isolated, unable to congregate into a force large enough to threaten your stronghold. While such a methodical approach might give the locals more time to mobilized militia units, and provide you with more targets when you finally do break out, these tend to be nearly as dangerous to the natives as they are to the invaders, and can only seriously threaten you on a strategic level with a great deal of plot armor.

I feel like MAD is the best argument for the use of landing forces. If you bomb the shit out of your enemy's planets just to achieve strategic objectives, why shouldn't they do the same to you?

I want to point out that the acclimator was actually a warship before it was a ground ship. Yes it was absolutely intended to ferry troops, but was somewhat capable of operating independently. in the old Legends Cannon they were fearsome warships all on their own, capable of doing planetary bombardment, and breaking blockades. They were essentially smaller Star destroyers.

So... You mentioned in the video that there was; military escalation (as you covered extensively), diplomatic, and economic escalation. Perhaps in the future you can cover how an interstellar empire can use the other two escalations?

Many factors can go into a planetary invasion and they can also go wrong. But either way, if you want to invade a world the thing you need to do, is eliminate your enemy’s fighting strength or deplete it enough to force them to surrender. But you also need to consider what you need to do once you’ve established a beachhead.

This is an exquisite video, bringing out many thoughts shared by myself and a great many other individuals into deep detail. While orbital bombardment will be a game changer with it uses, depending on the actually tactical/strategic goals, there will be some situations will orbital bombardment is not possible and planetary invasions are necessary. Examples of such as shown in the video are; 1.) capturing enemies which are needed alive (dead men give no intel nor can order surrenders), 2.) acquiring resources (the pristine farmland or rarelementium mine you wanted to conquer being reduced to a barren wastes makes your war of conquest pointless), 3.) cultural or religious reasons (the Holy Relic/World must be preserved at all costs), 4.) economic reasons (that world possess a fifth of the nation's industry, destroying it will cripple your further efforts to win the war), 5.) retrieving friendly forces (you don't have the resources to waste a million well trained troops with years of experiences, oh and your top leaders and strategists need to be alive to lead forces to victory), 6.) avoid civilian non-combatant casualties, especially if they are citizens of your nation (hearts and minds need to be won to avoid a coup; or if one of your worlds is under occupation and needs to be liberated for post-war reconstruction [this is particularly true for civil wars]), and many more various scenarios and technologies. Quite intriguing standardize classification of landing craft. It is something that I think would work well in development in future sci-fi works. The design and process of the escalation ladder was also fascinating. It takes a lots to go very seriously deadly for a military situation to go to a Total War, hence why the last one was over 75 years ago. Even in the modern day, there are still reasons as to there being healthy infantry with combat knives rather than swarm drone icbms. Overall, again, a rather fascinating video exploring the concept of planetary invasions and providing a one video essay to show others the importance of such tactical/strategic in potential interstellar conflicts. 46:28 ; Some Antares self-inserting there, clever Marc.

"Because we want their stuff intact" is a great reason for invasion

Side note, in WW2, naval destroyers (maybe the equivalent of a heavy assault ship at the time?) were also used as troop transport for some invasions, and offered fire support before/after dropping off the ground units. See Attu campaign.

An SF novel “Crest of the Stars” depicts a space-dwelling civilization called Abh Empire. This civilization’s main species is a type of engineered human, Abriel human, which has higher adaptations to space environment than on land, and they culturally do not like surface life. They have basically every resource produced on ships so they don’t necessarily need land, either. ( I don’t remember why they capture planets if they are so nomadic, probably because they are copying their creators, which they destroyed with their own hands) The way they capture a planet is to totally eliminate this planet’s space travel abilities and than diplomatically persuade this planet to let the empire run the space port for them. The planet surface government will remain kinda independent besides taxes or other specific orders from the empire. If the people on planet want to fly again, they can apply to be the pilots of the Abh fleet or own short-ranged transportation ships. Surface human can join the ruling class of Abh Empire if they served and get rewarded in the fleet, but their offspring must be engineered to be Abriel human instead of original species. The title they earned will pass on to Abriel offsprings. I didn’t finish the novel, so a lot of their culture is not explained clearly here. But I wonder if this “twisted” kind of civilization will actually plan to drop on to ground for a full-scale planet invasion. (They do have landing marines in their fleet, though, since surface mission like rescue crashed ships and personnel is always possible.)

The thing with orbital bombardment is quite the same for naval bombardments, there will be a planet that just won't die until you go there and shoot everyone. Famously, Iwo Jima was so shelled that the soldiers initially thought that they had killed all the Japanese only for them to spring out and start firing when the Americans were exposed

This was a very well thought out video, thank you guys!

one thing that is often overlooked in the scale issue is that a conquest doesn't have to be total, there are multiple levels of conquest : -"soft" conquest, similar to UK and india, India was officially UK territory, but outside of political power, the everyday life of citizens was virtually unscathed, very few UK citizens moved to India so the population didn't mix, didn't had to adapt to UK custom, or anything like that at all. the conquest was essentially just on paper and India was more or less just a heavily bounded vassal. this requires virtually no troops beyond the initial war (whish may or may not happen at all), and is how the mongols managed to invade 20% of the world, despite having no fast mean to communicate, the winner is recognized as an official leader, but as little influence over the conquered territory. -"mild" conquest, spares troops are left in the conquered territories, just enough to be able to enforce your own laws, however little to no civilians move in, and the cultural identity of the territory is largely unchanged, this can lead to rebellions, but is relatively cheap to maintain. (might be hard to do for a full planet tho) -"hard" conquest, the conquered territory becomes undifferentiated to the rest of the winner state, populations move in and may be moved out, breaking any sort of strong cultural identity. in the short run, this is extremely expensive, and requires a lot of diplomacy before things start being stable. (essentially impossible on a heavily populated world)

In Legend of Galactic Heroes, the forces of Reinhard von Lohengramm deliberately allowed a planetary bombardment by their opponent the Lippstadt League to proceed despite being in a position to prevent the massacre. The grotesque aftermath was then used as propaganda against the League, causing desertions and loss of popular support, thus hastening their eventual defeat.

Planetary Demonstration: Mobile Suit Gundam: Stardust Memory. The Earth Federation fleet was holding a Naval Review as a means to showcase how much of the fleet they rebuilt after the One Year War and to act as a warning against Zeon splinter factions. One such splinter faction stole a nuclear armed, Federation Gundam and used to to wreck two thirds of the fleet.

I have been wondering about this for so long, thankfully you guys uploaded this video.

Excellent dissertation! Lines up pretty on par with my own project. Orbital landings are defined as Objective Raids, Planetary Assaults, or Planetary Occupations and follow can follow the escalation ladder in order to reach the end goal. Raids to knock out AA and/or Orbital Defenses, neutralize key targets etc. Assaults to land a sizable force in order to achieve a more expansive goal ie seize locations, destroy infrastructure, combat enemy forces or secure a beachhead, etc. Lastly, Occupation would be make use of an existing beachhead to land a substantial force with the intent of engaging in a prolonged operations...

For an interstellar Army I’ve envisioned, a planetary invasion only begins when Void Supremacy has been achieved (80% of void space must be achieved). The Army and Navy are two separate entities. With the navies sole role is to win the battle in space, as well as provided additional support (planetary bombardment) along with holding the space. The Navy does not fight on the ground, unless the marines have been deployed. The Army have their own ships, they act has their bases and transport. They are the exact same class of ships that is used in the navy, just much fewer in number and are unlikely able to hold and win the space battle by themselves. Anyway, once void supremacy has been achieved, the invasion will commence. The invasion is split into 3 phases. Those being: Phase 1. “The Softening”. This is where multiple points on the planet or area will be “softened” by light orbital bombardment (with light being a relative term here. It’s best that a target or point is destroyed but even if it isn’t, it’s likely to be decimated). After a set period of time , drop pods will be shot into the atmosphere and to other key areas, as well as to sweep up any points that haven’t been knocked out. The drop pods will contain combat droids. This will tie up any local forces within the area, forcing them to commit men, and ammunition to contain the attack. Even if the initial droid attacks fail to truly do any damage, it will still soften up the enemy garrison/forces. Up next is the 2nd phase. Phase 2. “Take and Hold”. From here, the invasion begins. Dropships and fighters will descend from their home ships and enter the atmosphere to begin an attack. The fighters will strife any defensive position to lockdown the troops or lockup any reinforcements coming to bolster the defenders. And here the drop ships will disembark the Heavy Assault Infantry (My version of the stormtrooper) to create and take a beachhead. Once a beachhead has been secured. The invasion moves onto the next and final phases. Phase 3. “The Sweeping”. With a beachhead secured, a Forward Base can be established. There tanks, artillery, troops, supplies and equipment can be deployed on the ground. Note that the troops here are different from the HAI (Heavy Assault Infantry) to the regular army. The HAI is a part of the wider Army. The Infantry is to conquer the rest of the planet.

"If this thing needs to shoot its guns, somebody screwed up" Meanwhile me, using Acclamators as frontline warships in Empire at War I love these types of videos, they're why I found this channel.

I think a collab between the professors at The Templin Institute and the scholars that take care of the Curious Archive would be phenomenal. The latter takes the role of defending a planet (and picking which planet they are defending) that the former is taking the role of invading (based on what they can learn about the planet the latter chose) for War Games. I think that would be awesome.

A truly amaizing explanation. Well done.

In the Lost Fleet book series, a fleet launched an orbital bombardment, but planned it to bounce of the atmosphere, to create streaks in atmosphere, to shock the planet leaders into giving up planet bound prisoners. Would that count as a demonstration? Or something else?

"WE'RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL, GOIN' DOWN!"

I wish this channel would write a book on this stuff. This stuff is great.

This is an excellent video. I hope there will be more of its kind.

34:05 I remember an episode of star wars the clone wars where clones where dispatched to send medical supplies and technical aid to civilians in a planet after catastrophic earthquakes. The episode was about R2D2 and C3PO going with them, falling into a cavern, finding out what caused the earth quacks and solving the problems and then none of the clones beleaves them but that isn't the point. If anyone can remember the name of the episode, it could make for a good example of crisis response landings.

I remember something close to a demonstration in Earth: Above and Beyond. Episode 21. You actually used footage from it at 35:19 ☺ They abandoned the invasion after troops had landed. The enemy had used critical forces to counterattack, opening a very critical planet. So the fleets moved there. They explicitly referenced Guadalcanal twice. The Starship Trooper movie, "Planet P" initial operation might also qualify. The goal was to verify the presence of a brain bug.

I dont know how i came across your channel. Still pretty new to it and still trying to figure what its all about. But man, really cool stuff. Great production on your videos. This is the type of stuff thats just so easy to have on and playing no matter what it is I am doing. Keep up the great work!

This channel is EXACTLY what I wanted

If one is fighting a small rebel group soon to become an Galactic wide revolution a full scale Orbital Bombardment might be seen by your populace as too far. Also think of the kind of intelligence you might lose or Civilian casualties. You absolutely need to have a fully capable force prepared to invade what could be an entire section of a world.

If anything, clean up would be a nightmare if you had to retake a planet destroyed by orbital bombardment. Just like a surgeon with a scalpel, precision is key when needed. Just like the escalation ladder and key assets you explained.

Great video! Amazing insight and critical analysis

You raise some great points and I am very glad I found your channel

Taking a different angle on this, I think it's also fair to say that the difficulty of an invasion is directly proportional to how much you *don't* want to destroy. If you're keen to scour the entire planet, ecosystems be damned, all you need is a suitably large asteroid and an engine to push it. Conversely, if you want to retain critical infrastructure, planet-side resources, some degree of the local population, or the capacity for longer-term diplomatic relations the requisite manpower and resource investment increases accordingly. Thus, the more granulated the target profile, the more precise and specialized the equipment you'll need to actually achieve your objectives. Another factor not necessarily discussed here, is time - or rather, efficiency vs effectiveness. Logistical limitations might prevent you from amassing a large invasion force for a given planet. You might only be able to spare a large fleet to secure orbital superiority before they're needed elsewhere, or the sheer size of force required might not even be within your reach. In any case, even if you could, the wholesale bombardment or invasion of a planet is inefficient and wasteful of your resources, as is the opposed landing of troops on the surface in less-than-ideal conditions. Assuming you're not losing on other fronts, if you have orbital superiority, you can choose when and where to fight and dictate the cadence of the operation through 'energy superiority' to use air combat terminology - that being a higher altitude where the enemy must expend great energy to reach you, but you need do a lot less to reach them. Let's think of an example with Earth; a successful invasion that removes our capacity to resist, with minimal resource expenditure relative to planet-side defensive assets. We'll also be trying to retain as much planetary infrastructure as we can. Stage 1 of such an invasion begins years in advance, with reconnaissance efforts, passive and active, and depending on the timeline may even include sabotage and destabilizing the local political landscape. Sowing dissent or even emboldening local populations who might be supportive to your efforts could even be in the cards, depending on who it is doing the invading, or even the deployment of seemingly natural diseases, the covert triggering of something like a supervolcano, and other disruptive acts might also factor in. For the rest of this invasion, let's assume we stopped at reconnaissance, since we're trying to retain local infrastructure in a usable state. Stage 2 begins with the insertion of first-strike capable craft into planetary orbit. Ideally, this would be done undetected, allowing such craft to seed Earth's orbit with different warheads on a variety of orbits, prior to simultaneous activation at the beginning of stage three. Stage 3, the first overt military action, is to render the planet's detection and communication systems inert. Nuclear warheads previously left in synchronized orbits descend and detonate in the upper atmosphere, too high to cause damage on the ground, but more than potent enough to fry military tracking and targeting radar, disrupt radio communications, civilian power grids, and other electronic infrastructure. Concurrently, planetary satellite networks will be targeted, as will known connection points for major underwater cables and communication infrastructure such as internet server hubs. Now that the planet is in the dark, if everything went well, many portions of the world may be under the assumption they're experiencing a local event, and not understand the true ramifications of it, nor be able to effectively coordinate a response and mobilize as quickly as they should. Stage 4 begins with the selection of military targets and certain points of critical infrastructure. Runways, missile silos, command centres, armories, motor pools, naval yards, warships currently at sea, and anything else that might otherwise pose future resistance or be more difficult to hit if given time to move off-site. By this point, the time period of states are determined mostly by the orbital period of the ships engaging in limited bombardment - so it could be anywhere from one to several hours, based upon how high an orbit they choose to take either to avoid detection or provide a security buffer space in which to shoot down any planet-launched missiles that do make it out of the atmosphere. Stage 5 next shifts from military targets, to *parts* of logistical targets. For instance, you might not want to destroy the power grid, or the power plants themselves (unless you have better ones you mean to install later, and don't care) so instead all you need to do is take out the accumulators at each power facility, or strike local transformers. By comparison, they'll be much easier for you to fix later. For targets like New York, there's no need to hit the city directly when you can just hit the bridges. Elsewhere mountain passes, rivers, ports, canals, and any singular points which, if destroyed, would inhibit travel are being struck. Stage 6 shifts into more opportunistic operations, with the selection of new priority targets as they appear to eliminate future opposition, and is also the transition into planetary operations in an isolated scale. Taking advantage of the isolation of local groups through selective infrastructure destruction, a comparatively small landing force can undertake a defeat-in-detail style operation of the planet. That being; If you only have say 100 thousand troops to land, you segment and isolate the enemy so that you fight them in blocks of no more than 5-10 thousand at a time. Better yet, don't fight them at all; destroy their logistical chains with special operations or raiding parties and force them to disband without giving them the chance to fire back at you. Stage 7 is now the long game. Even a single warship in orbit could be all that's necessary. Once the fighting capacity of the local population has been broken, you can invade regional areas one at a time in order of importance. You don't even necessarily *need* to take the whole planet, just the parts of importance to you. If a later diplomatic resolution is attained, this stage might never be necessary, but it should at very least wait until after the food and consumables of nuclear missile submarines and other hostile assets that may still be present have been expended. From here, the process is only limited by the means and goals of subjugation or victory goals of the invaders. A decent fictional depiction of this, though a more rushed equivalent, I think is The Universal Union, or 'The Combine', who took advantage of Earth's ongoing disruption before dividing, conquering, and seeking to control key infrastructure while being largely ambivalent with regards to rural areas and humans outside their aura of influence. 7 Hours to secure a planetary surrender is impressive, though they also had Xen portal storms effectively do the first half of the process for them. Still, I think they at least qualify due to the end result of their invasion, with limited and precise retention of infrastructure and population - though they did land ground forces almost immediately, so it's not a perfect analogue. PS: The Kuwaiti amphibious landings I don't think could be considered a 'ruse' as they were in fact, a plan B. If the land invasion from the West had failed, then it would have gone ahead. Alas, the use of GPS and superiority of American armoured units proved more than effective enough to carry the initial invasion.

One thing I would add to orbital bombardment. The planet you’re invading will be just as capable as a ship of building weapons just as big (if not bigger as they don’t need to be mobile) as any ship and likely at similar or longer range. Why would they just sit back and let you bomb them?

I like this, you present some interesting facts and points. I appreciate your time and research you put into this. Thank you for sharing on this fun topic