I had a thought of writing this mainly for fun and speculation ever since I saw a replay of Independence Day and later the latest War of the Worlds redo with Tom Cruise. Other sparks on of inspiration came from Londo Molari's video of JF-17s fighting UFOs and finally about the Japanese news article suggestion that their armed forces should consider alien threats. And to think about it, the concept that we are alone in the Universe gets less and less with every exoplanet---well over 200 so far---that is discovered with the Hubble telescope. And that's just the stellar neighborhood.
To begin with, if we are seriously invaded by aliens...
1. Please don't assume we can shoot the motherships down with AMRAAMs.
There is this part in the movie Independence Day, where a formation of F-18s fired their AMRAAMs directly at the alien mothership. The effect is like shooting toothpicks to an elephant.
What are they thinking? If you seriously get invaded by aliens and they have huge motherships, you need something even bigger. I would prefer a Harpoon or an antiship missile whose seeker is reprogrammed to consider a large moving detection in the air a valid target as much as a large moving detection in the surface of the water. Antiship missiles are radar guided so they can pick up a large mothership like they would with a battleship. They are semi armor piercing and got a big warhead.
Even better than a Harpoon or Exocet would be a big old Russian Sunburn, Onxy or Granit. I would fire them off the ships when I can, or from large fighters, bombers or converted airliners.
Of course you can expect these missiles to be shot down by whatever defenses a mothership can have, but lets just hope some will get through. The faster the missile, the better the potential chances.
2. No need of heroics of flying a plane into the mothership's exhaust port.
And no need of the Force either. If you want to send something down or up into an alien mothership's exhaust port, a TV guided missile like a Maverick or a UCAV can do the trick. Assuming motherships have some kind of port.
3. Mother Nature's bacteria taking care of the aliens? Much like the ending of H.G. Well's War of the Worlds.
But seriously, if we are invaded, we actually stand as much of an equal chance of being infected and dying by whatever pathogens and contagions the aliens bring with them. Disease control should be part of any front line against an alien threat.
4. Our satellite networks...
...will be the first things that are going to be destroyed and shut down by an incoming alien invasion. We will not have GPS, we will not have satellite communications, we will simply not have anything what we depend on satellites for. We will have to fight without them.
5. Don't think about Star Trek or Star Wars, phasers, death rays and light sabers. Alien weapons should be a lot more direct and physical. Beams of concentrated energy like lasers don't store, transport or project energy in densities you can with physical projectiles.
If alien motherships are going to invade us, they're not going to hover over our cities and shooting everything in sight with direct energy ray weapons. They would be in low Earth orbit, dumping huge rocks at us. At least that is how I would do it. I would take an asteroid, carve it up to pieces, and start dumping them like large meteors, towards our airbases and cities. The effects can be catastrophic, if an event like something that happened in Tunguska in the beginning of the century would happen in a major populated city like New York.
We would have Tunguska events over all our major cities while rocks are blowing moon sized craters at our military bases.
6. Our Airforces...
...are not going to put up much of a fight initially as our bases are being blown by falling meteors. We will be forced to gather our surviving planes into heavily dispersed make shift bases, and pray we have as many underground bases as possible. It is preferable we have aircraft that can vertically launch or take off from short strips, like highways. We are going to lose a lot of our expensive fourth, 4.5 and fifth generation fighters. Stealth means nothing for the alien techs, our Raptors and B-2s will get detected anyway. Speed and agility maybe more useful, but dogfighting against alien drones and fighters, we will have significant negative combat ratios. It won't be like Star Wars where everyone seems to dogfight up close. We will be using our missiles a lot, and it seems its only the speed and agility of a missile that can reach out and "touch" the alien fighters.
To replace our dire losses of front line fighters, we desperately go back to our boneyards to resurrect our old fighters. The Starfighters, the Phantoms, the Tomcats. We are going to have a serious pilot shortage, so we will use a combination of remote control and autonomous automation. And once they have ran out, we will need to replace even these. We need fighter drones that we can build fast and expendable, yet they must be fast and capable of supersonic flight, carrying missiles. We may not have time to come up with new designs so in the interim we may resurrect older fighter designs.
(to be continued)
