09-02-2017, 05:39 PM
(09-02-2017, 03:07 AM)Kinser79 Wrote:(09-01-2017, 09:32 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(08-31-2017, 09:55 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: In Starship Troopers there is such a system though it isn't gone into much detail in the novel. I've seen the movie (it is one of my favorite movies actually but I understand that movie was basically written by a cheese eating surrender monkey so his tinkering with the plot makes it suspect) but do not consider it canon.
Heinlien said that veterans had the right to vote, though it is considered to be a lesser right. As such this means that there is a lesser democracy. Rather, the video clip I posted was far more relevant. Exercising political power is exercising force. As such it seems prudent to leave the exercising of that force to those who have demonstrated through military service that they are willing to make the safety and security of the body politic their personal responsibility.
This of course necessitates that any such state has an all volunteer military. Fortunately the US already has such a military and instituting a draft would be an anathema except under the most dire of circumstances, if then.
I think the era of the draft is over. With nuclear weapons and modern military technology, wars are no longer just a matter of how many warm bodies you can put in the field with rifles. You don't lose a war because one disgruntled draftee frags his sergeant, but when you're regularly using nuclear weapons, that picture changes.
The other thing mentioned in Heinlein's Starship Troopers is that the system is stable, because in the event of insurrection, the veterans are the ones that determine whether it succeeds. I wonder how accurate that would be. I don't think it would have been true in the warm bodies with rifles era, but again, we're due for a change with nuclear weapons.
In the book, regular use of nuclear weapons on the field was a daily occurrence and was launched from a device similar to a bazooka or panzerfaust. I would imagine if one is essentially using a nuclear RPG that the issue of radiation has been addressed.
However, in such a scenario it would be those with those arms who would determine future state of the state.
In real life, there is a three order of magnitude gap between the power of the largest conventional weapons and the power of the smallest nuclear weapons. Heinlein envisioned nuclear weapons using subcritical masses to fill that gap, but technology hasn't developed them yet, and it's not clear the science will support its doing so.
In Heinlein's world, those weapons, and their portability, provided a role for what are essentially commandos in powered armor. Without those weapons, I'm not sure such a role exists. The only remaining use for infantry may be security forces for occupation.
Even in Heinlein's Starship Troopers, though, there still existed strategic scale nuclear weapons; let's not forget the huge crater that the protagonist's platoon was on the edge of during one battle.
I would agree it will be people who control the nuclear weapons who determine what the state looks like, at least internally. Assuming more realistically than Heinlein that nuclear weapons remain too large to destroy less than a city at a time, what does that look like? So far, the state that has developed nuclear weapons most efficiently has been North Korea; is the future a world full of North Koreas? That's what I worry about.