A soldier so brave he doesnt need a gun.

Switzerland haven't been involved in a foreign war in 199 years and they share a border with France, Germany and Italy, 3 of the most aggressive nations in Europe. War is not inevitable.

 

I always found "The Art Of War" to be an excellent book on economics. To raise an army requires x amount of oz of siver etc to pay for chariots, glue, armour and so on.

Been a while since i read it but there was also good section on seige warfare. It's not directly related but everytime i hear news about the current situation regarding the annexation of Sevastopol i always think of the art of war.

Baza

 

Not really. All you'd need was to slightly tweak its orbit. For instance, a one ton probe parallel to the comet would be enough to pull the comet to a collision course with earth. You just need a very small tweak in the right spot of the orbit and it would be done.

 

amazing economics and business strategy book.

in tribal warfare accounts ive read too, the winning tribe always employed similar strategies

 

Oh I don't know, put a couple of self replicating robots on the asteroid, maybe a few that will build solar panels all over it, a few that would build engines and bing bang boom you're good to go. The point is that any civilization capable of interstellar travel is also capable of massive amounts of destruction. You wouldn't need a death star to blow up a planet, just a Millennium Falcon.

We may not pose a threat to them now, but in a few millennia it might be too late for them to respond to the potential threat. They also have no way of telling what our technological level is at this present time, because all of the information they have is already years out of date.

How humans treated other civilizations is less relevant, I think, than how we treated other species. Most megafauna quickly went extinct wherever we settled, and that includes animals that could have posed a threat to us - Dire Hyenas and wolves, whatever that mega goanna was, etc., etc.

We cooperate within our tribal groups and within our civilizations. The way we treat people we consider outside of our group, never mind outside of our species, has been less than compassionate. And, again, they might be receiving information that is hopelessly out of date. They have no way of telling what our current technological level is, only that we are intelligent and quite likely as savage as they are.

Except that there is no mutually assured part of it. Imagine a scenario in which the US and Russia had absolutely no way of seeing the missiles coming and no way to retaliate after the missiles are fired. I would think that might have pushed things along a bit. Plus, it's only been fifty years or so. Blink of an eye really in cosmological/evolutionary terms.

It is a bit depressing, but I'm skeptical as to whether or not there's any other way of looking at contact with an interstellar race. Every time a technologically advanced society has come into contact with a less technologically advanced society… well… Yeah.

 

Considering the first television broadcasts they see will include Nazi Germany and the aftermath of WWII, I don't fancy our chances at being welcomed into the Galactic Council. Things haven't really got much better since. I know I wouldn't want us spreading outside our solar system if I were a member of an advanced alien species.

 

It's surprisingly unknown, but we came closest to full-scale nuclear war in 1995. Supposedly after the cold war ended (I don't think it really did): http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

 

So to prevent war you just need to hold onto the other people's money?

 

Whoooof that's scary. Have you ever read about this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov?

 

No, you just stop invading other countries and make invading your country an unpleasant prospect.

 

Let me clarify then, I have been on several hot objectives, some of them a square mile in size with several enemy bunkers and structures on it, as well as roveing patrols (enemy patrols).
On one particular instance we were working with a special operations group, I think two squads roughly twelve Special operators in all. During our assault on this objective I personally witnessed the mobility and freedom to move about the entire objective that special operators get to enjoy, do not however confuse Special forces with scout snipers this is another thing entirely, although the two will and can work together.
Most of the time on an objective like the one I mentioned above the regular soldier lines up and moves as tactically as possible in rout to the different targets on said objective, the special operator moves where ever he is needed or wants to go, he gives orders moves troops and often is searching for high profile targets, specific people, intell peices and maybe even equipment in some cases, I think Navy E,O,D is best example.
All that said special operator is less warrior and more soldier than say the spy or intelligence agent working in a forign country, understand this is only my opnion.

 

I think it's a mistake to categorize modern military into ancient classifications that have long since lost their relevance. Might as well call jet fighters hoplites and tanks vikings.

 

Bodyshot, what you are describing is small unit tactics and every branch of the army has them. Usually for more regular troops it is mostly done by the company officer who is in charge of them while in special operations it is done at squad or individual level when you are ordered togo somewhere through some route or another it is usually because someones spent a lot of time looking at a map in with lots of recon intel (most of which through spec ops or the divisionalrecon assets). None the less, squad commanders in regular forces also have an input since they have the freedom to adapt to specific situations (they have to) for instance, when assaulting a town, the company commander will tell the squad commanders what he wants them to take based on information from the brigade commander, but it is up to each individual squad to look for the places where they are going to apply pressure adapting to the situation as they progress.

Now, regarding sun tzu being relevant nowadays, itis mandatory reading in almost every officer academy and its lessons are as relevant yoday as they were two thousand years ago. You need to know where to look. His strategy notions are sound principles incorporated into wverything including drones. If you want am army of drones it will not come cheap. Sure they don't eat but the resources needed to produce and maintain them are a lot bigger than for a human soldier. Their advantage is reduced war weariness and they don't get tired and they don't rout. Not a cpst based decision.

 

But then our hypothetical interstellar civilisation will also be much better equipped to detect and stop the asteroid, and would thus have less reason to fear such an attack themselves. My point was that with our current technology, where we are certainly vulnerable to such an attack, we are also incapable of carrying it out.

If they are capable of sending something over to wipe us out, they are just as capable of sending something to see what we're up to.

Now that's a can of worms. The debate about what killed the megafauna is still open, as far as I can see, so I don't want to get into it.

Now, I do admit that humans can be pretty nasty towards other species, even ones which display high levels of intelligence. We can also be pretty nasty towards other cultures which are sufficiently different from our own. But we have also shown that we can react positively towards them as well; I would even suggest that this trend has been increasing in the last few centuries. This is not to say that I reject your position, I simply don't accept it as inevitable.

That's why we have these. I am assuming that the two civilisations will both have prior knowledge of the other. Each one seeds a couple of asteroids in the other's solar system and there we have it.

I'll now try and offer a more coherent critique. Let us imagine that some interstellar civilisation has just become aware of humanity. There are three possibilities:

1) We are more advanced than they are. In this case, we are likely already aware of their existence, which means that either we have already wiped them out, or that we likely have the ability to detect, stop and retaliate to their own attacks. At the very least, they can expect that even if they succeed in attacking us we will also wipe them out.
2) They are more advanced than we are. We are unlikely to be aware of them. We would not be capable of defending against them, but neither would we be capable of attacking them. Assuming both civilisations advance at similar rates, we are unlikely to ever offer a threat that they are unable to either prevent or deter.
3) We are at a similar level technologically. Once again, we are probably becoming aware of them at around the same time. Assuming both have developed along similar lines, either both has the capability of annihilating the other, or neither does. This is basically a modified version of the prisoner’s dilemma.

Now our interstellar civilisation has, let’s say, 2 options:
1) Gather information; or
2) Attack immediately.
Option 2 only makes more sense than option 1, in my opinion, in the circumstance that we have both the means and the inclination to do the same, but neither the means or opportunity to stop them. The chance that both of these are true is extremely small. It’s much more likely that either we also have the means and opportunity to destroy them, in which case the best case scenario is mutual destruction; or don’t pose any threat whatsoever. Neither situation would necessarily preclude an attack, but I think it does open the possibility that they might try and work out exactly what’s going on before.

For what it’s worth, I personally think that the chance we will ever encounter an extraterrestrial civilisation is basically nil.

 

So, a lot of my reply has to do with the definition of what a relativistic weapon is, and I'm assuming that the speed of light barrier will not be broken. I think that's a justifiable assumption based upon our knowledge of physics at this time.

The thing about r-weapons or r-bombs, is that you can't anticipate them or detect them. Because they are traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, as soon as you receive the information that they have been launched, they're already on your doorstep. Because of their insane speed, their exact position cannot be determined. You only know where they were.

In doing so they would announce their location, the fact that they are capable of wiping us out, and they would have told us this several years before they gained word of it themselves. One can imagine an alien civilization rejoicing that it is not alone in the universe and several hours later getting an asteroid on their doorstep. :]

AFAIK it's pretty closed - I don't research extinctions directly but I've worked with some folks who did and they're pretty convinced anyway.

Wish I shared your optimism :]

I don't understand the relevance this has to r-bombs… The point is you'd be wiped out long before the order to wipe out the enemy civilization was received by those weapons. If those are just asteroids sitting in orbit, well, those are comparably easy to stop. If those are r-bombs on the way to Earth, well, you've already made your decision.

I think you're needlessly optimistic about the ability to detect and stop r-bombs. I guess something like a Dyson sphere could do it, but that's a few orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve than an r-bomb. I think it would be relatively easy to launch an r-bomb and prevent retaliation - you hitch a couple of these self reproducing robots onto a Honda Accord and fly it out a few light years outside of your solar system using your local gravity wells to slingshot it out there. Once its sufficiently far away you utilize a Broussard ramjet or a nuclear engine of some sort to start accelerating it to .7c or whatever. By the time we saw where it was launched from, it would be too late.

Unless they're utilizing some kind of special hand-wavium driven engine, we are likely to be aware of them; space is very empty and the energy released from an interstellar capable ship is very visible. Weapon defense doesn't advance as quickly as weapon defense in this case - any civilization capable of reaching near relativistic speeds is immediately lethal to anything short of a Type 2 Kardashev civilization. If the last thing they got was recordings of Hitler and Werner Von Braun rockets, and that was 50 years ago, well, I might vote on playing it safe rather than sorry if I were an alien civilization. You can't afford to be wrong, and if you don't act quickly, well, you'll never see it coming.

Unless, again, you have some means of transporting information faster than light.

Except its a prisoner's dilemma where there is absolutely no communication and you're facing total annihilation. You just have to hope that you see them and get to shoot first.

Yes, exactly. That is the situation that r-bombs and interstellar travel create.

God created all men equal, but Samuel Colt made some men more equal than others. R-bombs do the same thing.

Agreed. They probably already wiped each other out with R-bombs

 

So are we assuming that our hypothetical civilisation is incapable of FTL travel, or just that they’re not using it for this weapon? At any rate, when I use the term relativistic I mean less than c.

So let me summarise: we have a projectile which is travelling at subluminal speed, is highly visible and being launched from a distance of certainly more than 10 light years, I would say likely more than 100. If we give it a speed of 0.7c then we have more than 4 years’ warning. Assuming it needs to keep its engine firing over a time period of months or years, we should have no problem spotting something like that even with current technology. Assuming the trajectory is stable, acceleration is constant and that it needs to intercept the Earth, we could work out the trajectory. Stopping it from hitting the Earth would only require a small change to the velocity. Not easy, certainly; but assuming you had comparable or superior technology, not impossible.

Remind me why they can send r-bombs faster than they can communicate with themselves? And if they’re only light-hours from us, then surely someone would have noticed.

I’m not really up to date, but Wikipedia seems to disagree with itself over this one (sterling evidence there ) and I’ve found research from as late as last year arguing otherwise. The basic point is that most Australian megafauna died out tens to hundreds of thousands of years before humans could have possibly arrived.

Let’s say you learn about an extra-planetary civilisation, take you r-bomb and just leave it at the point where you would fire the rocket. It’s just an inert lump in the middle of interstellar space, no-one’s gonna notice it. Keep sending it a signal, with a command to activate if the signal terminates. Then just casually let it slip that there are a couple thousand of these things just floating around, in case anyone tries something.

Heavily modified .

 

But to ansewer op question, I would say that for an individual to be so God awfully powerful as to make entire armies flee at the mention of his presence no, that is a myth, fable that is all.

 

What he means is thatthrough positioning and manoeuver, you can defeat an enemy without engaging in combat. Latter I will give a more indepth replay. For now study the italian wars.

 

That may be true to some extent but you still need to have weapons. You can be be best tactician in the world but if you have no weapons to wield you will loose. Firepower is essential and so is planning but nether can work without the other.

There is no warrior/soldier/superhero who can win a war by simply scaring away the enemy and even if there was 50% of soldiers would just see that as a challenge. I personaly think that back in the days of hand to hand warfare it may have been possible but with modern war fighting weapons it just is not possible.

Don't get me wrong it possible to have an enemy no one wants to fight but that's usualy because they have a huge arsenal of weaponry. Look at Syria, the UK government looked into invading Syria to help with the civil war but they decided they did not want to. The technology and funding the Syrian military have avaliable to them was enough to scare off any thoughts of direct action.

That is very different to what the op was talking about but that's the only way to win a war without fighting that I can think of. At some point someone needs to pull the trigger/push the button if you want to win a conflict. Some celebrity super soldier is never going to change that.