I had the company assembled in one of the large landing bays to prepare to shuttle to Wolverine. When I walked in, Sanchez and Frost had the men lined up on either side of the bay. As soon as they saw me they started clapping and chanting my name, all of them. I raised my hands and tried to gesture for them to stop, but they just kept it up. As I was looking around the room, I noticed the SEALs where there too, clapping and yelling with the rest.
Chapter Nine
Major Cain. It still sounded strange to me. I remember the first time I saw a major at Camp Puller. He seemed so imperious and so totally in command, I was in awe. Was that me now?
I outranked the officer who recruited me, or at least his rank at that time. Actually I'd found out that Captain Jack had ended up as Colonel Jack, and that he'd died during Achilles. I didn't know at the time, but he was commanding the rearguard that covered us all as we escaped, and he was almost the last man hit.
I glanced at the organizational chart. A battalion. Over 500 troops, all under my command. We were going in as part of a brigade-sized attack, which would be the largest operation since Achilles. I was strangely calm, although the prospect of commanding so many troops in battle was daunting.
A look at the top of the org chart made me feel a bit better. Brigadier General Holm was commanding the operation. Holm had taken an interest in my career, and I didn't doubt I owed my rapid advancement since the Academy to him, at least in part. I hadn't served with him since Columbia. In fact, until a few days before, I hadn't even seen him since that battle had started, though I'm pretty sure I owed my survival to his efforts to find me when anyone else would have given me up for dead.
Although smaller than Achilles, this was still a major operation, and it got me thinking about the evolution in battle tactics over the last 75 years. Early fighting in space was conducted mostly by local militias, with very small units of regulars attached for stiffening. Even during the First Frontier War, it was rare for more than a platoon of regulars to be involved in any one battle. This was true colonial warfare, not unlike what transpired in the early days of the European wars in the New World. It was just too expensive to move around large bodies of troops in space. The navies were small, and they simply did not have the capacity to transport major units. Certainly, all these early battles were fought without tanks, artillery, and other support elements.
The colonies were smaller then, too, and there were a lot fewer of them. The thin populations were generally spread around wherever there were resources to exploit, and true cities and towns were rare. Taking a planet usually required no more than attacking a few clusters of settlements.
The spheres of influence of the Powers were much more in a state of flux, and many worlds changed hands repeatedly. Hostile colonies were all mixed together, sometimes even in the same system, and there were no real borders or rational lines to defend. The treaty that ended the First Frontier War started the process of rationalization. The Powers were each more willing to concede systems they knew they'd have trouble holding anyway, and a natural trend toward consolidation began. The skirmishes in the years after the First Frontier War accelerated the process, as the Powers grabbed whatever exposed enemy worlds they could when the opportunity presented itself, and scaled back on defensive efforts for poorly located systems.
By the time full scale war broke out again, each belligerent had a more or less defensible cluster of interconnected colony worlds. The Second Frontier War was a definite progression from the first in scale and intensity. There were still plenty of small skirmishes over petty colonies, but by this time each side's core worlds had begun to develop into significant populations. Although the battles were still small, and the militias who fought in them would continue to be important, this war was decided by regular troops fighting over key systems.
Larger populations, stronger planetary defenses, and militias leavened with retired veterans all necessitated a strengthening of attacking forces. Combined arms returned to warfare as strike forces began to be supported with tanks and field artillery. The complexity of war in space was increasing, and tactics and training went along in lockstep. By the end of the Second Frontier War it was not uncommon for strikeforces to consist of an entire battalion supported by a couple tank platoons. Atmospheric fighters were also deployed in large battles, often launched from orbiting assault craft. The decisive battle of the war, at Persis, saw over 5,000 troops engaged on each side.
Nevertheless, the typical engagement involved fewer than 500 troops on a side, and heavy support units were still rare. Things were evolving, but war in space was still hellishly expensive, and resources were always stretched thin. The years leading up to the Third Frontier War saw a return to very small actions, but when things began to escalate toward outright war, the battles became bigger again. Our attack on Carson's World involved an entire battalion where 40 years earlier a platoon or two would have sufficed. There was another reason why so much force was deployed to that seemingly insignificant planet, but I wouldn't find out about it until years later.
As the Third Frontier War heated up, the battles continued to increase in size and complexity. Colonies, especially core worlds, had become large and wealthy enough to build some indigenous industry and upgrade their local defense capabilities. All of a sudden we were attacking planets that had tanks and artillery as part of their local forces, compelling us to respond in kind.
We were learning this new reality on the job, and paying in blood for our lessons. One reason that Operation Achilles was such a disaster is that no one had ever mounted so large and complex an assault in space. In fact, it had been more than a century since a battle this size had been fought on Earth. No one in the command structure had any experience in coordinating a combined arms assault at that level. Still, we came fairly close to pulling it off. Like everyone else who was on the ground, I'd come to regard Achilles as a display of command incompetence. It was only later, when I studied the whole operation at the Academy, that I realized just how close we had come to success. If we'd been able to maintain space superiority we probably would have just managed to take the planet, possibly ending the war right then. Our forces were devastated, but the defenders had been nearly wiped out.
So now I was heading for a briefing on this new campaign. After we took the station at Gliese 250, my company rejoined the battalion for twin assaults on Dina and Albera, two moons circling a gas giant in orbit around Zeta Leporis II. Fruits of our victory in Gliese, from which they were a single transit, the twin moons were major mining colonies of crucial importance to the Caliphate's war effort.
The battalion attacked Dina first, then we regrouped and reinforced before hitting Albera two weeks later. Without controlling Gliese 250, the enemy had a very circuitous route through CAC territory to reach the Zeta Leporis system, so it would be difficult for them to mount a counterassault any time soon. Both battles were tough, close quarters affairs fought mostly underground. The colonies were solely engaged in mining the rare ores that were plentiful in the crust of the two moons, and all of the habitable areas were located well below the surface where they were shielded from the massive radiation produced by Zeta Leporis I.
It wasn't unlike the battle on the station, but there was no single installation we could grab and compel a surrender, so we had to fight it out chamber by chamber. The moons produced vital war materials, and they were garrisoned by regulars, not second rate security forces like the station. We had quite a fight on our hands.