war

The Art of War

Posted by

“A war either is legitimate and justified by the Contract, by the Charter, by the codes of the sentinel, by the writ of Dúréníän, and under the imperishable eyes of Heaven, or it is not.”

“A legitimate war is one whose goals are in accordance with ethics and the Imperial purpose. Such wars may be fought for the defense of the Empire and its citizen-shareholders, for the defense of the Empire’s protectorates and allies, for the defense of Imperial trade, for the suppression of rebellion or the destruction of other forces inimical to civilization, and for the expansion of the Empire’s benign influence into uncivilized regions.”

“Only the anathematic may be destroyed entirely, root and branch, twig and leaf; for any war save seredhain alone, the Warmain’s aim must be peace, order, and liberty, not destruction. When a war is didactic, or surgical, the destruction of the supplies, soldiers, and fortifications of the enemy is permissible, but every effort should be made instead to seize them and carry them off, and the persons and goods uninvolved in the war must remain inviolate so far as it is possible.”

“When a war is of annexation, battle plans must be laid with the intent to capture one’s objectives and make them one’s own, rather than to destroy them. Cities, once occupied, become one’s own and should be treated as one’s home. People, once conquered, are to be shown the hospitality of one’s own cousins. The soldiers of an enemy deemed worthy of annexation are to be respected as comrades to be.”

“A mass that expands without adding to itself becomes brittle, and is easily shattered and swept aside. So also an Empire that expands by destruction, leaving ruin in its wake. Only by preservation and incorporation, in adding the wisdom and strength of one’s enemies to one’s own, can an Empire grow and remain strong. The Warmain who wins a thousand battles and leaves none alive betrays the Empire and weakens his legions. The Warmain whose enemies surrender before a battle is fought is worthy of the highest praise.”

“The legionary excellence cannot conduct a war that is not legitimate, whether as Warmain or as Legionary, in the battle or in the train, at vanguard or in the rear, and retain his excellence. Let the legions commanded to engage in such wars refuse their service to the Warmain who demands it. Let the legionaries ordered into such battles overthrow their commanders and bring them to judgment. Let all legionaries excellence remember that the first duty is to the Empire, and not to the war.”

– The Imperishable Axioms of the Legionary Excellence

Trope-a-Day: Enforced Cold War

Posted by

2

Enforced Cold War: A lot of them, in various places in the Worlds.  The Great Powers with seats on the Presidium (see: The Alliance) may not agree on much, but one of the few things they do agree on is the importance of not letting major wars break out and upset their comfortable status quo.  Lesser powers, therefore, must content themselves with relatively minor regional conflicts, brushfire wars and shadow operations.

Fic-a-Day: Mutual Ambush

Posted by

(To illustrate some of the issues.)

As the classic example of the effects of physics upon interstellar relations, consider the short and inconclusive conflict known as the Odeln Extrality Incident (from the Imperial perspective), or the First Border War (from the Republican perspective). It is generally agreed that the cause and first engagement of the conflict was the mutual destruction, a short distance outside the Odeln system volume, of the Imperial destroyer CS Joyful Dirge, and the Voniensan battlecruiser VNS Deliberative.

The causes of the incident remain obscure, beyond the rising post-contact tensions in the Seam, and even the details of it are disputed. Many of the ensuing skirmishes and inconclusive negotiations can be attributed to the relativistic nature of the engagement; the consensus of the Imperial observers, computed according to the empire time reference frame, was universally that Deliberative fired first upon Joyful Dirge, while the consensus of Voniensan observers in-system, operating in reference frames tied to Republic Universal, was that Joyful Dirge fired first upon Deliberative. It is the unfortunate nature of relativistic space-time that all of these observations can be simultaneously truthful and true.

Such are the difficulties of the strategos, the diplomat, and the historian in a non-Callaneth-compliant universe.

– Larjyn Calcelios-ith-Calithos, Perspectives on the Early Interstellar Era

Trope-a-Day: Kill It With Fire

Posted by

5

Kill It With Fire: Played straight in both senses.  The Empire is certainly happy to use flamethrowers and other Fire Breathing Weapons, fire bombs, fire sheets, and other kinds of fire in war, not because it’s tremendously efficient (it’s not) or because things are Immune To Bullets (they aren’t) – but rather, just because while it’s possible to convince a lot of species to charge down the artillery, or even to charge down the machine guns, a good 95% of everybody is scared shitless of fire and just won’t charge down a wall of it.  Fire is terrifying, and the more you scare them, the less you actually have to kill them.  Of course, it works well enough for that, too.

(Actually, there is one thing they are really good at killing, which is another reason they’re kept on the active list – nanoweapons.  Remember, nanites in general are constrained by their ability to dump heat.  How do you add a lot of heat to a nanocloud quickly?  Yep, flamethrowers.  Big ones.)

They are not impressed by the “it’s inhumane” argument.  It’s war.  Of course it’s not bloody humane.  And the guy over on the other battlefield trying to stay conscious through the agony so he can keep holding his guts inside him with his fingers after being disemboweled by slugthrower fire is not having a significantly better a day than the one who got flamed, m’kay, because that’s not really possible.

In the other sense, yes, symbolically, fire cleanses and transforms.  It used to be used by some religions this way – it’s how the Somárans executed the seeress Merriéle back in the day, not that that went terribly well, and it’s also in this form, the fires of purification, still used by the judicial system for particularly abominable criminals, the ones who put a great deal of effort into demonstrating that they were corrupt right down to the soul – the serial killers and torturers and rapists and other absolute dross of society.

Of course, these days said fires are no longer a conventional pyre, good at making a point as those might have been, and is actually quite fast and humane.  They involve a sealed chamber containing a fusion torch, into which the criminal is placed – and then, shortly thereafter, it again contains only the fusion torch.

The Battle to the Cunning

Posted by

1

“It is easy to use entropy to solve our kind of problems.  We may say this; we are sentinels, those sanctioned to use it when necessary.  It is the natural tendency of this universe, after all, to break down – and trivial, then, to use that against anything within it.  If it doesn’t work, you need simply to apply more of it.  As our more blunt-ended colleagues in the Legions and Navy say, every battle can be won with sufficient antimatter.”

“I say this by no means to disparage them; some nails simply require very large hammers, and in truth, they are graduates of the same War College as we, and learned the same principles.  That, as Xian Anandonos-ith-Anaxios said in the Thousand Wise Analects of the Supreme Warlord, to achieve victory in war without ever forcing the enemy to battle is the supreme test of strategy.  That to win a battle without engaging the enemy is the supreme test of tactics.  And that the greatest of warriors is he who never needs to fight.”

“They possess many tools and strategies to effect this – to ignore the forest and seize the trees, to capture nexuses in lightning raids, to attack the weak point and melt away, to adopt formlessness, to raid, and ambush, and strike ever at the flanks, or deep in the rear, or at the logistic chain, or the links to their allies, or the will, to daunt and deceive, even to overawe; these are our ways of war.  The admiral who lets herself be trapped into an attritional slugfest, an open engagement, even fighting on fair margin, has failed by our terms.”

“But most of all, these things are our province.  We ensure that the hammer of such applied entropy is never needed.  Some of you will become nomomachs, and wage war with legal manipulation.  Some will become memetic warrior-philosophers, and attack the heart, the mind, and the will to conflict, or raise up rebellion in the wake of war.  Some will become assassins, and eliminate leaders who command wars, or the engineers who make them possible.  Some will become saboteurs, destroying the machinery of war.  Some will fight with secrets, to shatter alliances and discredit leaders, or with the mere threat of their revelation.  Some will fight with money, bankrupting our enemies’ forces and depriving them of the resources to wage war – or raising up their other enemies against them.”

“There are ten thousand other tactics – but always, the smaller our intervention, the better.  We have won victories in the past by deleting words from messages, delaying mail by one day, arranging harmless respiratory infections, corrupting single data rods, or arranging the absence of single containers of oil.”

“Minimum leverage, always, for maximum effect.  Make these your model and this your watchword, and you will prosper here at the Stratarchy of Indirection and Subtlety.”

“Report here for initial assessment tomorrow at second-watch.  Dismissed.”

– Stratarch Villár Minaxianos, Sixth Lord of the Admiralty, address to new cadets

Trope-a-Day: The Laws and Customs of War

Posted by

10

The Laws and Customs of War: There are several sets of these, locally; the Empire has its Imperial Rules of War, and so forth, but the ones people mean in the general case are those contained in the Ley Accords, which might be considered the Associated Worlds’ closest approach to something like the Geneva Conventions.

They come in effectively two parts: Chapter I, and Chapters II-XVI.  The former covers “Instruments of Regrettable Necessity”, and nobody screws around with Chapter I, because what it means are the big ones – star-killers, planet-killers, ecocidal weapons, uncontrolled self-replicators, persistent information or memetic weapons, berserker probes, that sort of thing.  Weapons prone to affect people well beyond the battlefield, replicate and spread out of control, stay virulent through deep time, or destroy garden worlds and their information-rich ecosystems.  Start deploying these, and the penalty clause attached is “every other signatory will drop everything to wipe out your polity – albeit not necessarily its population – right now”.

Of course, what we consider weapons of mass destruction are fair game, and you can throw around all the tactical nukes, non-persistent chemical and bioweapons, incendiaries, non-persistent info- and memetic weapons and nanoweapons you can carry with merry abandon.

Chapters II-XVI are the Conventions of Civilized Warfare, which cover the usual things – no indiscriminate planet bombardment without inviting a surrender first, no orbital bombardment or demonstration strikes on civilian areas without a military purpose, no using those permitted weapons of mass destruction near civilian areas without a military purpose, no using infoweapons that would corrupt noetic backups (causing Final Death), no mistreating of prisoners (including various kinds of mind-probe as well as torture and the usual indignities), no terrorism, hostage-taking or asymmetric attacks on civilians, using civilians as shields is forbidden, uniforms to be worn, honorable surrenders are to be accepted, quarter to be given, private property to be respected (no foraging or pillaging of civilian volumes), and a baseline standard for treatment of POWs (including communication of capture and subsequent communication with home via the Accord) and civilians in occupied areas, and so forth.

Notable differences from our laws of war include:

  • There is no requirement for a declaration of war; attacking is sufficient.  Nor do they forbid an aggressive war, as long as the Conventions of Civilized Warfare are followed.
  • Parole is permitted.  (In some cases, this has led to odd wars in which taking the enemy prisoner was prioritized over killing the enemy, because a parolee could not return to the war, whereas a reinstantiation of a dead soldier could be back at the front very quickly.)
  • Spies, assassins, and saboteurs attacking governmental, military, or militarily useful targets are considered legitimate tools of warfare and are protected by the Accords.  The fuzziness between some sabotage and terrorism has, of course, given space-lawyers a peck of trouble in the past.
  • Mercenaries and privateers are also considered lawful combatants; mercenaries in particular are permitted to exercise their parole option almost immediately as long as they do not return to either side of the war in question.
  • Medical personnel are protected by the Accords and may not be attacked (but see Combat Medic); but chaplains are not, which may have something to do with the Empire’s two war gods and their enthusiastic templars.  Or the kaeth.  Or… well, several others.
  • No types of weapons are specifically forbidden other than those covered in Chapter I and the situational limits on WMD use in the Conventions, i.e, fire, poison, blinding lasers, explosive shells, bioweapons, devouring nanoswarms… all allowed.  As they say, war’s not supposed to be humane, dead is dead, and no-one’s doing anyone any favors by prolonging it by fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
  • Prisoners may not be compelled to labor, even in non-military roles (the Empire hates slavery, and insisted on this clause), although they may be asked to volunteer to do so.

Also, while the Ley Accords are, like the Geneva Conventions, a reciprocal treaty – well, technically, Chapters II-XVI are a reciprocal treaty; Chapter I is applied ecumenically – this is done much more in practice with the Ley Accords.  Signatories are under no obligation to respect the Accords vis-à-vis non-signatories who don’t respect them (many do, though, at least until the other party openly defects); and if it can be demonstrated that a signatory is not respecting them (by a tribunal appointed by three nations including the offended-against party), penalties can vary from reparations and individual-level trials for war crimes to the execution of the complete political authority and military forces, in kind as well as in personnel, responsible for the breach of the Conventions.  All signatories are required to provide such military forces as are necessary to enforce such penalties.

Trope-a-Day: Church Militant

Posted by

1

Church Militant: The eikones revered by the Church of the Flame include two war gods, arguably so described: Dúréníän, eikone of righteous war, battle, conquest, strategy and tactics, and patron of the sentinels; and Kalasané, eikone of battle, courage, valor, victory through strength, and personal combat.  Their combined religious order, logically enough, is made up entirely of heavily armed and appropriately deadly templars – and when I say appropriately deadly, I do mean that in the modern age, they’re stomping around in much the same power armor as the actual Imperial Military Service uses.  (No bludgeoning weapons here out of a “commitment to peace”; they are very clear about Coming In War, and Gods Being On The Side Of The Big Weapons.  Also, not terribly keen on converting by the sword – they’re religiously militant, not militantly religious, if you see what I mean.)

They also supply all the military chaplains, which in the Imperial Legions is not a noncombatant position.  If anything, it’s a more combatant position than “legionary”… if one considers enthusiasm anything to go by.