It is interesting to read that so little has changed since the days of Caesar. Reading his Gallic War you'd think the war was won by digging ditches and building walls. For instance, search for "fortification" on this page:
That isn't very surprising you win a war by controlling territory which is why boots on the ground are always needed to win an actual war, to control a territory you need fortifications.
A properly fortified base can take pretty much any conventional artillery fire for weeks without taking any real damage and unless there is an all out assault you can hold out as long as you have food and water, ammo might not even be that important as long as the enemy doesn't know that and or is incapable of scaling the fortifications.
Even when we'll be fighting on Mars and the jovian moons you'll still will have grunts digging trenches unless for some reason the war is going to transform to purely strategic weapons in which case it's usually the side that either has more or strikes first who would win.
Not necessarily. I imagine the wars of the future will largely be automated and wars will be won or lost almost purely on logistics and manufacturing supply chain management. Do you need walls when you have a drone above doing surveillance and an army of quadrocopters or other robotic flying machines that are doing 24/7 patrols along the perimeter and can arrive within 30 seconds?
Wars are already won or lost on logistics. That's why, in WW2, the allies ran a near-continous near-sucicide air bombing campaign against German industrial capacity (and to their eternal shame, civilians, too). That is why the Atlantic was so important, if the Germans could have choked off the supply chain from the US, they would have won the war more or less overnight. The ability to run the air bridge to Berlin after the war was also a logistical feat.
But at the end of the day, the only purpose of the logistics are to support the fight to control the territory you need to win.
A classic battle example was the Pusan perimeter from the Korean War, the NK had a staggering numerical advantage and pushed the US into the peninsula, the one with a perfectly operating seaport, which we flooded with people, supplies, material, but the NK didn't have air superiority so the US mauled the NK logistics system, and a few weeks/months later the NK had to walk home with no ammo or food.
Of course there are limits to that strategy as the Chinese proved that if you're willing to lose 20 to 1 ratio you can simply deploy millions of infantry and ignore logistics, admittedly most of them will die, and regardless of logistic support next thing you know we're back south at the original DMZ.
The situation in Khe Sanh was similar, OK you're outnumbered 10 to 1 and surrounded, that's sustainable for months as long as the airdrops keep coming in. Of course Dien Bien Phu was an example where the airdrops didn't come in and the French were wiped out. After the war Gen. Westmorland was savaged in the press, Trump style, for making fun of Gen Giap for being the worlds most predictable one trick pony, but now that the politics and tempers have cooled its "OK" to admit the general only had one strategy that he used basically every time. Of course, in the end, it eventually worked, so losing 90%+ of your battles is OK if the enemy eventually goes home in defeat.
Speaking of the air bridge, one thing I loved about living in Berlin was the fact that its tumultuous history was so visible. One of my friends lived in the Bergmannkiez, which is right between the 'Platz der Luftbrücke' (place of the air bridge) and Tempelhof airport (now an unconventional and wonderful park).
Visitors often commented how different this area felt from its surroundings (and perhaps even from much of the city), and apparently the reason is that this area was generally spared bombings.
>Do you need walls when you have a drone above doing surveillance and an army of quadrocopters or other robotic flying machines that are doing 24/7 patrols
Do you really think this is a stable strategy? Drones are probably cheaper to shoot down than they are to build. At least the quadcopters. Imagine a few very fast automated shotgun turrets with birdshot.
Even if war is automated, the same basic strategies apply. The fortifications will just be built and manned by robots instead of humans.
"Imagine a few very fast automated shotgun turrets with birdshot."
Mounted on a smaller, lighter, much shorter range defensive quadcopter. Don't even need the fancy weapons, just collide with the larger, long range, very expensive attacking quadcopter.
Nothing is ever really new, and a lot of the "drones will solve everything" talk sounds exactly like "missiles will eliminate guns in military aircraft" from the 50s/early 60s. That didn't turn out very well, and if you ignore the details that don't matter, drones are tactically merely very slow, short range, traditionally cheaper, missiles. Yeah yeah the electronic speed controllers are infinitely interesting to a EE but to a grunt a drone weapon system is tactically a lame cheap missile. So your attack helicopter of the future will have drone wingmen, but it'll also have guns. Or some infantry platoons might carry a couple anti-armor drone weapons instead of a couple AT-4 or LAW rockets, but they'll still dig trenches and carry some kind of M16 variant.
Drones of the US Military type fly very high and are thus quite difficult to shoot down, especially if they have anti-missile missiles (I doubt any currently do as they are only used in battlefields where the enemy doesn't have good missiles).
Quadrocopters could certainly be shot down by robots, but probably not by humans once they get fast enough at flipping themselves around and making evasive maneuvers.
Anti missile defense other than jamming and decoys do not exist for airborne platforms.
US drones operate in an uncontested environment let them try fly over Russian or Chinese airspace, the soviet shot down a bloody U2 thy can hit a globalhawk or a reaper.
HARM is typically used to engage a SAM site's radar, not the SAMs themselves. Intercepting a missile is a bit harder than nailing a stationary emitter. Plus, many SAMs use IR sensors, so if you don't detect the launch signature, it's hard to take defensive actions. DIRCM, laser based dazzlers etc can help, but not if you don't detect the launch.
Fortifications are still needed and are cheap then instead of human grunts you'll have t-1000's digging trenches.
A drone or a soldier it doesn't matter a sandbag that stops a bullet is still cheaper and faster to make than training or building a new combatant.
All modern wars are in effect industrial wars at least when both sides are even remotely equal in military power, the US simply out produced both Germany and Japan to win the war.
If you are fighting a war then it's always better to reduce force depletion than to increase manufacturing if nothing else than it's cheaper, faster and leaves you with more options for the long run.
With regards to space, I think your second scenario there is more likely. Dropping things from space is pretty easy, and most anything like that is going to qualify as a strategic weapon.
Bunker busters are not really conventional artillery even if they are not nuclear.
These are also not missiles, but very very heavy bombs.
And you can also reinforce against them, just usually not at the FOB level, but considering the cost of every one of those bombs they aren't really going to be used to blow up a pillbox on a hill.
A fortified base will also not protect you from strategic bombardment on a massive scale, but that doesn't mean they are useless even against nations with modern standing armies, it's not like they are going to attack every outpost and base with everything they got, that would be pointless.
Force depletion can happen rapidly without any casualties, if you are going to use the bombs you would want to use to take out strategic command and control centers, factories, and natural resource reserves to blow up a couple of of dirt boxes you ain't going to be winning that war.
On the other hand pretty much the most basic field fortification will be enough to nullify virtually all field artillery which is exactly what it's likely to encounter - self propelled howitzers, mortars, and multi-role ground attack missiles.
I'll respectfully beg to differ. At the beginning of the US war in Afghanistan (at the time I was a US Army UAV "drone" pilot in training), for the first 48 hours, a Tomahawk cruise missile was fired, on average, every 12 seconds. They were firing at all kinds of things up to an including caves! I think that would qualify as firing everything you've got at little outposts.
I think ultimately it depends on the situation and the resolve of the aggressor to take you out. After 9/11, the US went balls to the walls with conventional military.
That's because the US conducts modern wars like it has an unlimited supply of everything, mostly because it doesn't need to worry about the economics of the otherside.
This is why I specifically talked about wars where there is any level of parallelism between the belligerents.
The US will not fire a 2M missile at every Russian pillbox if there would be a real war, because they would lose.
When you are fighting the Taliban who doesn't have any real long range or strategic weapons you don't really care about force depletion, if you are fighting a standing army with equal equipment, equal or greater manpower and at least as far as war economy goes equal or greater production capabilities you start picking your targets with considerably more discrimination.
The US excels at combined arms coordination, but it also makes it's engagement very wasteful, granted one can argue that losing less men is important than having more bombs but that doesn't go very far once the economics of a full war with an equal opponent kick in.
If you are going to waste an airstrike on every ground engagement, and a Javelin missile on every truck you'll have issues when 50,000 tanks start rolling into Europe (these are cold war numbers, chillax ;)).
Shock and Awe might work against Iraq and the Taliban, it wouldn't work against China or Russia, they can withstand it and return in kind, you also will never push a nuclear power into a corner, so US tactics will change to facilitate holding and controlling the ground rather than carpet bombing Beijing or Moscow for 48 hours expecting a surrender.
If nothing else is that this only works when you can unilaterally walk out of the fight like the US can do it now, they could and had dumped everything they could on Afghanistan and Iraq and they can and did just walked away, if you do the same thing to a country that can then chase you home you probably going to reconsider how you wage war.
I was also thinking about Caesar when reading the article especially the Battle of Alesia - his greatest battle. He sieged and surrounded Vercingotrix by a wall, Vercingotrix called for reinforcements so Caesar built an outer wall to protect himself from them. Then they both attacked him and even though he was surrounded and outnumbered 4:1 he somehow managed to win!
A while ago I read an article that explained and visualized the Battle of Alesia and it was one of the best things I'd read in a long time. I wish I could find it, but this article does a decent job:
That is definitely an even better example. :-) I do like that you can see it even with Ctrl+F though. And I think that he uses Galba very skillfully as a foil to his own command.
I was also reminded of the Romans as related on the History Channel show "Engineering an Empire". They talked a lot about how the Romans used concrete for various purposes including aqueducts, etc. Iirc, they mentioned that they'd built a building with a vaulted concrete dome that we weren't able to reproduce, even after the re-discovery of cement, until we had computers.
A lot of simple tactics are overlooked by a society raised in decadent comfort compared to the Romans, or any other agricultural-era empire. Our overwhelming force and technology has come at a cost to our creativity.
If you look at most battles throughout history, there is a single, simple tactic that almost always assured victory: rolling logs downhill at your enemy.
But because we have so much whiz-bang tech doing our fighting for us we've delegated our thinking as well.
A marine I know of often complained that the most effective tactic the Iraqi insurgents utilized again and again was to set up a missile or RPG pointed generally in the direction of a military base and fire it off long after they've left the area. Even if the rocket doesn't get anywhere close to do any damage, everybody has to stop what they're doing and go on the defensive, and even when they've located the source of the attack, nobody's there.
A stupid rocket that doesn't damage anything can bleed the U.S. Military of millions of dollars at a time.
My son was based in Mosul. He reported the same tactic. A timer on the rocket; set it and leave. Most detonated against the fence or fell outside the fence. Occasionally one would fall in the compound, once during morning muster. It detonated against the wall of the building in front of everybody. To their surprise not a scratch on anybody.
It erodes your mental health, never knowing when a random explosion might happen. Damaging in its way just like a bullet.
It's also interesting to see how the article fails to mention a more recent, infamous example of the deployment of concrete to control an urban environment: the Berlin Wall.
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.5.5.html
Contrast with Galba in the early chapters of
http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.3.3.html
You would only exaggerate a little to say that in his telling, victory is all about being prepared and not slacking off.