Planetary Warfare
#2 of HSR Worldbuilding
notes on planetary warfar
The Jeewol or Machine War, lasted twelve years, when in the 21st century AD, is unknown now, but sometime after the Anglo-led Invasion of Mesopotamia (Iraq? Sumer?).
The Sentillian Empire, at the start of its reign over the galactic south, was a forced confederation of an untold number of mostly irrelevant planetary city-states, nation-states, and a few, very few, multi-planetary states. The Empire, emerging as the only major trade organization in the galactic south east, leveraged an economic collapse heralded by the Jeewol Invasion of a major mining region of deadworlds, did not have the standardized military-industrial complex we, in the 20th and 21st century are accustomed to. In response, the empire contracted out the creation of weapon systems for planetary warfare to anyone willing to make them, and in the earliest phases, would even use some rather primitive off-the-shelf systems like the F-35, MQ-9 Reaper, Hillith Armory's Sunbolt, or Refactory's Laser system.
Section 1: Establishment of an Air War Years 0-7
Airpower was pretty rare and is usually relegated to small recon drones used to find and mark targets for destruction with guided artillery. However, as the war ramps up, particularly after the 4th year of the war the situation stabilized enough for contracts to be issued for air and naval assets for the land-forces which usually relied on artillery and sabotage for disabling enemy offensive build ups or weakening defensive positions. The first standardized aircraft for the Imperial Army was the RF-1A, functionally an F-35 Airframe with an exterior that could resist the stress of reentry, upgraded with the latest and greatest weapons from across the galactic south, and an entirely new sensor suite and operational program, in essence was the galactic equivalent of a Ford Model T upgraded with 2005 Camry technology, the 2023 tech is reserved for starfighters. As for stealth coatings, not used, as even modern-level guided missiles were used by both powers in the far more important Interstellar Navies. Functionally, the air war, both from a defensive and offensive position, is defined by the use of considerably more primitive technologies hooked up to extremely advanced target and control systems.
Sentillian Doctrine and Weapon, also a brief history.
The Million Star Confederacy/Sentillian Empire's original doctrine was to direct all production to the Navy, and then adapt the systems used to land warfare to cut costs and shave down the man hours needed. This resulted in a LOT of kinetic and laser based anti-aircraft weapons with large EMP Pulse devices meant to weaken electromagnetic field generators on starships. The most common Anti-Aircraft weapon was the 132mm M-4133 Multiple Autonomous Anti-Air Gun System, or MAAAGS, an automatic and optional anti-aircraft gun system designed to target all airborne threats from 100 meters to 10 kilometers in the air, of course field modification and manual override did see guns moved into a various number of non-air defense roles. The system uses one and sixteen separate guns connected to a central targeting computer which is fed data from the localized air-threat system including direction, velocity, projected flight path, and potential countermeasures. Later however, as the land-wars became more and more important as the naval war ground into a stalemate and the establishment of body-mounted anti-vessel weapons were seen as the best way to break the stalemate. This renewed focus on the planetary war saw the integration of most Imperial Marines and planetary militias into the new Imperial Army or more commonly called "Line" after the non-humans incorrectly assumed humans humans still fought in line-style warfare after a Korvan filmmaker made a best-selling series based on a dramatized, and improperly timed film series about the Peloponnesian War, using line infantry from the Napoleonic Era.
Combat degraded into trench warfare early on, starting out as delaying operations for population evacuations, then, as the naval stalemate began, the evacuations also were reduced from full on planetary to even system-wide evacuations like the Khalthi, the homeland of the Cohoat, the cat-like genus of biped sentients to those like Rema, where the civil infrastructure was secure enough to have the civilian economy running, albeit restricted by rationing and the population was encouraged to remain so the refugee crisis that was spanning across the entire galactic southeast wouldn't worsen. The Jeewol, returning from their 100,000 year forced exile focused their war effort on the extremely unprepared Ancie Kingdom, giving the Human-led Empire time to consolidate and standardize across the realm in the "New Imperial Standard" for manufacturing, which was a mix of Metric, Earth Imperial, Old Avin, Mathalic Standard, Equar, and Ghilish measurement systems for manufacturing. The newly unified market and manufacturing bases were assigned localized versions of products with standardized ammunition. The initial divide in manufacturing bases was why the series system was developed as each was supplied in one measurement system. The former American Military-Industrial complex practically swallowed the forcefully unified Earth military industry being the most well funded and liquid of them all. This renewed focus on land warfare saw the emergence of an integrated air force within the new Imperial Army.
This Imperial Army Air Force as would be said in Court English, was the first of the four powers involved, initially being assigned to the Choat Series, being modified F-35 Airframes known as the RF-1A, upgraded with a new power plant, modified firmware, new electronics and sensor packages, weapons, engines, and even exterior materials. These RF-1As were not meant to be stealthy but simply make use of preexisting production as warfare in the galaxy was either done through space warfare for planetary and multi-system states, or limited infantry heavy armies for city-states with air and armor elements usually being custom or single run productions. The RF-1A's were designed with active protection in mind with counter-projectile laser pods, pulse emitters, and good old fashioned flares and thick armor to mislead heatseekers and shrug off shrapnel.
The Choat Pilots, trained in secret on Earth, first used their warbirds to flatten the artillery batteries of the 9th Host of the Returned, the Jeewol Army group operating in the Carina Arm's inward ridge on the Nepjardi Homeworld of Gles. After the precision strike, the main artillery opened up, flattening their static defenses and after brutal resistance in the open-top trenches and deeper bunker complexes, the front eventually shattered, and without artillery fire to halt the advancing Choatic reclaimer army, forcing a breakdown in command a total collapse of the polar front. Of the 30,000,000 Jeewol assigned to the front, 20,000,000 were captured in the five week blitz, 5,000,000 were assumed killed, and 5,000,000 managed to escape to the main continent and bolster the Jeewol defense there, only about 28 million Sentillian troops were deployed along with 2,000 of the new RF-1A planetary multirole aircraft.
Gles was liberated in full two years after the collapse of the Northern Polar front, and saw the death of forty million soldiers, the capture of two hundred million Jeewol, and the death of over three billion of the leopard-like natives, a shocking twenty percent of their remaining total population. Gles was the last Nepjardi planet ever occupied, even partially, by the Jeewol and is considered, along with Rema in the Perseus Transit, to be where the Jeewol and their autonomous vessels and land vehicles were halted. The full recapture of Gles allowed the placement of railgun and PBAS Missile silos and facilitated the edge needed to drive the Jeewol out of the system. Nearly two billion Nepjardi refugees would arrive on Nepjardi as part of a resettlement and repopulation effort while the remaining ten billion mostly settled on planets numbering less than a half billion in total population.
The success of the RF-1A precision strikes during the Gles campaign was such a success that the Jeewol lines folded before they could get a proper report in leading the Jeewol to develop void-to-atmospheric fighter craft but only limited numbers and limited success when pitted against an already designed and tested multirole fighter. The RF-1A facilitated the otherwise impossible ability to destroy enemy artillery batteries without exposing, or worse still, giving away the exact position of the Empire's own batteries. Later, both manned and unmanned aircraft would enter mass production around the rather isolated Gould Belt where Earth was located and the Rosette Nebula region. In terms of numbers, roughly twenty three quadrillion, seven percent of the empire's pre-war population estimate was mobilized, and accompanying them were five billion RF-1s of varying model and a further hundred billion aircraft were manufactured to facilitated a wide range of planetary roles, mostly related to transportation and logistics, but also limited combat roles on non-static fronts like archipelagos, mountainous regions, and areas too soft for trench warfare to set in like jungles and swamps.
Later aircraft used by the Sentillians were the SC-1(A-L) a heavy aircraft that could be deployed from low orbit, its airframe was used to make a bomber (SA-1A), a transport aircraft (OST-4), gunship (OA-2), or AWACS (ACS-2A).
Doctrinally, the use of planetary aircraft served like a form of sniper, using coordinated, small squadrons to wipe out an intended target then retreat back to safety. After the target would be eliminated, massed artillery would follow, then would come the infantry and armor to overrun the disorganized lines of the bugs and machines. Or course the Jeewol developed counter-tactics, like digging deeper, using decoys batteries, and camouflaging or signal-masking their artillery, bunkers, and other valuable targets. It did make the life of the linemen easier, if minutely, but it greatly increased the speed of engagements as frontlines that would usually remain static for months as both sides went through the titanic effort of building up their forces while wearing down the other's across entire continents, would be settled in weeks as Sentillians would try to exploit the gap and cause a general chaotic retreat, while the Jeewol would dig their tunnels faster to bring the fight to the Sentillian trenches where their machines could clear out the trenches and force a chaotic retreat.
Section two: The on-the-ground war.
Any planetary mission had only three reasons, one being to set up surface to void weapon systems, the second being delaying actions for evacuations, and third would be to destroy or otherwise disable enemy surface to void weapons. In the opening stages of the war the first and last objectives would be carried out by small units of highly skilled professional soldiers and the second was carried out by citizen militias. However as the war increased in scale, and the first and last objectives became more and more important, the numbers of men on said missions increasingly ballooned until eventually entire continental frontlines with the prize of missile silos, monstrous railguns, and their shields became the prize. While the highly elite soldiers still existed, most became stormtroopers, or green-light teams of a sort, infiltrating small parts of the coast-to-coast frontline and leaving nasty surprises like burnt barracks, nuclear devices, biological agents, chemical traps, or just grim displays of violence and gore to break the moral of the enemy, others still would leave small speakers playing horrible noises at random intervals to ensure their enemy, so long as they never found the source, would never be totally clear of mind. These stormtroopers would usually, once having sufficiently weakened the enemy line locally would be followed by massed infantry assaults, then once a wide enough gap had been made, mobile infantry units would flood the gap and begin to push as deep as possible behind enemy lines, burning, mining, and generally scouring the land in their wake if they thought it would be impossible to hold. On some fronts where fighting was more brutal and personal, civilian populations were the first target with "Bleeding Swaths" being carved every time either side made a breakthrough. In the first three years of the war, battles would last weeks as the Sentillian Military was disorganized and its civil and military administrations were in chaos. After year three, when the main blitz of the Jeewol into Sentillain Space was dulled by total war having set in and naval engagements becoming too costly to carelessly engage in for both sides. From years 3-5 the imperial marines quickly overran the lightly-settled or lightly scoured worlds on the frontline, while years 5-12 saw intense, brutal combat that could last months or even years across long fronts while the remains of civilian populations oftentimes served as guerilla fighters.
The next largest occupation of land forces were counter-insurgency operations within the empire, followed by airmobile infantry and ultralight armor wherever trench warfare or other forms of static-position based warfare was not possible be in mountainous regions or swampy coastal plains. Eventually surface and submarine navies weren't really a thing until much later in history so insertion operations on coastal areas were done using modified, pre-war local spacecraft that didn't have a place in the Imperial Starfighter Fleet or its reserve.
With the trillions upon trillions of soldiers who were serving at the peak of war in year ten, less than a tenth were planetary, as the naval war in the space above planets and between stars was where the actual war as fought, the land forces just made star-system campaigns slightly easier.
Organization
The Seires System: Every billion soldiers of a single species forms a "Series" which is a combat unit with its own fleet, air systems, and if needed, planetary navy system. Each series is assigned a specification, usually in-line with the species, these specifications regardless of species use the same equipment barring uniforms. When elements or multiple entire series are deployed in the same area it is called an episode (a bureaucratic distinction because referring to both as campaigns caused massive confusion with the ESL bureaucrats. During the war Series that had no assigned task joined the "Civil Draft" and joined the Imperial Construction and Logistics Department to construct a wide range of infrastructure projects from Wormhole hubs to clearing land for planetary road networks, if the department had too many men, then they'd be assigned to the Imperial Office of Intelligence or IOI, commonly called the Secret Police or some derivative therein, and deployed against covert rebel cells, counter-piracy operations, bringing unruly planetary or system leaders to heel and various other internal operations. However, these land troops when not deployed would also aid the "Royal Diplomatic Corps" and function as bodyguards or train insurgents in other interstellar realms, especially if they were encroaching on Imperial Space. Other uses of trained ground troops include: Deck Guards, ABCPCW (Atomic, Biological, Chemical and Planet Cleansing Weapons) Authority Armed Researchers or Security.