Dan,

'Seat of government' as I used it was an EXAMPLE of a potential mission objective. There are many other.

The subject of discussion was use of Dorsai mercenaries, not raiding for plunder, which is by the way an early Christian depiction of the Scandinavian Germanics, 'viking' meaning 'raiding', a type of operation and not a defining cultural trait.

Do you recall what Sun Tzu said about tactics without Strategy?

Ordinarily mercenaries, and in my usage these are relatively large forces in their tens of thousands sentients and hundreds of thousands androids, do not do Strategy. That is up to the Client.

Cheers

Greg

On 24/06/2015 2:49 AM, "Grimmund" <grimmund@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 11:05 AM, Greg Nokes <greg@nokes.name> wrote:
> > To the point - the Aslan tactics that the other Greg mentioned are straight
> > out of H. Beam Piper's Space Viking
>
> > (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Viking) - Only they used starships and
> > just landed them on the seat of government, disgorging troops and using
> > nukes to swat pesky defenders. Nothing new or surprising there, and easily
> > defended against if you have a proper planetary defense network.
>
>
> '50s era thinking, and it shows.
>
> There is no reason for the "seat of government" to be  more than symbolic.
>
> Although the Space Vikings were mostly interested in raiding
> *industrial* sites for raw and processed materials, rather than trying
> to decapitate & replace the government.
>
> And just for fun, I'll point out how well this is going in "Game of
> Thrones" where someone not familair with the local power structure and
> it's political ins and outs moved in from outside, staged a decap &
> replace, and is now having difficulty *governing* as the previous
> "established interests" are restablishing their interests.
>
> Or how smoothly it worked for the US in Iraq, or US led coalition
> forces in Afghanistan.
>
> Getting the *leadership* to surrender does not ensure that all the
> various existing power blocks, and new power blocks moving into the
> vacuum, will comply.
>
>
>
> Dan
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> "Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
> kook." -Alan Morgan
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