Starship Troopers Revolutionize Warfighting
45 comments
·May 17, 2025WillAdams
stackskipton
Starship Troopers is on the reading list because of politics of the books, not technical warfighting side. There is also interesting passage in there about how Service Academies are insane idea since books has chapters on officers in infantry are enlisted personnel who go to OCS and training period with much higher washout rate.
galacticaactual
You have no idea what you’re talking about. An Osprey doesn’t have a “forward firing weapon” because Direct Action Penetrators followed by -47s from the 160th are better suited to such a scenario.
On the topic of USAF security forces training to fight Spetsnaz…lol.
kayodelycaon
I think you missed the part about Harriers carrying soldiers in pods under their wings.
simonebrunozzi
This piece is so naive.
If you want to send Starship to the capital city of your enemy, and pretend this changes everything in war... well, it already exists, it's called nuclear missiles, and they've been around since the late '50s.
enragedcacti
Meanwhile SpaceX is convinced that all it takes to catastrophically destroy a Falcon 9 is a single round fired from a mile away: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/spacex-pushed-sniper-t...
neilv
I was about to post:
> Why would you do any of that if you could deliver 300,000 pounds on a Starship anywhere in the world in an hour?
How much does it cost to destroy that vehicle and its 300,000 pounds of cargo before it lands?
TMWNN
Cargo aircraft like the C5 Galaxy the author mentioned are also vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, including when they approach.
Aeolun
Starship pretty much just falls out of they sky though. There’s a lot less time to destroy one than a similar aircraft.
jvanderbot
I don't see why a drop ship needs to be all that sophisticated. A parachute and some shipping crates and send the rocket home from orbit, don't risk it.
faitswulff
Meh, dropping actual human troops anywhere is largely romanticized. I'd bet on orbital drones, myself.
aaron695
[dead]
stoolpigeon
SpaceX is reusing spaceships, landing them, catching rockets in chopstick contraptions. But a spaceship that lands near its launchpad can also land anywhere in the world. In an hour. Loaded with military might.
No - no they can't. Referencing Starship Troopers is appropriate because this is fiction.
Telemakhos
It's an old military dream; Ithacus [0] was a 1966 concept for a vertical take-off, vertical landing troop transport rocket that could put 1200 soldiers plus materiel anywhere in the world in an hour. Issues that others have brought up here (like the vehicle being mistaken for a nuclear missile) were brought up then, and the obvious flaws killed the project.
As [0] points out, and as I vividly recall from the antiquated books of my childhood, a similar concept was prominent in the 1979 Usborne Book of the Future. The idea of being able to put boots on the ground anywhere within an hour is probably still a military dream somewhere, although I don't think US doctrine has a place for that right now, since achieving air supremacy over the theater, a prerequisite to boots on the ground, would probably take longer than an hour.
[0] https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2015/12/Ithacus_and_SUSTA...
richardw
Don’t need air supremacy if the boots are attached to ground drones. We’re not far off from a starship equivalent deploying a cloud of ground and air drones, some of which could help effect the air supremacy required. Like rapid dragon but more variations of deployed materiel and…a lot more rapid.
null
Coffeewine
I agree, that line jumped out at me. They need the chopstick contraption, it isn’t available worldwide!
literalAardvark
Yep. If a ballistic missile such as this one ends up aimed at Europe logistics will be the last thing on everyone's mind.
nocoiner
> So why go meet the enemy in an hour on the frontlines of a battlefield they have picked?
> Why not instead point your Starships at their capital city?
Can’t think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong with sending a few dozen ballistic projectiles toward the enemy’s capital.
kayodelycaon
I see two major problems just from a surface reading:
1. Sending multiple large rockets on a ballistic trajectory might look like a nuclear attack.
2. Landing a rocket on a flat concrete pad in clear weather is vastly different from trying to land something on terrain while dodging surface to air missiles.
I also think the surprise factor is overrated. Any nation state with satellites would be able to spot you moving a lot of equipment around.
tw04
So China and Russia attack the space-x launchpads prior to starting whatever conflict.
The concept is great, I don’t see it surviving that first “punch to the mouth”.
gcanyon
> Why not instead point your Starships at their capital city?
I thought we gave up MAD as a strategy almost fifty years ago? Also, if you're just going to do that, ICBMs are way more efficient than Starship.
M95D
The military application of Orion Project [0] was to transport an entire army, everything included, anywhere on earth, and wipe anything close to the landing zone as it landed there.
AFAIK, China didn't sign/ratify any nuclear non-proliferation treaties. So there's nothing stopping them from building it, except a crash of their exports as another cold war begins. And the new tariffs are set up to crash their exports anyway...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
rasz
So far lol tariffs only crashed US imports and stock exchange. US is merely ~15% of China exports.
Kim_Bruning
If you can drop a soldier or a tank in the enemy capital under an hour, why not go all in and drop a thermonuclear device?
I'm sure no one has ever thought of that! O:-)
gcanyon
Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but this wouldn't need to be orbital, just suborbital. That means something like 4K less KPH, which means less fuel needed or more weight capacity.
StopDisinfo910
This is yet another article writing without taking into account the reality of the nuclear weapon.
In an age where all your significant opponents have nuclear ICBMs, anything which could look like a nuclear strike will be interpreted as such by your opponent in an open conflict and generate direct retaliation.
This is frankly weird to me how some American commentators like to pretend this has not been the reality for 70 years. I don’t know if it’s because most of America recent wars have been mostly asymmetric or if it’s because the army propaganda needed to be insanely strong to occult the long series of strategic losses despite the costs of the wars but it’s kind of scary.
murderfs
> In an age where all your significant opponents have nuclear ICBMs, anything which could look like a nuclear strike will be interpreted as such by your opponent in an open conflict and generate direct retaliation.
This has happened before, and we're all alive because it doesn't really look like a nuclear strike: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
A single rocket heading your way is not the massive salvo of missiles that you would expect for a counter-force attack, and a counter-value attack means that you still have the option to retaliate.
jltsiren
In that specific case, Russians needed 8 minutes out of the 10-minute decision window to rule out a nuclear attack. And the key factor was that the rocket was not headed towards Russia.
Now imagine that this is not a random peacetime incident but something that happens when both parties are expecting a war. This time the rocket is actually heading towards the capital or another strategic target. It's not a single rocket but a fleet of tens or even hundreds of rockets. And it's not a one-off incident but something that repeats a hundred times over the course of multiple wars.
What are the chances that the target never misinterprets it as a nuclear attack? And what are the chances that the attacker never chooses to use nuclear weapons, after everyone has learned that an attack like this is not a nuclear attack?
Aeolun
Oh, thanks. You said exactly what I was going to say.
All the evidence points to people really not wanting to assume anything is a nuclear strike.
ashoeafoot
The world is filled with desperate young men, living in power fantasies far away from reality. A spaceship landing or starahip troppers it all ends swarmed by flies(drones).
The problem is these COD operetta heroes with a death wish due to no future voted in a warchieftain who does not deliver and they get antsy. Game Theory didnt factor in a humanity that would be selfdefeating in crisis mode.
advisedwang
A lot of these pundits would be quite happy with a nuclear war. There's varying ideologies (do they think the US would come out unharmed, or are they just ok with the consequences) and varying levels of commitment (there's hardcore preppers out there).
Interestingly, Heinlein's _Starship Troopers_ is the only book, other than _The Bible_ to be on the reading lists of _all_ the U.S. Service Academies.
That said, while the Marines dream about powered armor and self-deploying troops, the reality is nowhere near that yet.
As noted, one needs to have control of the LZ --- if that weren't critical, then Spec. Ops. would have actually done something with the idea of putting pods containing soldiers under the wings of Harrier jump jets, and the V-22 Osprey would have a forward-firing weapon --- keeping control of an airfield is hard, which is why AF Sec. Police train to fight against Spetsnaz and the U.S. had RoK Marines guarding their bases during Vietnam.
What does a supply chain look like in a time of drone warfare? How does one control a perimeter and maintain the surface of a runway against an opponent which is well-equipped? (For an example of how critical that can be, see AF-4590)