Why Planetary Invasions Would Never Happen

what about anti-orbital weapons, basicly SAM sites on steroids

“Invading earth would be pure madness, because there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

- The Martian President

I usually like your videos but the points stated in this are utterly pointless. This concept of gaining air supremacy, bombing your opponent and thinking they would inevitably surrender has been proven wrong so many times in history. When the Germans bombarded Britain in WW 2 they thought Britain would surrender but that did't happen. A few years later the Allied bombarded Germany thinking they could make the German population stand up against the Nazis but the population was just too busy with their own survival. The Japanese also didn't surrender when Tokyo was flattened during WW 2.
And even if they surrendered how would you take control of the planet? Even if there wouldn't be full scale fights anymore you would need a huge amount of ground troops. And these troops need to be supplied. The logistics alone would be a nightmare and resource intensive.

I mean, whole Halo setting build upon a single fact, that Covenant would proceed genocide all humanity and by surrender we would just make it easier for them. Sooo its a choice of dying in battle/prison/under bombardment at home.

So why wasn't the Pacific theater just a campaign of bombarding islands until they sank?

What's wrong with this is that this has already been done on a micro scale, it's mentioned that terrain and population would prove a problem, but what was ww2 and the recent conflict in the middle east if not that, Germany was invaded, a country of almost 100,000,000 people occupied split and integrated so much that both germanys became the frontline of the next war with 2 armies of one people set up against each other. The scale of a planet is massive yes, but so is the problems of the defender, they cannot position their armies in one place, aliens invading earth would likely pick africa or south america due to the lack of development and sparse populations which would be easier to invade than the continental USA, Europe or China. Using Earth as an example, how quickly could colaborators be set up in case of an invasion? how quickly could you convince the Ukranians to accept Alient overlordship against the Russian if it meant autonomy, or the Basques in Spain and france in the 1800s, or the Catholic Irish against England in the 1900s. There was no great armed resistance in Poland, Hungary or Romania when the soviets came in, the Nazis had been worse they were left relatively autonomous with local governments and were tired of war, could not the same arrive. A planet has many problems but it has just as many opportunities to find allies within, and if you're not loooking for allies then extermination and slavery works just as well, the Nazis were never driven out by partisans it took the entire world to "liberate" occupied europe, where are the natives of Dominica or Cuba, exterminated or mixed in so much they don't exist as a people, the Spanish conquered Mexico with a few hundred men, it took the United states 6,000 soldiers to invade Afghanistan and an occupation where a total of 4,000 troops died over 20 years a cost we should not have had, but a miniscule cost in terms of the raw manpower availble to that occupation. There are currently 6-7 thousand languages spoken on Earth and less than 200 countries, ethnic conflicts are a staple no matter the time or situation is so bizare to consider an invading force to take advantage of that.

You don't attack things that don't matter. If you are fighting over planets, then you'll want it intact. This means that bombing a planet flat simply isn't viable. While resistance could last for decades, so long as you garrison the world properly, it really won't matter.

I like really like space dock content, but this one is off the mark. The reason earth isn't a viable invasion target in the expanse is because the difference in population and not having really viable landing vehicles.

When I think about invasion, I think about Stellaris. There are often only two alternatives when it comes to planets, either I want my own population on the planet or I want to incorporate that population into my economy. In case 1, I wipe them out with bombing or viruses or some other weapon of mass destruction. In case 2, I make their government fold, which requires landing troops on each planet and subduing each local government.

Which is the main point of an invasion, subduing government. You don't need soldiers on each street corner, you just need to dismantle the military and replace the government, which doesn't require landing a billion soldiers. In fact, in most cases one Titan will do.

If the planet is fortified with space guns any number of orbiting ships can be brought down.
If you bombard the planet with asteroids this might work unless the planet holds a species that has disintegrators. Then it will be ineffective.
If your invasion fleet has shields then the planet can too...powered by fusion reactors. Where the planet has a limitless fuel supply and you do not.
Then if the defending species is a kardeshev civilization they may have the ability to cause their sun to flare up in your direction. And of course the planet will be hardened where you are not. Invasions are always won at cost since the enemy has had time to dig in. Especially if the species is native to that world.
If successful invasion of a world is part of your plotline great but make it happen at cost and your readers will love your story. It's part of the hero's tale that the hero loses something while gaining his objective.

Shields change this, especially if they work how they do in Star Wars. Having a shield that can take a massive amount of abuse from space or can hold off that kind of fire indefinitely would constitute a ground assault if they can slowly fly through the shield. That was the whole point about the battle of Hoth after all.

This is easily the worst Spacedock video I've watched. You could make a lot of points to support an argument that planetary invasions would be extremely difficult, but to assert there is no reason for one or that it would never happen is very short-sighted

Iwo Jima and Okinawa were islands that required ground forces to invade after ships bombed them to hell with little effect, the British in WW2 stubbornly endured bombardment, bombarding a position is means to suppress it not destroy or capture it, and ships parked in low orbit would be incredibly vulnerable to ummmm, missles, why would anyone need to build a ship for that? You can compare a planetary assault to an amphibious landing but you have to keep in mind that a beach can be approached from one direction while the SKY offers a fast Avenue of Advance from any direction, and ground forces won't be nearly as Mobil, it also wouldn't be necessary to completely secure the planet, only large ports or important cities, the actual assault would only be an opening move in a long invasion campaign, it wouldn't be the entire plan

Imagine if frieza was in star wars damn frieza charges a energy blast and that planet explodes

There was a book called Hero! in which it was stated that a planetary invasion would never happen because all manner of anti-orbital weapons were waiting to wipe out anything that appeared in orbit. The bad guys organise a starship as a kinetic kill vehicle instead.
The invasion in the SCP Foundation would probably work better, as it featured KKVs followed by the crash of a massive ark full of mining and manufacturing equipment, which upon landing started harvesting resources and building the aliens' materiel.
Of course invasions would happen; just not like in the movies.

I was going to comment about all the things I think are wrong with this video: bombing not being a showstopper from a morale and technical perspective, anti-orbit defences, the point of not taking an entire planet not being about capturing every square metre, etc.
It’s clear everyone else has it covered, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I think planetary invasions would be limited to taking down planetary shield generators and orbital defense guns. Once those are down, the planet can likely be assumed to surrender, but would likely not surrender until those are down as they hope for relief from a friendly fleet responding to the siege.

I think he underestimates people's willingness to fight on when there homes beening invaded sure losing the space battle is going to be really bad and I can see people surrendering after that but not everyone I think it would turn into gorilla warfare because your never going to know if they have anything to combat the the ships still so your going to have to send troops down and there they might be able to kill enough of you to get better terms of their surrender or even make it not worth tacking

Yakitori: soldiers of misfortune, in that the Pan-Star Trade Federation just blow up some cities on Earth from space and was like "surrender or be genocided" and well Earth surrendered and became a 3rd world nation after because Earths tech level was way to primitive for export...

What if they just build deep underground? Have some ground weapons that can shoot at ships on the orbit, etc. Can you really always just bomb it from orbit?
You make good point for "typically" but definitely not for "never".

Kinda makes sense, but in a way that airpower proponents made sense when they were talking about bombs wining wars with out use of ground army. Made sense in theory in practice turned out false.

there's a big issue with your view:
You say that invaders can threaten the planet and then bomb a bit to soften, and then the planet surrenders....first of all, it didn't work in WW1 with artillery barrages, it didn't work in WW2 during the battle of Britain, it didn't work in Vietnam with the U.S. ArcLight B52 runs on North Vietnam, it's not working with the Russian barrages on Ukrainian cities nowadays...but let's crazily assume that it DOES actually work for once...well you're talking GOVERNMENTS here. Assuming for example that the United States, or China, or Italy, decides to capitulate, what makes you think that the American, Chinese, or Italian PEOPLE will surrender?
You'd still have resistence movements, even less predictable because they wouldn't be coordinated by the governments (at least not officially, have you heard of "Operation Gladio" and the "Stay-Behind Network"?). You'd still have hit-and-run attacks or what others would call "terroristic attacks" (bombings, IEDs, ambushes etc) on critical invading garrisons...so you'd still need a ground occupation force deployed planetside to phisically OCCUPY the surface.
There's a reason as to why it's said that Artillery, Tanks and Planes win battles but Infantry wins wars....you can level the fortifications with Orbital Kinetic Ordnance and crush the enemy lines with attack shuttles and void dreadnoughts, but unless Imperial Pvt. Sn'affu-69420 with its Space M16 has quelled any opposition behind every blade of grass, the war is not over.
And thus, given that military doctrine calls for a numerical advantage of three to four times the defenders in order to win an engagement, and double that at least in order to "exploit victory and occupy territory", it'd mean the invasion/occupying force would need to be six to eight times the total planet population at the very least , which needs to be transported, fed, supplied and organized for a long duration of time, including reinforcements, replacements etc....
So at this point, yes, Spacedock, your hypothesis of "Planetside Invasion wouldn't happen" is right, but for the wrong reason...because since a ground invasion would still be necessary and it would be astronomically cost-ineffective under every point of view (even for a hive-like species with easily replaceable soldier "drones" of little individual value), it would be cheaper and quicker for a would-be invasion force to perform planet-wide Exterminatus and then re-terraform the planet.

This does kind of ignore the fact that bombing civilian targets is a war crime. And if you think you can destroy all of a planet's military capability without catching civilian targets in the crossfire...well you're only right if your enemies for some reason don't have their military bases positioned to directly defend their population centers. Not to mention what happens if you have something like a planetside rebellion, where only some of the population is your enemy and they're keeping close enough to your allies on the ground that you simply can't bomb them without killing friendlies.

This title is very misleading. What you meant to say is that planetary assaults would never happen. And that is reasonable... But planetary invasions would still occur, by your own admission. Siege, bombardment, occupation then finally insurrection against the occupying force.

In the case of Star Wars though with their planetary shields and planetary defense weapons that can shoot ships out of the sky invasions do make sense. Land your forces on a side of the planet where anti-space weapons don't have an effective attack angle, then fight across the planet to the target (a base or capital or whatever). Same thing happens in 40k all the time with the Imperial Guard. In both cases it sounds impractical, but if the alternatives are losing a bunch of footsloggers or losing expensive capital ships to planet based-anti ship weapons then I know what most generals would choose.

Planet invasions in halo make sense because the covenant didn't want humanities surrender and the planet had valuable artifacts on it so bombing wouldn't be a primary objective

This is half right. The deviation comes if planetary bombardment is not considered functional as a method of war for political slash social reasons. That would be as if planetary bombardment were in the same order as nooking cities is in our world. In which case, planets become very much seizures and having some ability at siege craft would be useful.

I know you mentioned them towards the end, but I feel like it may be a bit bad as an example, using halo, and star wars (with the OT). I mean, the only large pitched land battle in Star Wars during the OT, was Hoth. And, the reason why that was ever the case, was because the shield around the rebel base made bombardment impossible, while the Ion cannon made it so the rebels could attack the imperials, essentially with impunity. In that case, a land campaign to attack the single fortified base was the most logical step to take, since the battleships were effectively countered. And with Halo, surrender for humans is just not an option. They are fighting a war where the primary goal for the covenant is extermination. It's a genocide. Is genocide an easy way to wage war? No, but it's happened in real life many times, so it's not unrealistic, especially when the existence of humans in Halo puts the hierarchy of the covenant at risk. Along with that, the covenant only attacks with ground forces on planets with forerunner artefacts. Most human worlds get glassed once the defense fleets or orbital defenses get destroyed. It just so happens that in the halo games, you're either fighting on a planet with forerunner artefacts, such as reach, harvest, or earth, or you are fighting on a forerunner structure, like the fortress world, halos, or the arc.

The very example from Star Wars that was used explicitly rendered a bombardment useless due to a planetary shield.

Most invasions the people at the top change the little people stay the same

Historically wrong.

People made the same claims about sea invasions after ww2.

Just bombing never worked in history.

Excellent points you've made, but why did you choose music that makes me feel like I'm on an escalator in a posh department store, in the 80s?

Invading Force: We've come to liberate you!
Civilians: Hooray!
Invading Force: Wait. It appears the enemy is still on the surface. READY THE STAR CANNONS!!!
Civilians: 😐

Your reasoning is absurd.
If the planet has important infrastructure that you don't want to lose, then you can't threaten to bomb it, because it's bloody obvious to the hive citizens that you want their hive city, preferably with them still in there, to work for you and pay taxes, or whatever evil schemes you have.
In that case, you will need to either parley with them, as was done in history, or mount a siege, which in this case is an invasion. If you bombarded their Anti-Landing capabilities, you can safely deploy troops, and have orbital bombardment ready, preferably at differing scales, to do precision strikes against enemy hardpoints your ground troops can't handle.
What is utter nonsense is throwing your landing troops in WHILST enemy defences are still active and can oppose their landing. There is apparently nothing stopping you from orbiting a planet and deploying landing troops, so what is stopping you from softening their defenses, and creating the best environment to make planetfall?

And if a planet DOESN'T have anything worth taking... why are you there? If the planet has nothing to take over then I don't see reason why to bother with it. If it has large enemy concentrations and enough defences to oppose you, then it means it has the necessary infrastructure and production to maintain all that, so there is something important there to take.
If it doesn't have large enemy concentrations, then IGNORE IT, or as you said, bombard it from afar if the gained effect is worth the munition and time expended.

Ground forces would be needed as you'd have to assist the government of that planet to stop the radicals or freedom fighters. You likely want to planet for its farms or something and don't want to kill them all so you'd likely have several nations or provinces agree and you could begin landing there and slowly working with them to take areas of interest you dotn want damaged.

Even without planetary defences, any planet with satellites already has tons of materials it can throw at the invading ships. After that, there's the countless nukes able to reach orbit or do so with some modifications. Basically any civilisation which has reached the atomic age would be capable of putting up some resistance, let alone a planet spanning civilisation.
You can invade with marine corps but you won't be able to occupy anything unless you plan on making the invasion force a permanent feature of the planet's orbit, which will be inevitably depleted by guerrilla actions. People aren't suicidal, but they also are not slaves.

You can sink giant battle ships, you can't sink islands. You can scare people, you can't control them. You can bombard a planet, but that will not give you access to its resources. It is a war of attrition, but only for the invading force. So the only way a planetary invasion works is if the technology gap is so great that they would be considered gods, like with the Goauld and Orai.

I like to provide a different reason from most people why you shouldn’t just jump to using an orbital bombardment to win. Look at the destruction of all Kaminaon cities in the Bad Batch. Yes, this was the destruction of an Imperial world by the Empire instead of the Empire destroying an enemy world, but I think the concept still applies. I mean, sure we don’t stick to all of the rules of war, but the way this video talks about how a commander should just threaten to bombard a planet just makes it sound like they expect all people in war to just resort to anything to win, no matter the cost.

Anyways, Rampart, the Imperial in charge of the fleet, got arrested for nearly wiping out the Kaminoan species. Sure, the Covenant in Halo always do glassing, but how many factions in sci-do are going to be fighting to wipe out a whole species or planet? Nobody wants to be a war criminal or get caught as one. And it’s going to be hard to try and cover up the level of destruction and mass slaughter on a planetary scale if a planet refuses to surrender. So at least in Star Wars and Star Trek, there’s a good reason why most ships won’t use such tactics. I mean, who wants to be responsible for mass genocide?

Aside from other points that people here have made, its weird how you assume that your military would be fine with just bombing a planet that is mostly filled with civilians. That's probably against all kinds of interstellar conventions of war. Unless you can extremely easily discriminate targets you're just commiting genocide and that's not something your troops might want to do.

when you invade weak planet after your now responsible for there politics, economy, military no thanks it's very stressful we like independent alien planet good thing we only invade planet if they have influence to our civilization 😎👍

Love the channel, but I completely disagree with the premise of this video.

Of course there could be planetary invasions.

1. Parking battleships next to a planet and threatening to bombard it might work. Or maybe the planet folks have planetary shields that limit bombing damage and can shoot back. You might need to go down and take the planet if you really want it and can do it.

2. Yes, planets are huge. But if you have the technology to take you all the way there, then you probably have the technology to move across the planet’s surface quite rapidly. (By the way, with this level of technology, a lot of the action might actually happen deep inside the planet.)

3. Major islands and continents are only a few orders of magnitude smaller than planets, and they’ve been successfully invaded and conquered in human history. Think of the conquest and re-conquest of Europe in WW2, or the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, and almost the entire Eastern parts of China, also in WW2. And this was done in a matter of months or a few years, using much lesser technology than what we now have, let alone thousands of years in the future.

There has to be atleast 100 million troops supported by fleets and 1 big main ship, like a mothership, to commence a planetary invasion.

SD I understand you points. But you are wrong about why invasion makes more sense then you think and here is why.

First off: Orbital bombardment is to lessen any form of resistance. But if you do too much bombardment you risk glassing the planet and reducing it to rock and not worth it.

Secondly: The force you would need is on the level of a civilization in order to take out the key structures and levels of government on said planet. You do not have to capture every inch, just the key places and you need a sizable force to occupy it for a long while.

Thirdly: The planet that you want to conquer has resources or it is placed in an area that has value to the occupying forces and so they might use it as a staging ground for any other war that they are facing right now.

Invasion is more reasonable then you think SD.

Neat video, but disagree. A planet has much industrial capacity, More resources, more energy, and more mass for armor than even a good sized fleet of ships does. In most scenarios, a planet has far more guns on it than does said ship or even fleet of ships (unless truly massive in scale). A planet, will be shooting up at attackers and have far more rock and metal to armor their positions with. Yes, a place like Earth is fragile and vulnerable, but a planet or moon settled and developed in a culture aware of and preparing for the threat of interstellar or interplanetary war would be a very different sort of situation.

What about the planet's defences? The planetary defence force could threaten to destroy the fleet (depending on the size of the fleet, this is arguably easier to do), putting the parties in a sort of "mutual assured destruction" stalemate. In this situation, it would be irrational for either party to take any hostile action (excluding strictly covert operations such as espionage, which would still be very risky).

Nerds continue to look at war as a purely mechanical numbers game and will continue to be proven wrong again and again.

Well planetary bombardment in a realistic setting is not that feasible since if you can do that then well to say the least that planets gon have a ton of guns and maybe even literal armor and maybe even under ground settlements and maybe guns that are quite literally under the crust when you are talking interstellar civilization this sort of stuff is on the table so basically the only real option is to invade if you want the planet either that or get them to surrender with the treat of invasions since well, invasions would not be fun for the defenders to say the least

hoth probably would happen, its just one base that the empire needed to wipe out not a civilized world. and they wanted to just bomb it from space so they couldnt

Lol no way, at least a century of this theory proving itself wrong in multiple theatres of war would like a word with you Mr. Spacedock.
Love almost all of your other content having discovered you recently and binged alot of it to get me through a few work days btw, but this is a hard disagree.

Even self preserving instinct doesn't mean you have the communication array. Bombing will continue.
Without establishing Rules of Surrender, or what is allowed in war.
Gorilla Forces would continue even if the Government surrendered, Which can make the invader look at it as a loss, strip mine everything they can.
And then Bomb the planet to Oblivion to show what happens to those whom try too hard to be heroes after the loss.
Humans are Irrational, We will break those whom done Us wrong. some of us at the cost of an entire countries livelihood.

I have to disagree that it would never happen, but it would be situational. It depends why you are invading the planet. I can only think of two reasons to invade a planet:
1. The Falling Skies reason
In Falling Skies the invaders have been driven from their home galaxy and have no where else to go. Although they have more imperialistic motives in that show, the point stands that if you have no where else to go and need somewhere to live then glassing the surface is counterintuitive. You need to land and either subdue or annihilate the natives.
2. The Galactic Republic reason.
Taxes. If you are advanced enough to travel to other solar systems then you can get all the raw materials you need from asteroids. The only reason to invade a planet is the living population to add to your empire and pay taxes. Long term investment. The Go’auld from Star Gate invade planets so they can enslave the population to work for them. Bombing a planet from orbit kills all your potential slaves and undermines to point of seizing the planet in the first place.
I think the scale of The Expanse makes it a poor comparison for most other sci-fi. In a single solar system, planetary invasion is technically possible, practically impossible and definitely impractical. The scale of a war changes the rules and goals of the war.
So while planetary invasions like in Star Wars are way too difficult to do effectively, they are sometimes necessary because orbital bombardiert isn’t an option.

Planet combat is similar to urban combat. In the past it was highly unusual to see a battle in a city. It always happend nearby or was turned into a long siege and then surrender.
But then something changed... And urban combat became viable and the most deadly one. That will someday happen with planets, on a greater scale of course.
It takes months and years to storm a city.
Stellar empire definitely can spend some decades storming the planet.

If highly effective food supplies exist in a setting, it can be possible to withstand an orbital blocade for years and decades, using underground communications and vast empty areas of a planet. The core cities will definitely be destroyed in the orbital bombardment. But on fortress worlds they just may not exist. And there you have it:
An enemy supply base in your rear that diverts your forces on its siege.
Hundreds of millions will die, storming the planet. But your population is counted in tens of billions. Entire generations will wage war for this planet, but in cosmic scale the conflict will be pretty average at its best.

People with civilian background always tend to think that surrender is a viable option. It was. But as we see now, it's more efficient to make a city with hundreds of thousands of people into a fortress — a very effective one, nonetheless. And if you have a planet, which can supply a garrisons of tens of millions... Well... If it's not in the core worlds, who gives a shit about population?