Battlestar Galactica Essay By: Brendan Kelly Tue, 7 Sep 1999 Military Analysis of The Situation in the 12 Colonies OK, so we all know the story. The Cylons pull a sneak attack, and destroy the Colonial Fleet at the Cimtar. Simultaneously their Base Stars hit the Colonies in an attack. Baltar's people perform at least some sabotage, and the element of surprise does the rest. The attack is devastating. Commander Adama decides to abandon the Colonies and take the only surviving Battlestar (the Galactica) off on a search for the legendary planet Earth. Only there is one problem. The "rag tag fugitive fleet" of refugees that Adama and the Galactica are protecting is quite small; less than 300 ships. Although the size and capacity of the ships vary, it is highly unlikely that the fleet has over 250,000 people. That's only about 20,000 people per planet! 20,000 out of Billions? What happened to everybody else? What fate of all those folks that were left behind? The simple answer is, "The Cylons took care of them." The tough question is "How?" We know very little about what happened in the attack on the Colonies. We know that there was massive destruction from attacks by Cylon raiders. The fact that their Base Stars were deemed more useful in the attack on the Colonies than on the attack on the Colonial fleet implies that they were necessary to the attack. Obviously they transported and refueled the Raiders that carried the attack out, but the Raiders for the attack on the Colonies could have just as easily refueled from the tankers as the raiders that attacked the fleet, and the Base Stars heavy weapons would no doubt come in handy in the fight against the 5 Battlestars; but the Cylons chose to forgo that edge in the fight against the fleet, and instead chose to use their Base Ships to attack the Colonies. Two reasons are likely. First, they were probably needed to transport the troops to occupy the Colonies, (though perhaps they could have come via some sort of transport) and two, their heavy artillery was probably needed to help reduce whatever Colonial Planetary defenses survived the initial waves of the attack. In the original episode "SAGA OF A STAR WORLD" Apollo asks Boomer about the contaminated food stocks, He says " I thought the supplies were checked for radiation before they were loaded" Boomer replies "They were, but not for Pluton poisoning, there wasn't enough time." Apollo then goes on to inform us that "Pluton breaks down the structure of food, all this is worthless." We also have the shots of the Cylons attack on Caprica, Omega's report to Adama that the planet Sagetarii is "in flames", and the views of the burning Capriacan city when Adama goes down to Caprica to visit his home for the last time. What does all this mean? First of all, it seems that the attack; at least in the initial stages and at least on Caprica, was non-nuclear in nature. We see Cylon raiders strafing targets in Caprica City, but no mushroom clouds that would indicate an all out nuclear strike. This could be explained one of two ways. Firstly the Cylons, being more or less human in size and shape, may want to take the city more or less in tact, in order to use it themselves. We see in THE LIVING LEGEND that they use cities (like Gammorahe) and they may have wanted to keep the damage to the city to a minimum for that reason. There is also the possibility that the raiders we see strafing the city during Seriena's broadcast were just the first wave of the Cylon strike. They were sent in on what the Air Force calls a SEAD mission (suppression of enemy air defense). Perhaps they were tasked with taking out key Colonial military and defense installations BEFORE the main strike (which may or may not be nuclear in nature) arrives. Apollo's reference to checking the food stocks for radiation implies that some sort of radiological weapons were used though. This does not necessarily mean that the Cylons dropped nuclear bombs on all the Colonial Cites though. Neutron bombs, or other radiological weapons would most likely be Cylons weapon of choice; killing all humans and animals with a radiation pulse, but leaving the buildings and equipment for the Cylons to use when they landed. Simply spraying a short lived but highly radioactive dust over the cities would have much the same effect. The mention of "Pluton" is also interesting. From the little context we have it seems that "Pluton" is a biological weapon of some sort, perhaps a bacterium or fungus. This sort of weapon would also meet the Cylons objective of killing huge numbers of humans in a short amount of time, while leaving the buildings and equipment in tact. There is also another indication that (at least high yield) nuclear weapons were not used by the Cylons. The crowd that comes down from the hills to meet Adama and Apollo at the ruins of their house. Had a nuclear blast recently gone off there would have been fallout, and enough radiation that the survivors would have fled, not to the suburbs, but to shelters. (Surely a society that has been at war for over ten centuries would have trained its citizens in the basics of Civil Defense!) Perhaps these people felt that they had nothing to loose from exposing themselves to fallout and radiation, but that seems unlikely. They came to Adama's house unaware of the destruction of the fleet, and there is no indication that they knew they were experiencing anything more than a particularly viscous Cylon raid. (Similar to the one that killed Starbuck's parents.) It isn't until after this scene, where Adama announces the evacuation and the formation of the fleet that the evacuation begins. We know that the fleet was assembled quite quickly, but that there was at least some time to organize the evacuation. In "Murder on the Rising Star," Chella tells of how he bribed his way onto a ship that was reserved for orphans and their caregivers only. We also see that Ortega, the warrior he bribes, has at least some sort of a passenger list he is checking the passengers off against. This implies that somebody drew up such a list, and assigned him the duty of checking the passengers off. This means there was a least some sort of administrative order to the evacuation, and that means there was at least some time to organize the evacuation. During the War of the Gods episode Sheba gives Count Iblis a tour of the Agro Ship, and tells him that "We tried to take as much as we could in what little time we had." (Sheba could not have know this from first hand knowledge. She would have been on the Pegasus at the time, but she no doubt would have asked Apollo and the other Galactica crew for details of the evacuation.) All in all the impression of the evacuation and assembly of the fleet took days, perhaps even weeks. While this is not a lot of data to go on, a pattern begins to emerge. The Cylons objective, (at least on Caprica) seems to have been "kill all humans, but preserve as much infrastructure as possible". This would indicate that the Cylon attack would involve radiological, biological, and most likely low yield/high radiation nuclear weapons, in addition to more "conventional" laser and plasma attacks by their Raiders. Pockets of strong resistance were demolished by direct fire from the heavy weapons on the Base Stars (which may explain Omega's report that Sagitaria, the colony with the best planetary defenses, was "in flames".) After the Cylons have achieved space and air superiority, the transports land, and the Cylon Centurions go in to "mop up" the survivors. All the while the Cylon juggernaut is being slowed, if not stopped, by Colonial Troops fighting valiant holding actions, trading their lives for the time needed to assemble and organize Adama's fleet. How many survivors are there? Most likely, several billion, at least at first. Earth, at the end of the 20th Century, supports about six Billion people, and it has the resources to comfortably support about twice, perhaps three times that. (No those horrible slums you see in the Zero Population Growth brochures are not the result of too many people, they are the result of too little economic freedom and opportunity, but that is a side issue). Given the technology available to Colonial society, and the awesome resources available to a truly spacefaring culture, each of the twelve colonies could conceivably support a much higher population, perhaps even by an order of magnitude or so. Still two hundred billion people is a lot to stuff on one planet, even one with a thriving economy that makes use of high technology and off planet resources. It is best to be conservative. Let's guess that each colony had a population of, for simplicity's sake, 10 billion. With 12 planets that means the colonies had, at the start of the attack, roughly 120 BILLION citizens. Killing that many people is a VERY tall order, even for the Cylon Empire. A lot depends on how effective the initial attack was. Going on estimates of what sort of casualties the US could expect to suffer in a nuclear exchange with the USSR, I would guess that perhaps 1/3 of colonial citizens were killed outright in the initial attack. If we use the Black Death that swept through Europe in the 1300s as a database, we can guess that between 1/3 and 1/2 of the survivors died of disease caused by the Cylon biological warfare. Even more would have died from the destruction of the planetary economy and infrastructure. Medicines would no longer be manufactured, food is no longer easily available, power and water supplies have been destroyed, and survivors are forced out of the cities and exposed to the dangers of the wilderness. All things considered, even if the Cylons never land a single soldier, between 60 and 80 percent of the population of the colonies will be dead within a year of the attack. Still, that leaves the Cylons with about two or three billion people on each planet, many (perhaps even most) of which have no desire to "go easily into that dark night". Given that the colonies had been at war for 1,000 years it seems likely that Colonial Culture will have a strongly military bent. Much, if not most, of the population will have either served in the military or been connected to it in some way. These will be the people best trained, best equipped, and most likely to survive the Cylon attack. They are also the people best trained, best equipped, and most likely to organize some sort of resistance against the Cylon invasion. They will have familiarity, if not training in, weapons, tactics, and warfare. And during the last days of the Colonies, while Adama was organizing the rag tag fugitive fleet, and others were doing all they could to get out of the Colonies, these people will have time (not a lot, but some) to organize and equip their resistance effort. So, what are we left with? Something not unlike the "Terminator" movies, only on a much larger scale. Twelve planets, each occupied by the Cylon machines, each with a population a little less than 1/2 that of present day Earth, each fighting the machines for every inch of ground, taking as many of them down with them as possible. Each trying to hold out for as long as they can, hoping against hope that help will come to them before the final Cylon assault does. Now this gives the Cylons a real problem. They are effectively fighting a 12 front war at this point. The best thing for them to do would be to concentrate their forces and take on each Colony one at a time, hunting down the survivors and destroying the resistance on each planet before moving on to the next. The only problem is that concentrating ones forces means just that, putting all, or at least most, of them in one place, leaving only a minimal amount of forces in other areas. Assuming the Cylons are intelligent enough to take out the strongest of the colonies first, it will be months, most likely years, before they finally get around to the last of the Colonies on their list. Depending on the amount of resources the Cylons have at their disposal, the humans might well have the time, the motivation, and at least some of the resources and training to rebuild their defenses on those worlds lucky enough not to be on the top of the Cylons list. It is possible that the humans could hold on, on at least one, perhaps even more, worlds. Given time they might even be able to liberate one some of their planets!!! The Cylons only alternative to giving one or more of the Colonies a "breather" is to try to simultaneously fight on all 12 worlds at once, a difficult task at best, but possible if they have enough resources. Here the Humans have some serious problems. They are now engaged in the classic guerrilla war. They can not strike back at the Cylon home base. All they can hope to do is make the Cylon occupation of their homeworlds expensive enough that the Cylons will tire of the war and go home. Since the Cylons are machines, and they have been engaged in their war against the Humans for over 1,000 years, this does not seem to be much of a possibility. Their only hope is that someone else, either an Alien race, other survivors of from the Colonies (like the Pegasus or the Galactica), or the people of Earth will defeat the Cylons and liberate them before the Cylons hunt them all down and kill them. Once again though, the question becomes one of what sort of resources the Cylons have to devote to this war. During WW2 various resistance movements kept thousands of troops occupied guarding installations and suppressing the guerrillas. Even if only 1/2 as many Cylons are engaged in fighting the human resistance as there are humans, (an unlikely possibility) we are talking about millions, if not billions of Cylon troops. What we are left with is a whole new field for GALACTICA stories, and MUSHes. Grimmer and gritter by far than the original series, closer to the TERMINATOR movies than to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but waiting to be written. === I'm not in therapy, but some of the other personalities are.