ClearanceJobs has looked at the best ways to get a security clearance both at home and abroad, what you need to do to join the intelligence community, how the Army names the wars you might soon be fighting, and a few secret military units of which you might find yourself a part. But there’s one question we ask ourselves every day: What would happen if the Klingons attacked?Fact What would we be up against, and what’s their disposition? Here is a look at the makeup of a few fictional armies, and the real life human events and technologies that parallel them.
The Bugs (Starship Troopers)
The Arachnids (sometimes “the Bugs” or “Archie”) are a highly volatile race of insect warriors from the planet Klendathu. Their numbers are inexhaustible, and their weapons include the ability to fling asteroids across vast interstellar distances and hit planets with pinpoint accuracy. They conquer and colonize planets by firing their spore into space through biological means. Their method of battlefield combat is gory. Also, they eat your brain. Avoid if possible.
Throughout history, however, brutal grisly warfare is hardly in short supply. In terms of sheer horrific spectacle, consider the Moroccan military under the leadership of Ismail Ibn Sharif in the late seventeenth century. He met the Ottoman Turks on the field of battle and secured the independence of Morocco. He later engaged and destroyed the Spanish and the English, winning back three major seaports. He was known as Ismail the Bloodthirsty, and he earned the title. Twenty years into his rule, 30,000 were tortured to death. More charmingly, perhaps, he ordered the mounting of 10,000 severed heads on the walls of Meknes, the capital city, as a (presumably effective) deterrent to enemy invasion.
The Romulan Guard (Star Trek)
The Romulan Guard is a joint service run by the High Command of the Romulan Star Empire, whose home worlds are Romulus and Remus. The Guard’s officer rank structure varies from sublieutenant through admiral, and none of them, apparently, shy away from war. Likewise, the Romulan populace appears to have an inexhaustible hunger for conflict. The Romular-Vulcan War lasted a full century, and wasn’t even all that personal—it was triggered “by a misunderstanding.” The Romulans fought a full-scale war against Earth and lost decisively, and moved right along to all-out war with the Klingon Empire. Which it lost. It was later tricked into war with the Dominion, and for once was part of the winning team.
The mainstay ship of the Romulan Guard is the Warbird—in the native tongue, D’deridex-class warships. It is twice the length of a Galaxy-class starship (e.g. U.S.S. Enterprise) though slightly slower. This speed differential is made up by the Warbird’s cloaking device, rendering it impervious to scan and invisible to the naked eye. While no one knows the exact size of the Romulan fleet, “really big” is probably a fair assessment. Every time a Federation starship gets close to the Neutral Zone, which is pretty vast, being space and all, a Romulan vessel is only moments away from uncloaking.
In our day, stealth technology is a battlefield revolution. While our stealth aircraft aren’t physically invisible like the cloaking devices of Star Trek, they may as well be. The F-117 Nighthawk, perhaps the most famous stealth bomber in the United States military, is only made of 10% metal. The rest of the plane is made of Fibaloy, which is a kind of plastic-fiberglass hybrid. The result is an aircraft all but undetectable by enemy forces. Only one F-117 has been lost in combat. Just as the Romulan Warbird cannot fire its weapons while cloaked, an F-117 was detected by radar over Yugoslavia when its bomb doors opened. A Yugoslav S-125 “Neva” missile system took the plane down.
Flying Monkeys (The Wizard of Oz)
The flying monkeys are a shock force of monkey slaves led by the Wicked Witch of the West, and are headquartered at her castle in Oz. You will know you’ve encountered a flying monkey if you see a monkey with wings, flying. Their commanding general appears to be a monkey named Nikko, who reports directly to the Wicked Witch. The flying monkeys are capable of aerial assault, and show little mercy on their targets—a flying monkey strike force dismembered the Scarecrow, and Nikko seemed fully intent on throwing Toto (a dog) out of the window of a castle turret.
An army of slaves is pretty common in history. The most famous, perhaps, was that of the Third Servile War in ancient Rome. Under the leadership of Spartacus, Crixus, Oenomaus, Castus, and Gannicus, a company of seventy-five rebel slaves grew into an army of 120,000. They raided Roman cities, and more notably met and repelled the Roman Legions on the field of battle. Theirs wasn’t a war to liberate the oppressed, but rather, a war of men who were mad as hell and wanted the world to know it. Their plan worked and the Roman Republic initiated major reforms.
The Locusts (Independence Day)
Here’s what we know about the Locusts. Their mother ship appears without warning over resource-rich planets. It detaches thirty-six smaller ships. By “smaller” I mean the ships are each fifteen miles in diameter. Each smaller ship takes a position of equal distance around the target planet, forming a triacontakaihexagon, which is an actual word. The ships relay a countdown, and when it hits zero, each ship fires a massive beam of energy that completely obliterates an area the size of New York City, which is just under 500 square miles. The ships are protected by force fields that can withstand a direct nuclear blast, and each houses a fleet of thousands of smaller “flying saucers” with green energy weapons. The pilots of said flying saucers have powerful psychic powers capable of disorienting the pilots of opposing squadrons, and wear rugged biological exoskeletal armor. They also have tentacles. This is a highly organized force to be reckoned with.
The point here is that you don’t want to get into a war with these guys. If you find yourself on the receiving end of the invasion, however, your best bet is to somehow disable the mother ship (their system are compatible with Apple computers) and then aim for the energy blasters on the 15-mile-wide ships. Good luck!
The modern day battlefield might well see powered exoskeletons for humans as well. In 1986, Monty Reed, a former U.S. Army Ranger who suffered a crippling parachute landing during an airborne operation, was inspired by Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers (which bears little resemblance to the movie listed above). Because Rangers are unstoppable violations of the laws of physics, he developed an exoskeleton called the LIFESUIT, and went on to set the land speed record for robot suits, walking 3-miles in 90 minutes.
The much maligned and eventually reorganized Future Soldier program of the U.S. Army had a major exoskeleton component planned for soldiers on the battlefield. The suit was lightweight and strap-on, with powered joints to allow soldiers to easily carry 300-pounds of gear. Meanwhile DARPA, the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency, has developed a working prototype. Only battery issues remain to be worked out. At the exponential rate of battery improvement, it might not be long before super-powerful soldiers (well, more super-powerful) are fighting America’s wars.
