In a shooting war, the command authority has already thought out its plans.
Nobody ever thinks out their plans. And when the shooting starts, your plans are quickly all wrong, anyway. The enemy is not following your script.
I am picking nits here. It would be the political authority that would be the major "waffler". The military would be very annoyed that their assets moved from advantage for no good reason. Don't pull the trigger unless you intend to destroy something thought process type of thing. The economics and political distrust of such a move is incredible. Moving a fleet, dropping only 1 to 2 bombs and then saying, Oops, I didn't mean it.... The other side has already committed by this time. It would be too late to back out.
It's the political authority's perogative to "waffle" when his only choice is to shoot everything and decide to do it in the next ten minutes before he loses everything. If this annoys the military, tough s**t; they are paid to subordinate themselves to the civil authority and they had better like it.
They can always mutiny, of course, and in that case fire of 1 or 2 bombs before getting brought back under control. In this case, it would be nice if there was time to communicate what has happened to the other side before they murder your country.
With space warfare, at least with current levels of tech, the MAD principle applies. If you are going to use it, use it, because the other side will. There will be no nobility or chivalry in this style of warfare. Do it to them before they do it to us.
Yes, with missiles in silos 30 minutes from being wiped out, MAD applies. But we are not talking about this level of tech. We are talking about stationing nukes aboard vessels which are at least hours away from weapons delivery and the point of no return.
This is what I'm trying to tell you: keeping nukes on hair trigger alert gives you no time to think. Placing them far enough away that they take time to get here, but cannot be stopped, gives you time to think and change your mind. It also gives the enemy a very good reason not to attack you. (Until he evens up the tech with his own space force, which is our scenario).
I never said anything about chivalry, the concern is for your own nation's childrens' futures. Even if you wipe out the enemy and take not a single hit yourself, you are making life a lot harder for your own nation.
But since you mentioned it, there is still a place for the law of war in this sort of conflict, since the space war scenario means the weapons are no longer automatically going to hit.
In any case, if you are so stubborn that you cannot imagine a non-MAD scenario, or cannot imagine ways to disrupt comm, why even bother talking about this? It's obvious that you are happy with MAD as is and would never have to fight a space war in the first place, which is what this thread is about.
Detection is the key. EM radiation jamming is not as usefull as it once was. Fiber optic command and control backbones on the ground. Major telescopes of all sorts hooked in. Lased light communications from the ground can issued orders. Jammers themselves look like a bright star in EM.
Nuclear protocol still exists, because once the fleet is launched, then it becomes hard to contact.
The two above statements are in conflict with each other. If I can't disrupt your comms, then by definition you can contact your ships. "Nuclear protocol" allowed Kennedy to scramble B-52s in 1962 and send them to staging areas, without committing them to a nuclear attack. This a similar system, except that my space warships are capable of staying on station for months at a time and are far less vulnerable than a B-52.
Some other things: fiber optics cannot talk to spaceships. Antennae and laser terminals are vulnerable to physical attack (as are fiber optic lines), even if jamming is not reliable. By bomb, missile, or commando raid if need be. There are ALWAYS ways to disrupt comm, you just have to use your imagination.
All in all, you have to make some assumptions if you want to simulate a space war. If it's alternate history you can even use current or historical tech. This sort of scenario could theoretically have taken place in the 1970s.
As for detection being easy, all that stuff (but it's good stuff, I admit!) on the projectrho.com page is theory. In real life there are always practical reasons why tech doesn't reach its theoretical potential. The Space Shuttle is a perfect example of a system that is theoretically capable of doing much more than it can in reality.
In order to have a playable wargame, we have to make some assumptions about this stuff, which may not be perfect. But you can always change these assumptions and intial conditions and see what effect it has on the scenario, which is the purpose of a wargame (other than having fun, which is
my purpose).
