Warfare in Space, Part 3

Image via Wikipedia
Dear Readers,


   This is the third and final in my series on space warfare.  It has been an exciting ride, between conventional warfare in space and inertia-negated warfare, but it's time to bring it to a close with my third and final assumption, one that occurs in many of the time streams I study:


One or both of the belligerents have invented a means of traveling faster than the speed of light.

  I do not mean a vehicle that moves between points A and B while passing all the points in between, because that's going to be lead to all kinds of causality violations.  Rather, I am talking about devices that utilize either teleportation or wormholes to transfer a craft between one point in space and another in faster time than it would take for light to travel between those two points.  Ideally, the transfer would be instant.

   So, how does that affect warfare in space?

   Let's consider the first, "wormhole" option.  Wormholes are the colloquial term for a physical phenomenon that allows the traversal between two points in spacetime through another spatial dimension.  It is similar to traveling through the Earth instead of on its surface; the distance between two points on the surface of the sphere will be longer than through the sphere.Image via Wikipedia

   If that is the sort of faster than light technology we are talking about, then there are two more possibilities.  Either the wormhole-generating device will generate fixed wormholes, and travel will be limited to specific points A and B, or the device will allow you to generate wormholes between any two points in the universe.  We'll discuss the latter idea later on.

   Instead let's consider the idea of fixed wormholes, massive freeways to convey us around the universe.  These would become choke points in the world of space warfare, the places that are key to hold in order to keep your opponent's supply lines broken.  They would be like the bridges on the Seine in World War II.

   The actual warfare, however, would not be much more complicated.  It would have to occur either inside the wormhole (the laws of physics may be different there) or nearby the wormhole, where the battle would devolve to the scenarios in my previous two posts.  So, aside from the tactical significance of the wormholes, this wouldn't be a terribly different scenario from what I've already discussed.

   Now onto instantaneous teleportation. At the same time, I want to discuss the generator that makes wormholes anywhere.  From a tactical standpoint, these devices are identical, because they allow you or your enemy to appear anywhere, instantaneously, or with a very short delay.  That ability completely breaks all of your traditional thought about warfare.  Don't want to fight a battle?  Disappear.  Want a quick victory?  Teleport a bomb into your opponent's capital.  Except, they can do the same thing too.

   Three things can happen in this scenario.  One, the combatants recognize that war is pointless and agree that they can combine their interests to produce a golden age.  Two, the combatants destroy each other before such an accord can be reached.  Three, the combatants learn to hide.

  The first is the most desirable, but the last is the most interesting.  If both parties to a war decide to hide their command and population centers, or cause them to migrate around the universe at near-random, the situation becomes more a war of information than a war of physical battles. Certainly each side will attempt to cause some degree of resource deprivation by holding various systems that contain rare elements necessary to the war effort, but they would have trouble attacking a hidden base of operations.

  The ultimate goal, though, would be to find the base of operations and destroy it.  For this, spies and information warfare would be vital.  This would mean that war would become more a matter of small skirmishes across a huge universe, while a secret spy war attempted to break the stalemate with some information that might lead to the destruction of the enemy base.  Furthermore, misinformation might be a part of strategy.  If you can mislead your enemy about your command center's location, you might be able to deal a serious blow to their forces.

  Either way, the actual in-battle mechanics are more or less the same, but the grand strategy of the conflict is altered in distinct ways by methods of faster than light travel.

  This concludes my series on the possibilities of space warfare.  I hope you've all enjoyed it.

   Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople