The military implications.

<< Science fiction weapons: Lasers (Part 1)

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Hello again everyone. I hope you’re eager for more science fiction. We’re still talking about lasers, but building on last week’s technical deep dive to explore the military implications of these fancy weapons. Last week we saw that firearms really would be a better choice for most science fiction fighters, but only because Hollywood makes lasers much worse than they ought to  be, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for lazy reasons.

This week we’re looking at the military implications of laser weapons: how do they affect military tactics, military operations, and military strategy? We will examine this both in the context of unrealistic Hollywood versions of laser weapons (which are pretty bad), and realistic, effective lasers (which would be much better). And just as a reminder of what I’m talking about:

The official definition we landed on last week was that a laser is “anything that goes ‘pew’ and/or fires a beam of light at a target” (this is in the dictionary now). We’ll look at other science fiction weapons in future posts.

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The balance of power

Weapons don’t have to be balanced…

There’s a myth, which I think comes primarily from table-top games such as Warhammer 40k, but also computer games, that weapons need to be “balanced” for gameplay purposes. This makes sense in a game, where you want to keep it competitive, but unfortunately real life is not fair like this. Armies with futuristic laser weapons would not be on an even footing with lower-technology aliens. We’ve seen enough of this in the real-life history of colonialism. Insurgencies in real life do not involve plucky bands of amateur freedom fighters making fools of the established occupation forces, à la Ewoks vs. Empire in Return of the Jedi:

An insurgency is a bloody, bitter, uphill battle where the occupation forces can inflict devastating damage on the rebels, but also suffer from a “death of a thousand cuts” at the hands of their enemy. Especially where there’s a steep technology gradient, one side will suffer the bulk of the civilian and insurgent casualties while the other side suffers disproportionately fewer military casualties. We can see this effect in real-life, live, in the news every day, or in recent history. Insurgents win not by defeating the incumbent force on the field of battle, but by sapping their will to continue committing lives to the cause.

There’s simply no way that the technologically-advanced Empire would have suffered such a defeat against literal sticks and stones, especially given how strategically important the planet Endor was to them. Another example of this is in Dune, where Paul Atreides defeats the occupation and imperial forces in open battle with his band of desert fighters:

I won’t go into huge detail here on this trope, but if you’re interested in reading more about why small bands of tough fighters from a lower technological rung don’t usually win against more “civilised” opponents, I’d suggest reading The Fremen Mirage series by Brett Devereaux. Suffice to say that increased levels of economic and technological prowess confer a huge advantage, but Hollywood writers try to blunt this effect and balance the scales by making science fiction weapons, such as lasers, quite useless.

…and they shouldn’t be sugar-coated

Laser weapons in Hollywood never seem to cause gruesome injuries. As discussed last week, this is partially a design decision by producers to avoid more restrictive ratings on their films. It’s worth taking a few minutes, however, to look at the human effects of lasers. Content warning: the quote below is quite gruesome

When the beam struck my eye I heard a distinct popping sound, caused by a laser induced explosion at the back of my eyeball. My vision was obscured almost immediately by streams of blood floating in the vitreous humor, and by what appeared to be particulate matter suspended in the vitreous humor. It was like viewing the world through a round fishbowl full of glycerol into which a quart of blood and a handful of black pepper have been partially mixed. There was local pain within a few minutes of the accident, but it did not become excruciating. The most immediate response after such an accident is horror. As a Vietnam Veteran, I have seen several terrible scenes of human carnage, but none affected me more than viewing the world through my blood-filled eyeball.

—Dr. C. David Decker, quoted here

This is a level of violence which we don’t usually see in science fiction, but it’s at the milder end of what combat with lasers would actually entail. The Vienna Protocol on Inhumane Weapons, adopted in 1995, prohibits the employment of: “laser weapons specifically designed as their sole combat function, or as one of their functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective devices.” However, we should not take this to assume that futuristic militaries would avoid using lasers to blind their enemies, for two big reasons:

• Countries today have rarely let international conventions limit their use of certain weapons. Usually the people pushing to limit the use of chemical weapons, cluster munitions, nuclear weapons, etc., are those states without the capability to develop them or the pressing need to use them.
• The “rules” prohibit the use of lasers designed to target the eye: there’s nothing against lasers which target optical sensors in general, and the eye is just another type of optical sensor.

When we do see lasers in science fiction, we rarely see the damage they would do to human bodies. There are some exceptions. The damage could be mild, as in The Andromeda Strain:

…or comically gruesome, as in Mars Attacks:

Other laser-adjacent weapons would have similarly gruesome effects: the “plasma” fired by the blasters in Star Wars would burn and melt flesh, the particle beam phasers in Star Trek would punch holes right through the target. Instead, we see this:

Note in the clip above we see Riker “dialling up” the power of the weapon. This brings us on to another tactical aspect of laser weapons which we’ll discuss in the next section.

The myth of the all-purpose weapon

“Less than lethal” can still be pretty bad

The Empire/First Order using planet-killing superweapons is like the Soviet Union or the USA using nukes in Afghanistan. You don’t need to use nukes when you’re so much stronger than your foe, and all you end up doing is destroying the populations and resources you need to control to gain overall victory.

In the military, there’s a whole spectrum of weapon and ammunition types that used to be called “non-lethal” and then went through a few identity changes, including “anti-riot” and “crowd control” before settling on the current favoured moniker, “less than lethal” (LTL). As the name suggests, LTL ammunition is designed to be ouchie, but not deadly, but doesn’t always get that balance right. Why? Because targets (i.e. people) are different, and firers are imperfect. If the ammunition has no effect on the target, then it’s a failure, just as much as if it kills the target. This level of uncertainty means that there’s always a lethal risk with LTL ammunition. There’s no reason that science fiction weapons would be any less variable:

From a technical point of view, it’s difficult enough to explain how a single beam of very fast particles from a small handheld pistol can run the gamut from temporary incapacitation to complete disintegration. From a tactical point of view, it’s utter madness.

Using the same weapon for both purposes is a massive red flag. In the military, special weapons are used for LTL ammunition. Otherwise, you run the twin risks of going into a deadly battle firing LTL ammunition by mistake, or going into a crowd control situation spraying hot lead by mistake. Both of these are very bad ideas, but it’s clearly not something that Starfleet Command has considered.

Space is not a battlefield, and lasers have limitations

Real lasers could be good in space, even better than projectile weapons. Hollywood lasers, less so. As we discussed last week, laser beams (or plasma beams, or particle beams) on screen usually travel much slower than bullets. However bad they would be on the battlefield, they would be far more useless in space, so let’s put them aside and talk about real lasers for a while.

Hollywood likes to show space battles as a sort of dogfight, mirroring how aerial battles used to work in the real world. Coming back to Return of the Jedi, we see a smorgasbord of big and small ships chasing each other in circles while firing colour-coded beams:

However, even modern air-to-air combat doesn’t look like this anymore, with faster interception speeds and heat-seeking missiles removing the necessity and opportunity to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and… dodge around the enemy:

A battle in space¹ would be a very boring spectacle, with ships travelling very fast relative to one another, too fast to see on screen. However, lasers might be useful as close-range weapons which ships fire at each other when they get close enough. There is a sweet spot where they will be effective:

Far more effective would be to fire projectiles on interception arcs with the target, or even place them in the predicted path of the target: at space combat speeds, any collision will result in very high relative speeds and a lot of damage to the target. But lasers look cooler!

A final point on using lasers in space (or anywhere), however. You really should ensure that you actually aim at the target, not right behind it:

What are you trying to achieve with your fancy laser?

All weapons have (or, at least, ought to have) a strategic purpose. For example:

Weapon	Tactical Purpose	Operational Purpose	Strategic Purpose
Rifle	Suppress the enemy	Allow friendly forces to advance and gain ground	Hold territory, defeat enemy forces
Artillery	–	Degrade enemy positions, supply lines, and infrastructure	Defeat enemy forces
Nuclear missiles	–	–	Deterrence, destruction of enemy’s economy, infrastructure, and population

Science fiction laser superweapons should be no different. There needs to be a strategic purpose to these weapons, or else what’s the point of investing so many resources in building the things?

The James Bond franchise gets this right in Die Another Day: the supervillain’s laser was built with a specific purpose: to sweep the Korean DMZ and initiate all the landmines there, clearing a path for a North Korean invasion of the South².

It also doubles as a useful way of trying to kill Bond, although the baddies do the usual thing (see also Dune above) of tracking right behind the target instead of, you know, hitting it.

The lasers that the aliens use in Independence Day has immense destructive capabilities (although it makes the funkiest explosions, as I’ve written about before):

The aliens use this as a “shock and awe” tactic to inflict a massive psychological defeat on humanity as a prelude to wiping us out. If genocide is the goal, then there’s probably a more strategic way of achieving this: slow-moving laser explosions might not be the best method.

The Death Star superlaser from Star Wars makes even less sense. We already mentioned last week the ludicrous energy requirements needed to blow up planets, but leaving aside the technical aspects of the weapon, I have some issues with how the Empire employ it. Like all empires, we must presume that their power comes from controlling the resources and populations of the many planets and star systems in the galaxy. In that sense, blowing up a planet is like cutting off a part of your body. You could argue that this is a sacrifice the Empire are willing to make pour encourager les autres, to set an example for all the other rebels. Maybe, but if so, it’s a singularly ineffective strategy, because it doesn’t seem to make one iota of difference to the Rebel Alliance’s resolve. The crew of the Death Star could have destroyed a city or two on Alderaan with their superweapon and probably achieved the surrender of the planet (although watch out for those sneaky computer viruses, don’t get caught out like the aliens in Independence Day).

Moving on to the super-duper laser³ from The Force Awakens, this makes zero sense from a strategic point of view. There’s no ultimatum, no negotiation, no demand that the space-Nazis make of the Resistance⁴. Unless their goal is to progressively destroy all the planets in the galaxy, and therefore their own power base, then this weapon is pretty useless, at least how they use it.

Conclusion: A means to an end

In Hollywood science fiction, lasers are more important as signifiers of futuristic tech than they are as useful weapons. This is usually understandable: we (the audience) are lazy, and want to see situations which are familiar but slightly exotic. Replacing firearms with “pew pew” lasers achieves this.

It’s not realistic, however, even if the logic behind it is understandable. Real-life weapons are only a means to an end, after all, and war is simply “the continuation of policy with other means.” (Clausewitz). Sometimes science fiction writers take this seriously, a brilliant example of which is the Lazy Guns from the late, great Iain M. Banks’s Against a Dark Background. These weapons destroy whatever the target puts in its sights, but often using the most spectacularly improbable sequences of events. Point it at a person, and it might shoot a laser beam, or it might cause a wild animal to suddenly appear and attack. Point at a city and it will be suddenly hit by an asteroid, or a nuclear reactor will explode. I would love to see a film adaptation of these Lazy Guns.

As usual, I’ll finish with something of a challenge to screenwriters: please give us science fiction where the battle tactics actually reflect the futuristic weapons used. I’d queue up to see powerful lasers punching holes in armour and burning flesh, causing panic in the squad as they desperately try to locate the direction of fire. I want to watch ships strafing each other with powerful blasts of laser fire as they pass by in a flash. And I’d be intrigued to see the implications of blinding lasers on ships’ sensors as well as the eyes of the crew on the bridge. Not that I’m overly keen to see gruesome injuries like those described above, but I would appreciate a more mature and realistic depiction of these weapons.

That’s all for this week. Thanks, as always, for reading! I hope you enjoyed these two science fiction-focused articles. If so, please let me know in the comments what other examples come to mind and what types of futuristic weapons I should write about next. If not, please also let me know! And if you haven’t already, please Like, subscribe (using the link below), and share with your friends.

Featured Image: Die Another Day, MGM Pictures/United Artists/Eon Productions (2002)

1. As opposed to a “battlespace”, which means “battlefield” but signals that the speaker is a military nerd who is proud of the fact that they realise space has three dimensions ↩︎
2. Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that there are far more practical ways to achieve this aim, such as using munitions specifically designed to clear lanes through minefields. These are extremely cool: you fire a rocket across the minefield which drags a thick rope made of explosives. When the rope lands, the explosive detonates and clears several metres either side of it. ↩︎
3. Clearly the technical term. ↩︎
4. As an aside, did anyone else think it was very lazy writing to go from Return of the Jedi and the supposed defeat of the Galactic Empire into The Force Awakens, with an even stronger “First Order” and even weaker “Resistance” still reprising their roles from the original trilogy? It’s like the entire culmination of the original trilogy was for nothing. ↩︎