You know as someone who isn't an American, who grew up watching an America which was "ten years ahead" of every other culture, and yet still seemed to think space would be like the wild west, instead of a place more advanced than what we have here, I've often wondered how conflicts will be resolved and what a modern war would be like. The basic tasks of a modern 'airforce' would still apply, reconnaissance, close air support and battlefield interdiction giving direct support to ground forces, interdiction of enemy supply routes, airfield strikes, deep strikes on vital energy supply and communications, also tying up enemy airforces, anti (ship and submarine or equivalent), troop transport and supply, and preventing the enemy from doing any of these tasks... but with modern space craft. Or would it? Would a war be something else we haven't thought of. Would it, could it be carried out in purely financial and economic terms, on television perhaps, with both sides simply trying to control the means of production? It isn't just that I hate to see people hurt, blowing things up with explosives seems very crude and almost an admission of defeat.
it depends entirely on the mechanics and logistics of interstellar travel. if you're pootling about at the kinds of speeds we can presently achieve in space which are - relatively speaking - slower than snail's pace, war would be completely impractical. if you're dealing with a scenario in which some kind of super-luminal speeds are possible, it gets more entertaining, depending on the drive systems abilities and disadvantages. i mean, in Trek they whip around at warp speeds with nary a care in the world. in many Wars novels, space-warfare is often far more strategic since you have to work oout where in a system you're going to arrive and account for the gravity-mass shadows in hyperspace of the star, planets and moons and such. fleets can be pinned in real-space inside a mass shadow and pounded on as they try to flee. in a novel i once read - possibly Alan Dean Foster's Weave books - troops were merely shuttled to worlds, dropped off and left to fight on the surface. the only battles were fought in orbit as the troops tried landing, as you couldn't fight at SL speeds.
What a modern war would be like? Well, Iraq isn't a bad example. What a war between two relatively large powers would like, say, America versus China... simply catastrophic, with today's superweapons. I think the threat of the bomb has contained warfare to relatively small if costly operations and proxy wars.
Here I was ready to give the Trekverse awnser. We saw it on DS9. While some have their pet peaves. That there should be space marines or in my case all the Star Wars space fighter planes don't make any sense. But we have a general future war question with all the Mil SF and techno thriller writers trying to create a universe where people agree to fight a limited war yet it has to be grand enough war to warrent a story. This is usually done by getting the reader invovled with the survival of the star.
DS9's a good place to start but you have to just ignore one big problem, which Joseph Sisko referred to when he complained that space is so BIG, why are there still wars? Star Trek depicts a galaxy full of habitable planets with technology that offers unlimited abundance for all. Resource-based fighting seems absurd. I could accept it more readily in a nuBSG type scenario where habitable planets are rare. There's also the problem of space fleets fighting between star systems - why fight over empty space? It would make more sense to defend star systems - think of it as islands being defended in a vast ocean, most of which nobody cares about. You might also need to defend trade routes in the case where they're constrained (by Badlands-type no-go zones) but for the most part trade routes would not be constrained in space so that would be a minor factor. The only thing worth fighting over is planests - either because they're habitable or beause they are the source of needed resources (in TOS, there were fights over resources, not so much later on). For fighting to be concentrated around bottlenecks like DS9's wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant makes the most sense. Since post-TOS series have largely dispensed with the motive for resource-based warfare, they've gone more for the ideology based type of war, particularly in the case of the Borg and the Dominion.
You will not be fighting over the space. You will be fighting over the fleet. Yet dramaticaly you can't have a Starfleet Admiral saying we are out numbered run. Nor can he say we have the 6th Founder fleet outnumbered 5 to 1 , torepdo them until their ashes glow.
Also there are aspects of Trek warfare that are not quite realistic. In one of the Star Trek science books, it is mentioned that Picard's "blockade" of the Romulan-Klingon border was untenable, given space's vastness in all directions. There also is the matter of the spherical graphic/schematic of the Klingon Neutral Zone in TWoK... And the logistics of the Dominion War battle in "Sacrifice of Angels" -- a warp fleet vs. another... ...it was very cool to see, however perhaps the Battle of Chin'toka and other planetary system battles made more sense?
It's certainly a problem, but I think they would have to figure out a decent solution, since that kind of problem might crop up a lot. They would probably have a large number of ships patrolling the main "horizontal" area of the border, with a lesser number of ships patrolling the vast areas "above" and "below" the border. Then, there would be a few ships patrolling each system inside the border and a number of other ships going wherever they were needed at the time. It would require a heck of a lot of ships, but a huge organization like Starfleet would already require a heck of a lot of ships.
Assuming this means wars between more or less equal parties--- Without FTL, war is impractical. With FTL, the only battles between spaceships are ambushes, as the weaker parter would quickly flee. Barring some doubletalk designed to trap the fighters face to face. But the impracticality of spaceship battles is irrelevant, since a single minuscule package of antimatter or a miniature black hole or nanobots that eat up everything replicating themselves or some such device could go far toward wrecking an entire home world. Space war would be like a US/USSR war in the Seventies or Eighties would have been---basically, suicide. And, as said, there is the question of why? Unless somehow FTL is as cheap as earthly water transport, essentially no mineral resource known could be worth transporting. Manufactured resources, such as antimatter or neutronium or Bose-Einstein condensates or whatever, are not plausible goals either. Even if they couldn't still be made more cheaply at home, the war that aims to conquer the industrial base would destroy the industrial base! Biological resources, whether unreplicatable natural products or habitat itself, also are implausible goals. Again, the war to seize them would probably destroy them. Further, it is unlikely that many of the conquerors could come to the new habitat to exploit it. Why would the home population spend vast sums for an elite to acquire a new home? If you object that the elite is spending other people's money, I reply that their first concern would be maintain control at home. The likelihood of purely ideological wars seems slim. But if there any, the chances are that the infamous climax of the Shadow War in B5 is the way they would end---when enough parties got tired of the fooforaw, the game's over. In other words, space war as depicted in the vast majority of television shows and movies is absurd. Only pathological cultures would engage in space war. They would almost certainly very soon have a few missiles slipped through any conceivable orbital defenses. When the high tech nasties thus delivered, the pathological civilization would be a pathological savagery, no longer spaceflight capable.
Space is the ultimate high ground. A smart country will build space defenses and moon fortifications and weaponry. It is air superiority. Launching a space craft is hard enough, now imagine kinetic weapons and lasers are coming down at the launch vehicle.
War is never restricted to the warmongers. You may want peace, but have war forced on you when a warmonger attacks you. You may be peaceful, but occupy a strategic point, making you a target.
The litter left over from a low orbit combat might wreck all possibility of a permanent satellite system. Goodbye GPS, goodbye hurrican watch, goodbye climate science (well, that's already debudgeted in real life, but still,) goodbye satellite TV, goodbye lots of good stuff. Like Ken MacLeod suggested in Sky Road, maybe the detritus would make a shooting gallery ending all space programs for decades. There is no reason to believe that war as currently practiced could possibly become a rational instrument again. Only a government answering to a tiny elite could so delude itself.
The orbit on those objects degrade. They won't be up there for a million years. The shuttle and Russian vehicles go up there all the time and don't get creamed by debris from all the assorted launches. If debris did become a problem, some ground based lasers could break up the smaller stuff that didn't fall into the atmosphere. Once a power had control of orbit with space based weapons, nobody else's stuff is gonna get up there if they don't want it there.
Antisatellite weaponry will leave quite a bit more debris than what has already accumulated. And that is becoming a problem already. Some orbits will be more stable. As for ground based laser breaking up debris---if they can do that, why coundn't they break up space weapons? Star Wars is nonsense. Orbital nukes and other offensive weaponry are not. But it is not certain whether earthbound weapons can't be more effective in most cases. Nor is it certain that what space nukes or whatever can uniquely deliver isn't unnecessary overkill. Lastly, cannon shooting pellets into orbit seem they might be feasible, cost effective and lethal to space weapons.
economic/financial war will be fine up until its not and then the shooting war will start. As to the form of war we can expect alot more of the dirty work to be done by machines as technology progresses. However the over-emphasis of technology may backfire. we don't even know what socio-political powers are going to exist in the future though, so its all a toss up. One thing you can be damn sure of is that war is not going to go away anytime soon.
war for spacefaring societies would likely be more one of independence from or the imposition of some sort of socio-political ideals or philosophies. You have to figure that just to be out in space at all requires a rather advanced and robust survival technology and most likely the ability to extract resources from spaceborne objects. there's alot of rock out there to mine for what you need.
These issues are probably interrelated. Even though we seldom see it, there seems to be an easy way to force enemy ships and formations out of warp; usually this simply involves firing at them long enough from a chase position. So in theory, a player with superior numbers of ships should be able to intercept, force out of warp, and contain an intruding fleet, even in deep space. And surely the defender would want to. Stray shots, let alone deliberate ones, would be devastating to the target planet if the defender let the fight take place anywhere near it. Sometimes he has to, in which case the powerful orbital defenses of Trek come in handy. But in cases like "Sacrifice of Angels", the superior defender would wish to fight as far out as possible. And if he's capable of that, so is the attacker. When deep space can be contested, it will - which means that any attempt to secure the livelihood of Cardassia by mining the distant and uninhabited Obscurius III is doomed to fail, since shipments between the two systems can be threatened. Far better to spend the time and effort for conquering the nearby inhabited Bajor, then. If interstellar travel took place by means dissimilar to warp, none of this would be likely to happen. Slower-than-light ships would have too low odds of intercept to be able to blockade anything unless the blockade would be effected right next to the target planets. Hyperdrives or jumpgates or wormholes or whatnot would not allow for intercept between A and B, either. But warp drive makes fighting over empty space both practical and necessary. And this basically regardless of what one is fighting over. If it's ideology or security, one side will wish to annihilate the planets of the other, or get into a position to threaten the other with this. Solution? Deep space fights to keep the enemy at a sufficient distance from his targets. If it's resources, one side will wish to conquer the other's mining/farming worlds, cut his trade routes, and secure one's own resource planets and routes thereto. Again, lots of deep space fighting, both to intercept the other's conquest forces, and to hit his trade routes where they are weakest. Most probably. Or it could still be over resources - not in the short term sense of "I need these to survive the next year (of fighting)", but rather in the long term sense of "if I rationally exterminate these other five sapient species now, there will be more resources for me a million years from now". Trek warfare clearly could have the short term motivation. Since resources on distant planets are so plentiful, societies probably develop in a fashion that leaves them incapable of self-sustenance. There would be some exceptions, mostly planets that first chose isolation and then developed a home industry to match the choice. But most would find it cheaper and easier to rob outer space for riches, and would be unable to cope with the loss of these distant resources. And while there are more inhabitable worlds out there than there are takers in the Trek universe, there are also bottleneck resources that aren't present on all planets. Warp is depicted as so cheap that one can haul ores (rather than refined products) from star to star, making it tempting to base one's industries on these rare and non-indigenous goods. The Feds are dependent on imported topaline and pergium, the Cardassians need their daily uridium, everybody likes to have his dilithium fresh from the mines rather than replicated, etc. War in Trek apparently is cheaper than self-sustainability. Timo Saloniemi