Starship Troopers

Bugs, Mr. Rico! Zillions of 'em!

A case has been made that airlifting with rockets a single American armored division could be decisive because of the ability to move and sustain the division with little preparation and deployment time. I appreciate the enthusiasm but I don’t think it’s possible; and even if it is possible, a division is a drop in the Eurasia bucket.

Is SpaceX proving that its economical Starship with 100-ton cargo capacity (expected to reach 200) will revolutionize warfare with its logistics potential?

[A] fleet of Starships could land an entire armored division anywhere on Earth in under an hour and keep it supplied in the field.

Just as the speed of tanks revolutionized warfare between the World Wars, this development changes everything. Forget C-17s and cargo ships: you might as well use horses and wagons. A fleet of Starships is not just an incremental improvement in logistics: it’s a fundamental shift in the nature of warfare. The ability to almost instantaneously create and reinforce a whole combat theater anywhere on Earth will give the United States overwhelming power, unlike anything heretofore seen outside of science fiction. [emphasis in original]

I don’t think so.

One, a division isn’t that large of a formation when you consider combat on the Eurasian continent. Sure, if it is supporting an allied army, it could be a useful addition. But ideally to be potentially decisive in its effect, I’d want a corps with two or more divisions and assorted support brigades and battalions under the corps headquarters as the ground component. I’ve been consistent on that (see pp. 15-20).

The author reportss the weight of an armored division and its initial supply load as 155,000 tons. That includes 4,250 tons for the personnel. That’s 775 large Starship sorties.

Let’s look at a division from history and assume some extras to help it fight. This Global Security article reports 8 American ships moved to the Persian Gulf in 1990:

24,000 tons of equipment for the Army's 24th Infantry (Mechanized) Division and the 1st Corps Support Command.

That’s 120 large Starship trips just to land the 24th ID’s (reflagged since then to 3rd ID) equipment. Admittedly, that was the equipment for a large Cold War division of perhaps 18,000 troops. But a slice of corps support would be needed for the author’s division to fight. I’m going to assume that the author’s modern division tonnage is equivalent to the Cold War division and division slice. A WAG, to be sure.

How many people can Starship move? People aren’t cargo. You can’t just divide the cargo tonnage by the wight of the personnel to get a total. The passenger compartments would need to be human habitable. Even assuming 100 troops without equipment, that’s an additional 79 Starship sorties for the division troops (including a subtraction from the 21 needed just based on weight).

Is divisional air defense enough for the division’s protection and to protect the rocket base? If not, we’d need to move and sustain air defense units. And infantry or military police battalions to protect them. Or will host nation assets take care of this?

How far away is the front? I assume that when the claim is that the division could be sent “anywhere” we’re ruling out deep behind enemy lines or even very close to the front. Rockets landing will go pretty slow. So it wouldn’t take super advanced air defense missiles to shoot them down. So the front has to be farther than easy intermediate ballistic missile range and long-range air defense missile range.

I suppose casualties might not be the best passengers. So I’ll just assume they get moved by host nation transportation to a conventional air field. And I’ll assume Starship doesn’t supply that air bridge.

And then you need transportation units to move the supplies from the rocket base to the division in combat. And protection for the supply routes. Both ground security and air defense. More tonnage. I won’t guess.

We have a high tooth-to-tail ratio to be so effective in combat. Is it 3:1 in the theater? So add 12,000 more troops to the 8,000 core slice troops compared to a 10,000-strong division. So 144 more sorties for the equipment and 120 for the troops. I’m basing that on the 1990 transport statistics.

And more sorties to supply the support troops. Say 40 sorties. Just for the initial supply loads.

How do we get the tanks and other heavy vehicles into Starship and disembark them? They aren’t cargo planes with rear ramps. If we can even fit them I doubt it would be more than two and probably just one given the layout of a vertically landing spacecraft.

And do you shove fuel bladders into a Starship for that massive requirement? Or do you have a massive tank that has to be pumped to get the fuel out to waiting tanker trucks? Starship is designed for a fuel tank for space refueling. Can it be reconfigured quickly or do we need specialized tanker Starships? The latter probably isn’t a big problem given the fuel needs of an armored division in combat.

That’s 1,158—at least—large Starship sorties just to put the division with its needed support and initial supplies on the ground.

Then you have to sustain the division and necessary support in combat. Let’s look at what an armored division requires to fight. The author calls the initial munitions and supply load 96,000 tons. That’s for supplies varying from 7 to 30 days per the charts included by the author, with other categories undefined. So I’m going to assume (there’s that WAG, again) that on average that’s the initial 10 days of supplies, for convenience. So 3,700 tons per day after landing the division for bare minimum just-in-time delivery. Which is supposed to be a feature rather than a bug of the spaceship bridge to avoid the need to deploy iron mountains of supplies to the theater. Assuming we don’t use more supplies than calculated (easy there, Pucker Factor). That’s 19 Starship sorties per day for supplies, after the initial surge to deploy the division. I’ll just assume this covers the support troops, too, for convenience.

And that doesn’t include replacing equipment and troop losses. More sorties. But certainly nothing compared to the initial surge.

This is all WAG math, I admit. But I’m surely not over-estimating the logistics need, am I? I mean, as a rule in peacetime planners grossly underestimate supply usage during war.

Yet I don’t have any idea how quickly we could complete more than a thousand Starship sorties for the initial lift. How quickly can the Starships cycle through the end points of this space bridge? Maintenance plus loading or unloading. Let’s say you need four Starships for every actual Starship sortie (WAG alert!). One delivering and three recovering from a sortie and preparing to conduct another sortie. If so, you need American personnel in the area of operation to keep the Starships moving. And equipment to move the Starships to maintenance areas. And setting up the maintenance areas. That’s more personnel and equipment in the area of operations. And troops to guard the launch site? Perhaps host country troops could do that. But would we totally trust allies not to commit “green on blue” attacks? More sorties.

How many launch pads and chopstick landing systems are there back in the continental United States? How many are in the area of operations? I read (tip to Instapundit) that our current slow pace of launches compared to moving that division is already stressing out America’s launch capacity. And that limit includes the lack of multiple daily launch capability:

Limp’s concerns were echoed by executives from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) during a panel discussion, where all three agreed that the industry must collectively prepare for a future where multiple daily launches become the norm — a tempo that current government-run launch ranges at Cape Canaveral, Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aren’t equipped to support.

And building more sites is restrained by earthly and space geography. Launch facilities have limits at both ends of the space lift bridge:

“The tyranny of orbital mechanics dictates where you get to launch from,” Bruno added. “So there will be a point in the future where the few other suitable launch sites are attractive to us, but that’s not now. Now our investments are better spent in improving the sites we already have.”

It is going to take a long time to get a division in place to engage in conventional combat operations. Unless moving from point to point on Earth rather than going into orbit changes that spaceship base location reality, that’s a problem with existing facilities. And if we can build elsewhere for mere planetary transport, that would make the new facilities useless for actual space missions, no? We’d be building large numbers of launch facilities—at both ends of the space bridge—just to keep them in reserve to move a division of troops and sustain it in combat.

And another thing, how do the Starships take off again after they land with the armored division’s personnel, equipment, and supplies at the landing site across the globe at the intersection of No and Where? This is how SpaxeX describes Starship:

SpaceX’s Starship system represents a fully reusable transportation system designed to service Earth orbit needs as well as missions to the Moon and Mars. This two-stage vehicle—composed of the Super Heavy rocket (booster) and Starship (spacecraft) as shown in Figure 1[.]

Starship has two main parts. The booster does the heavy lifting and then falls away to land back at or near the launch site while the spacecraft continues on to its destination, whether in space or on the ground. To be clear, the booster needed to launch is back in the United States.

Oh.

We’re going to need boosters at the division landing site very early in the deployment before the spacecraft start to stack up too much in the maintenance area. I’m going to guess that a Starship cargo hold can’t hold a fully functional booster inside it. I suspect we would need to ship boosters in by ship and rail—or God forbid, road. Please don’t shake them up too much in transport.

Assuming the division and its supporting ground elements get there, what about air support? The initial author assumed that the division would have that. Is the Air Force relying on long-range bombers or is it coming with the division? If the latter, that’s more transport for units and supplies. Air units need much more supplies per personnel deployed. I’m not even going to guess at this point. The numbers are already disconcertingly large.

The rocket bases at both ends of this shuttle run are getting massive to sustain this effort. The enemy would never dream of using fractional orbit hypersonic missiles to attack them, right?

How long does it take to build the Starship ports at both ends? We’re not talking about even concrete aircraft runways that need a lot of time to cure. Will there need to be dozens of pads and chopsticks? Scores? This has to be decades of very expensive construction. Clearly we aren’t talking about the ability to land an armored division anywhere. We’re talking about moving a division to one specific country that is extremely important to support.

If so, why not just deploy a prepositioned unit set for an armored division there? With a nearby airfield you just have to fly in the personnel. Add in a month of supplies to keep the division in combat until the supply ship shuttle can kick in. I’m thinking this is orders of magnitude more affordable than a fleet of rocket ships and the two vulnerable Starship bases to sustain the space bridge. KISS, eh?

The bugs in this proposal are tremendous even if not on the zillions scale when you think about it even at a shallow level. I’d honestly love to see a space expert and logistics expert weigh in on this vision of the future with better data and knowledge than my WAGs produce.

Still, get back to me when Starships can launch and land from grass fields.

Decades ago there were discussions of the ability to rapidly airlift Stryker armored vehicles to South Korea rather than sending them by slow ships. I read that once you get up to a Stryker brigade that it is just as fast to send the unit by sea as it is by air because of limits on airlift capacity. I suspect the same equation will apply to moving and sustaining an armored division by rockets.

One last thing. You may wonder why the initial author focuses on lifting one armored division. He says:

Most of you are old enough to remember the 2003 Iraq War. You will recall that America destroyed the entire Iraqi Army — fourth largest in the world at the time — and overran the entire country in just three weeks.

If you recall that, you are wrong. The Coalition defeated Iraq with 70 maneuver battalions, the equivalent of seven divisions—six American Army and Marine divisions plus a British division. And that large army had been softened up by a much larger Army in the 1991 desert Storm campaign that smashed up the Iraqi ground forces with a 40-day Biblical level air assault followed by a massive armored ground invasion that lasted 4 or 5 days (depending on whether you count a post ceasefire attack that corrected a problem caused by the slightly premature ceasefire at the nice-sounding 100-hour mark).

Add in sanctions and an armed no-fly zone that snuffed out Iraqi air defenses by the time of the 2003 invasion. So even if the Starship math works out—and I don’t see how it could—that solitary division rocketed to the other side of the world will not change the course of history.

If America is to dominate the planet, we’ll need to do it the old fashioned way. As dull as that may be, we’ve had decades of experience working out the bugs with those means.

NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.