On 30/10/24 02:37, kaladorn at gmail.com (via tml list) wrote:
> Lol, Alex.... I didn't get to yours before I wrote my thoughts which
> match with what was written about the Army as per Ground Forces (GT).
>
> One other thing to understand in that sort of model:
>
> Admirals and their Marine counterparts would be making decisions very
> quickly and acting.
>
> Army Generals of the Unified Armies would be dealing with a situation
> like a 'Coalition of the Willing' or a UN operation where there are
> general overall objectives, but every planetary system's forces would
> have their own RoE and limits (ex: In Afghanistan, Brits, Americans,
> and Canadians were regularly chasing down Taliban to where they were 
> located, whereas many European units couldn't because of RoE because
> the political blowback of losing a bunch of their soldiers would be a
> huge fuss back in those countries (Dutch, Germans, etc). They were
> derisively called 'FOBbits' as a play on 'Hobbits' for staying in the
> FOBs instead of chasing the hostiles. I'm not saying they never
> fought, but they never pursued because their limits were set by their
> governments. So the Army probably is slow, run by committee, and
> sometimes deadlock.
>
> That's why you'd need to have a great liaison group and be able to
> learn all the major political and military factor in the equation and
> how to manage/massage them to get things done. That's why I think
> there would be a 'Standing Imperial Army Cadre' which would include
> many experts in cooperative warfighting (hahaha), logistics,
> negotiation, and the like.
>
> It sounds like the Unified Army would be very hard to manage BUT if
> the planetary systems' forces had a politician impetus, and they need
> Imperial logistics and Imperial fleet support, that would give the
> Standing Army Staff a fair bit of clout because without them, the
> Fleet would be doing nothing. Now, yes, the Fleet and the Standing
> Army Staff would have to liaise and hash out the Imperial activities.
> That might work well in some places, not in others.
>
> T.

kaladorn,

GT:GF also addresses planetary/system defence forces - those under the
command of individual systems.

The three major branches of PDFs are ground forces, nautical forces, and
COACC (GT:GF, pp15-16) - it would seem that UA forces don't worry about
COACC or nautical forces.

The Unified Army is _not_ a mashup from forces seconded from various
PDFs - for a given subsector, it's a unified whole, with none of the
constraints you've mentioned about UN operations here on Old Earth,
probably to avoid that very problem.

_Between_ subsectors, or between sector and subsector, is another matter
entirely.

PDFs at GTL 8 or lower generally don't deploy at interstellar distances
without _damned_ good reason.

PDFs at GTL 9 or up, (ibid, p82): "about 10% of the world's army will be
able to move off-world at any given time, assuming that the government
is willing to let them go."

That does leave open the "coalition of the willing" where gubbinz from
various PDFs are detailed to work with, but not under the command of,
the subsector UA, with all the fun that entails, especially for PCs in
command or liaison roles.

In my first TU, I did have a game where two different groups of PCs
ended up as division-level command of sister divisions (Five Sisters
Aggressor Corps I), which was .. interesting, especially when they
competed to be the fastest to deploy to, and be in operations on, a
world within 4 parsecs of Iderati.

Alex