In a setting where orbital bombardment is an option, how necessary is the existence of ground troops like infantry or tanks?
When you can simply win the space battle and then proceed to bombard your enemy from orbit, what's the point of having hundreds or thousands of guys with rifles?
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You cant bombard everywhere
>In a setting when bombardment is an opton, how is the existence of ground troops like infantry and tanks? When you can simply win the air battle and then proceed to bombard your enemy from the sky, what's the point of having hundreds or thousands of guys with rifles?
The same good old, Holding the goddamn position you want to get a hold of
Depends on the setting
If there are places folks want to conquer without blowing up then massed conventional war will still have its place. If it is a war of extinction than even starships are redundant compared to throwing engines on asteroids and other random shit in space. Pretty simple t b h f a m
Depends on what your aim is, just like in real life. If you want to seize land/resources with the infra-structure intact, you need boots on the ground. This is pretty fucking obvious, you'd think.
>throwing engines on asteroids and other random shit in space.
boy, that reminds me of all tomorrows and that stupid as fuck method of killing everyone by blocking the sunlight, which can be circumvented so easily by just living underground near the mantle.
>In a setting where aerial bombardment is an option, how necessary is the existence of ground troops like infantry or tanks?
>When you can simply win the air battle and then proceed to bombard your enemy from 50000ft, what's the point of having hundreds or thousands of guys with rifles?
>lmao why don't we just bomb every city to dust lmao and drop some nukes on them for good measure lmao
>who needs captured land anyway lmao
Like dude, how is that even a fucking question?
If orbital bombardment is your people's only recourse, I'd send a regiment to the capital city of your capital world.
If you haven't been advancing your GI tech, your only options are surrender or destroying your own capital cities.
Bum rushing landing ships doesn't even require space-to-space fighter supremacy. Send a few sacrificial escorts out gunned and out manned just to distract your defenses enough for 'enough' of the ground crew to land.
It's a heavy casualty strategy, but effective for bringing down superior enemies.
All the way back in WW1 they discovered that simply saturating an area with firepower is actually quite bad at dislodging dug-in troops. They used artillery there mroe than bombers, but in the end it doesn't matter much if the can of HE that comes falling from the skies was shot from a cannon or dropped from a plane. They utterly shredded the land with their barrages, but even so when they sent the boys in there'd be some enemy troops here and there jumping out. If the advance wasn't careful those few could wreak havoc with a grenade here or a salvo there, if the advance was they'd take that slow advance and make it even slower.
So they upped the amount of artillery fire, and it dodn't solve it.
So they upped it even more, and it didn't solve.
And again, and again, and again.
In the end, the solution to break through the trenches turned out to be a WW2-style combined arms assault instead.
>compared to throwing engines on asteroids and other random shit in space
yeah, so we have this huge fucking rock. That we need to give a huge amount of delta-v. And which will then take thirty years to get on target. During which we have to stick around and make sure the enemy doesn't drop by and divert it.
Or we can just carpet bomb the place with nukes. I mean, one is way beyond anything we can do today, the other is something we've been able to do to ourselves since the sixties. What could be the easier option of those two?