Slaying the Hydra

In part this essay continues off of "Mecha Nations" which appeared on March 11th, 2000. Direct Access:
GatchML: http://www.egroups.com/message/gatch/216
BotPML: http://www.egroups.com/message/BotP/7401
Like it, it is geared towards the BotP world, though parts may be relevant to Gatchaman, GoS and perhaps even ER.
Inspired in part by Alara Roger's speculations on why there's only one G-Force and thanks to Bobbi for looking over this.

Numbers in brackets [] refer to episodes, numbered in Gatchaman fashion. Look up descriptions at http://www.akdreamer.com/botp/missions.html As usual commentary is welcome. :)

Now earlier I talked about the practicality of mecha but I don't think I completely answered just how useful they can be.

We all know the trouble with fighting a war on two (or more) fronts and yet Spectra (for one) appears to have little trouble carrying campaigns on several different ones. I do think that mecha are at the heart of of that strategy.

Consider a sea anemone. Yes, I know I said Hydra, but this is a little more practical. A sea anemone has a lot of tentacles radiating outward from a central mouth, each seeking potential prey. If an individual tentacle comes across potential prey, it stings it and tries to drag it back. Other tentacles swing towards it to help. If the prey gets away, that's disappointing, but not the end of the world. Not that much was sunk into catching the prey. The real advantage of a mecha is how little gets committed into a target. If it works, there's an excellent place to send more. If it fails (and this is important), then the only thing lost is one mecha and maybe a base as well. Like tentacles, those can be shed off and regenerated, quickly without any real hitch in operations. If the place is important, you try again. If not, console yourself with the damage you've caused and move on. And by setting up bases in valuable places, you can imagine each base as its own little anemone from which mecha will radiate.

OTOH, if one has committed an army to a place and it goes badly, you have committed weeks of logistics and getting out of it is not an easy or quick task. A military presence that is worth anything needs to be substantial and is more like a column of army ants -- (quite aside from the need for military intelligence and strategy) it needs its supply lines, its depots, it does not go that fast overall and it's very hard to keep secret. Which is why wars fought on two fronts are usually losing propositions. What an army is really good for is holding onto a territory, but for Spectra in particular, unless there's some way to know in advance that there will not be substantial local resistance sending an army is a nightmare's nightmare over the distances they operate at.

On the part of the folks who are beset by a mecha, the same applies. It takes some time to deploy any military force against an enemy, particularly if one needs a lot of firepower. You also need an enemy whose location isn't going to change too fast. Which isn't the case for mecha at all. In terms of destructiveness and toughness, they're as bad as an army, however they're as manouverable as a guerrilla unit -- and as utterly unpredictable in their choice of target as a terrorist group. [The Gatchaman world, in never having developed any technologies for tracking the progress of a known mecha, suffers particularly badly because of this.] One is reduced to using whatever forces one has on hand, which are rarely the best available. And should one destroy a mecha, the next one will be built taking the other one's weak spot into account and will come by a totally different means.
In other words, mecha make a mess out of sensible military strategy.

The one disadvantage of mecha is that they are large, they don't last very long (refer to former essay) and they do cost so at any one point in time, there aren't going to be a whole lot of them active, though we do have evidence for them having several of them kept close to being outfitted and sent at very short notice [59] -- which also helps with making necessary adjustments as mentioned earlier. Of course, in an end game, that doesn't matter, but we're not talking grand finales here. :)

So, what do you need to destroy mecha? You need to do what they do -- be very powerful, but compact (tho' the Phoenix is compact only in relation to a mecha) and manouverable. Which leads very naturally to the creation of a specialty team whose only job is to quickly go wherever a mecha can go (or wherever a base might be) and destroy it. But, if one team is good, wouldn't two or more teams be better? Not necessarily. Your ultimate problem isn't that the right weapon is hard to find -- it's that you can't get it there where it's needed. The more disparate units you have to coordinate, the slower you will be and the advantage of having a small team can very quickly be lost.

Their specialization can be seen on two levels. First, the Phoenix really isn't the best weapon for handling an enemy made up of small discrete units, like an army -- but an army is *exactly* what regular military science can handle best. What it's good at tackling with its relatively few (but powerful) missiles and the Fiery Phoenix attack are large targets.

Second, no Science Ninja Team really has the best hand weapons for large scale killing (a couple of nice machine guns would be a good start...), but for G-Force in particular, it's fair to say that they're very focused indeed on destroying the mecha or base, with killing goons as a secondary objective, if at all. If a goon isn't actively in their way, that goon is unlikely to be harmed, at least not right away. Killing goons wastes time and in the BotP world where there can be vast distances between one trouble spot and the other, you don't want to waste more time or energy than you have to. Killing goons is redundant -- they're going to die anyway when the base or mecha is destroyed. Contrary to popular imagination, G-Force is not magnanimous -- they have never, not once, tried to save the life of any goon, they are happy whenever no one gets away (see [49] or [76]) and in [26], Mark was quite willing to die if it meant that none of the Spectrans would get away.

Does this work? In conjunction with a world that is not helpless, the effect that G-Force has is to level the playing-field enough for more conventional ways of dealing with threats to have a chance of success.

So what I'm saying is that if I'm willing to make my Rationalization Machine work overtime (the poor thing needs rest now), it actually makes a very weird kind of sense. :)

Comments?
Dei.