Official debate about FT logistics
Part One: What are Logistics?
______Military logistics is the discipline of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of military forces. In its most comprehensive sense, it is those aspects or military operations that deal with:
- Design, development, acquisition, storage, distribution, maintenance, evacuation, and disposition of materiel.
- Transport of personnel.
- Acquisition or construction, maintenance, operation, and disposition of facilities.
- Acquisition or furnishing of services.
- Medical and health service support.
The word "logistics" is derived from the Greek adjective logistikos meaning "skilled in calculating". The first administrative use of the word was in Roman and Byzantine times when there was a military administrative official with the title Logista. At that time, the word apparently implied a skill involved in mathematical computations.
Research indicates that its first use in relation to an organized military administrative science was by the Swiss writer, Antoine-Henri Jomini, who, in 1838, devised a theory of war on the trinity of strategy, ground tactics, and logistics. The French still use the words logistique and loger with the meaning "to quarter".
The military activity known as logistics probably is as old as war itself. In the early history of man when the first wars were fought, each man had to find his own food, stones, and knotted clubs. Each warrior was responsible for foraging for his own food and firewood.
Not until later, when fighters joined as groups and fighting groups became larger, was there any basis for designating certain men to specialize in providing food and weapons to the combatants. The men who provided support to the fighters constituted the first logistics organization.
By the seventeenth century, the French were using a magazine system to keep a network of frontier towns supplied for sieges and to provide for campaigns beyond their borders. The American Civil War saw the introduction of railways for transport of personnel, supplies and heavy field pieces.
Until the Napoleonic wars, the military supply was ensured by looting, requisition or private companies. In 1807, Napoleon created the first Train regiments, entirely dedicated to the supply and the transport of the equipment.
During the Seven Weeks War, railways enabled the swift mobilization of the Prussian Army, but the problem of moving supplies from the end of rail lines to units at the front resulted in nearly 18,000 tons trapped on trains unable to be unloaded to ground transport. The Prussian use of railways during the Franco-Prussian War is often cited as a prime example of logistic modernizations, but the advantages of maneuver were often gained by abandoning supply lines that became hopelessly congested with rear-area traffic.
During World War I, unrestricted submarine warfare had a significant impact on the ability of Britain's allies to keep shipping lanes open, while the great size of the German Army proved too much for its railways to support except while immobilized in trench warfare.
Part Two: Modern developments
Logistics, occasionally referred to as "combat service support", must address highly uncertain conditions. While perfect forecasts are rarely possible (this is also true in most sciences) forecasts models can reduce uncertainty about what supplies or services will be needed, where and when they will be needed, or the best way to provide them.
Ultimately, responsible officials must make judgments on these matters, sometimes using intuition and scientifically weighing alternatives as the situation requires and permits. Their judgments must be based not only upon professional knowledge of the numerous aspects of logistics itself but also upon an understanding of the interplay of closely related military considerations such as strategy, tactics, intelligence, training, personnel, and finance.
However, case studies have shown that more quantitative, statistical analysis are often a significant improvement on human judgment. One such recent example is the use of Applied Information Economics by the Office of Naval Research and the Marine Corps for forecasting bulk fuel requirements for the battlefield.
In major military conflicts, logistics matters are often crucial in deciding the overall outcome of wars. For instance, tonnage war - the bulk sinking of cargo ships - was a crucial factor in World War II.
The successful Allied anti-submarine campaign and the failure of the German Navy to sink enough cargo in the Battle of the Atlantic allowed Britain to stay in the war and establish the second front against the Nazis; by contrast, the successful U.S. submarine campaign against Japanese maritime shipping across Asian waters effectively crippled its economy and its military production capabilities.
More generally, protecting one's own supply lines and attacking those of an enemy is a fundamental military strategy; an example of this as a purely logistical campaign for the military means of implementing strategic policy was the Berlin Airlift.
Military logistics has pioneered a number of techniques that have since become widely deployed in the commercial world. Operations research grew out of WWII military logistics efforts. Likewise, military logistics borrows from methods first introduced to the commercial world.
The Kargil Conflict in 1999 between India and Pakistan also referred to as Operation Vijay (Victory in Hindi) is one of the most recent examples of high altitude warfare in mountainous terrain that posed significant logistical problems for the combating sides. The Stallion which forms the bulk of the Indian Army’s logistical vehicles proved its reliability and serviceability with 95% operational availability during the operation.
Part Three: Loss of Strength Gradient
The Loss of Strength Gradient (LSG) was devised by Kenneth Boulding in 1962. He argued that the amount of a nation’s military power that could be brought to bear in any part of the world depended on geographic distance. The Loss of Strength Gradient demonstrated, in graphical form, that the further away the target of aggression the less strength that could be made available. It also showed how this loss of strength could be ameliorated by the use of forward positions.
Boulding went on to support the idea of a decline in the Loss of Strength Gradient. He used two lines of attack. One of these was that transport was becoming easier. Another was that combatants had achieved sufficient capacity to defeat the opponent through strategic air and missile power. Boulding said that there had been a “military revolution” in the 20th century, the significance of which was “a very substantial diminution in the cost of transportation of organized violence of all kinds, especially of organized armed forces” and “an enormous increase in the range of the deadly projectile.”
There is support for the continued importance of the Loss of Strength Gradient. It has been argued[by whom?] that "Where the LSG is reduced in significance it is of only temporary nature." Transport is said not to be becoming permanently easier while air power is said not to be permanently replacing need for forward deployed ground forces.
Source,
_______Wikipedia,The Free Encyclopedia
What this discussion is about
______In the Future, there is a vast amount of space, most people agree that Future Tech begins with a time after the creation of FtLt (Faster than light travel, also referred to as FTL, Ftl, Post Lightspeed Future and simply Lightspeed) this device allows a ship to move from point A, to point B in a time from a hour, to a week depending on the destination and or the power of the FtlD (faster than light Drive.)
______While the FTL is a important part others agree that other things such as Terra forming, Shielding and many other things, are the primary part of FT (Future tech) Roleplay. In a FT RP, it is mostly up to the player to guess, today we are nowhere near The time of Halo, Mass Effect nor Star Wars (even though they are in the past, sorta links to Halo don't ya think?) and many other Future based movies and games, the simple fact is that we are only guessing, the thing is, we know more about space than our own ocean, take it or leave it, but that is both positive and negative, what is positive about it is that if we can work on improving our technology, then hopefully we can make it to a day where we can not only colonize planets to survive the impending end of our sun, but we could also possibly stop the disaster. My point is that today we can only guess, but with our current knowledge, our FT RPs may be used as reminders of the people that wished to see the future (and maybe we will.)
______While we need the tech to be FT we still have one old nemesis, a enemy that plagued man since he awoke from his cave(and probably the same for Non Humans), what I am talking about is war. War is a old enemy to us all, whether you are a war monger or a police state, the world, galaxy, and universe will have both peace and war, they cannot stop because even in a FT society, war is always around the corner.
What is War
______War is a state of armed and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, societal disruption, and high mortality. As a behavior pattern, warlike tendencies are found in many primate species, including humans, and also found in many ant species. The set of techniques used by a group to carry out war is known as warfare. An absence of war is usually called peace.
War generally involves two or more organized groups or parties. Such a conflict is always an attempt at altering either the psychological or material hierarchy of domination or equality between such groups. In all cases, at least one participant (group) in the conflict perceives the need to either psychologically or materially dominate the other participant.
In all wars, the group(s) experiencing the need to dominate other group(s) are unable and unwilling to accept or permit the possibility of a relationship of fundamental equality to exist between the groups who have opted for group violence (war). The aspect of domination that is a precipitating factor in all wars, i.e. one group wishing to dominate another, is also often a precipitating factor in individual one-on-one violence outside of the context of war, i.e. one individual wishing to dominate another.
In 2003, Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley identified war as the sixth (of ten) biggest problems facing the society of mankind for the next fifty years. In the 1832 treatise "On War", Prussian military general and theoretician Carl Von Clausewitz, defined war as follows: "War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
War is a seemingly inescapable and integral aspect of human culture. Its practice is not linked to any single type of political organization or society. Rather, as discussed by John Keegan in his History Of Warfare, war is a universal phenomenon whose form and scope is defined by the society that wages it. The conduct of war extends along a continuum, from the almost universal primitive endemic warfare that began well before recorded human history, to advanced nuclear warfare between global alliances, with the recently developed ultimate potential for human extinction.
Source,
_______Wikipedia,The Free Encyclopedia
With that said, I shall make the first topic.
Issue one:With FTL it is no worry for a nation to focus much on distance and time, but more on the location, lets face it, it is hard to do on earth, and compared to the galaxy, Earth is an atom, even NS Earth would be a small thing and would most likely reach the size of a large start if anything, and that alone is a impossible feat, so for the sake of reality, NS Earth is a planet that the same size as RL Earth, next we need to think on how war is made in a FT setting, for a Warmonger, they need to be careful to know who they attack, being a Warmonger in a FT setting is suicide because you might come into contact with a much larger nation that might have better technology, so what you need to do is make first contact, if you a Human Nation fighting another, than that means Earth is not unified, it might even be destroyed, this means that you can have a choice.
1: you fight anyways
2: you meet with them, ally or leave alone.
If you see a ship that is not from your nation, try to send a scout to follow it, or place a tracer, once done the scout can return as long as it keeps a trail of some sorts, a Tracker works better, especially if it is a Smart A.I.
my point is that in FT, you need to worry about where your going most of the time, and you will not have to fear the time or distance at all.