CHAPTER 13

THE TYPICAL INVASION: PART SEVEN: ONLY BRINGING FIVE GUYS TO TAKE OVER AN ENTIRE PLANET

Now this next point concerns all of you. There’s a very good reason why you are where you are when it comes to ranking the galactic badasses. But first, just answer one simple question: how many warriors does it take to conquer a planet?

How many did the Gorgonians bring? A few hundred, almost all of them in their assault walkers. The Sondrak? About the same number. The Bloodlords brought almost a thousand. General Dronn and his group brought the largest number of troops to date, a few divisions, maybe fifty thousand troops total. Nearly all of them were concentrated into a handful of large landing craft, twenty-five in all.

I see you sitting there and asking, “What’s the big deal? Superior technology saves on manual labor, therefore it must make occupation and controlling area easier.”

WRONG!

The Earth has 148,300,000 square kilometers of dry land. This means each your twenty-five ships has to cover six million square kilometers of land!

War is an expensive proposition. Never believe anyone who tells you it can be fought for cheap. And never believe anyone who says you don’t need manpower. Sometimes you may have to do without large numbers. If your population is small, you have to rely on technology and the quality of your troops to see you through. But if you’re in that situation, you know what you shouldn’t be doing? Invading another planet!

Advanced technology and troop quality only goes so far in military matters. You still need troops on the ground to control territory and make sure it stays yours.

You need numbers because eventually front line troops have to be rotated into rear areas.

You need numbers just to guard against a lucky shot taking out fifty percent of your total force!

Frontline combat is only a small part of a military force. There’s command and control, communications, logistics. We’re going to get into the reasons why you’re invading this rock in the first place. For now, just remember that you need some kind of work force to do what you came several hundred light years to do. If you’re smart – which you’re not, but we’ll pretend you are – then you’ll have police and administration units set up to handle the pacified areas. Then there’s scouting and recon, intelligence, medical. The list goes on and on. The thing is, you need a lot of specialized personnel in order to make any large scale military operation run properly.

But more important is space. Not the black space of the void. I’m talking about the space of the planet’s surface. If nothing else, you have to control that space. You need to form a continuous front line. Why? Because if you don’t you may as well not even be there. Without a continuous line, you leave gaps that the Earthlings can travel through at will.

There’s no way to secure what you’ve conquered without sufficient troop numbers. You can’t even really claim that you conquered the area if you just leave it after blasting your way through. You never even come close to a million combat troops. Which, by the way, would only be enough to properly seize and hold a fraction of Earth’s habitable land mass.

In the Nimerian global war, a single theater of the conflict involved no less than ten million combat troops. Nimeria is roughly the same size as Earth, and this theater covered one side of one of the major continents. That should give you an idea of the size of the force the Earthlings can mobilize. Numbers don’t scare you? They should. Anyone with the slightest ounce of military knowledge knows this is a problem.

And that brings us back as to your less than stellar status. It’s not just that you have a history of poor leadership and planning. It’s not just that you have exceedingly poor troop quality. The main reason you rank so low is that you simply don’t have enough troops to be taken seriously. The major powers all have several million troops. Even tiny factions like the Bagara, who have a total population of two million, can field a force twice as large as the army General Dronn brought into battle. You want to get real about invading the Earth? Then you’re going to have to bring a lot more troops.