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)
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.
I would say it's more about the discussion of morality and specifically the morality of actions in war and not the politics of war, though they are linked.
The lesson of the Skinnies is quite jarring for someone that didn't go through WW2. Earth outright terrorizes the Skinnies into submission.
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.
I figured it was real. Now I get to read about them. :) Thanks!
The US actually did strap people to the sides of helicopters for medevac at one point. The TV show MASH showed one of them. (And yes, the Bell 47 was real.)
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.
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.
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.
You do want control of the airspace if you want the operation to be affordable, otherwise, you're pouring resources into a drone grinder (to mix metaphors).
Why would you try to land the rocket at the destination rather than re entering a pod and parachuting its contents past critical burn independently? We already do high speed spy plane HALO since the 1960’s, this would be more controlled and the rocket could bring massive payloads like tanks.
It would be more useful for the launch vehicle to return to its original pad for relaunch. It’s not like you’re going to refuel and refit it on the battlefield.
>Why would you do any of that if you could deliver 300,000 pounds on a Starship anywhere in the world in an hour? Multiple times a day?
>This is a bigger change to warfighting than drones and electronics. Combined.
I'm struck by the contrast with the real war with Russia invading westwards. Sending a few tanks took six months and allowing some F16s took two years. Real war seems to move much slower than the article discusses. Meanwhile drones and electronics dominate on the battlefield.
In Ukraine both sides seem to be able to fairly easily destroy any target that is visible to the eye by firing a surface to air missile at it. Starship landing is pretty visible and not really faster than a jet over the final mile.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> A single rocket heading your way is not the massive salvo of missiles
The article actually talks about moving a whole army on dozens of large rockets preferably near your enemy capital city. The discussion never was about a single rocket which logistically has very little capacity.
> This has happened before
This hasn’t happen before. That’s in 1995, after the end of the Cold War in a peaceful era with a rocket from a country which doesn’t host ICBM.
This incident has very little in common with what is being discussed and yet it still nearly gave way to retaliation. That’s actually nicely making my point about how out of touch what is being proposed is.
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?
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.
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).
I would assume this would also disrupt airlines as well as wealthy people could jet around from London to California to Tokyo in ten minutes. For less than a jet.
At the same time as I am super-impressed by the progress SpaceX has made, it scares the crap out of me that any part of the U.S. space program depends on the whims of Elon.
The Pentagon is also busy firing anyone who cares about boring woke things like 'logistics' in favor of manly men who can go head to head with Defense Secretary Whiskey Pete downing shots.
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)
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.
I would say it's more about the discussion of morality and specifically the morality of actions in war and not the politics of war, though they are linked.
The lesson of the Skinnies is quite jarring for someone that didn't go through WW2. Earth outright terrorizes the Skinnies into submission.
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.
That’s not what the commenter said. My guess is they were referring to this:
https://youtu.be/Kn9iznJZ9Do?si=3a_LALC2Yx0KEE1z
I think you missed the part about Harriers carrying soldiers in pods under their wings.
You laugh, but…
https://theaviationist.com/2013/12/06/exint-man-carrying-pod...
I figured it was real. Now I get to read about them. :) Thanks!
The US actually did strap people to the sides of helicopters for medevac at one point. The TV show MASH showed one of them. (And yes, the Bell 47 was real.)
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.
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...
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.
You do want control of the airspace if you want the operation to be affordable, otherwise, you're pouring resources into a drone grinder (to mix metaphors).
Why would you try to land the rocket at the destination rather than re entering a pod and parachuting its contents past critical burn independently? We already do high speed spy plane HALO since the 1960’s, this would be more controlled and the rocket could bring massive payloads like tanks.
It would be more useful for the launch vehicle to return to its original pad for relaunch. It’s not like you’re going to refuel and refit it on the battlefield.
Yep. If a ballistic missile such as this one ends up aimed at Europe logistics will be the last thing on everyone's mind.
I agree, that line jumped out at me. They need the chopstick contraption, it isn’t available worldwide!
The booster needs chopsticks, but the Starship payload (theoretically as it hasn’t happened yet) does not.
The current version of it does, it only has catch pins, no landing legs.
Good luck not getting shot down during a mostly ballistic trajectory.
>Why would you do any of that if you could deliver 300,000 pounds on a Starship anywhere in the world in an hour? Multiple times a day?
>This is a bigger change to warfighting than drones and electronics. Combined.
I'm struck by the contrast with the real war with Russia invading westwards. Sending a few tanks took six months and allowing some F16s took two years. Real war seems to move much slower than the article discusses. Meanwhile drones and electronics dominate on the battlefield.
> 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.
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...
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?
Starship pretty much just falls out of they sky though. There’s a lot less time to destroy one than a similar aircraft.
In Ukraine both sides seem to be able to fairly easily destroy any target that is visible to the eye by firing a surface to air missile at it. Starship landing is pretty visible and not really faster than a jet over the final mile.
That slow moving vehicle...
Massive, shiny and slow
well, maybe it could deliver 200k pounds of gear while carrying 100k pounds of counter measures?
but again, the original plan was always good enough for humans dropping slowly on parachutes
Cargo aircraft like the C5 Galaxy the author mentioned are also vulnerable to antiaircraft fire, including when they approach.
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.
Meh, dropping actual human troops anywhere is largely romanticized. I'd bet on orbital drones, myself.
[dead]
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.
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”.
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:-)
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.
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...
So far lol tariffs only crashed US imports and stock exchange. US is merely ~15% of China exports.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> A single rocket heading your way is not the massive salvo of missiles
The article actually talks about moving a whole army on dozens of large rockets preferably near your enemy capital city. The discussion never was about a single rocket which logistically has very little capacity.
> This has happened before
This hasn’t happen before. That’s in 1995, after the end of the Cold War in a peaceful era with a rocket from a country which doesn’t host ICBM.
This incident has very little in common with what is being discussed and yet it still nearly gave way to retaliation. That’s actually nicely making my point about how out of touch what is being proposed is.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Conventional Prompt Strike
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_Prompt_Strike
I would assume this would also disrupt airlines as well as wealthy people could jet around from London to California to Tokyo in ten minutes. For less than a jet.
For less than a jet seems unlikely.
At the same time as I am super-impressed by the progress SpaceX has made, it scares the crap out of me that any part of the U.S. space program depends on the whims of Elon.
The Pentagon is also busy firing anyone who cares about boring woke things like 'logistics' in favor of manly men who can go head to head with Defense Secretary Whiskey Pete downing shots.
1/75 would not have fallen under 24th ID as even then the 75th was under SOCOM. That is the first of a dozen fallacies in this article.
This person was probably in the 24th ID at one point in their adult life. Their credibility stops about there.
Good luck not being shot down during a mostly ballistic flight.
starship troopers is a book about how to break young people into Sargeants. not about supply lines. lol