The Right Weapons for the Wrong War

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see the shortcomings in the weapons systems used by the UEDF during the First Robotech War. While the failure of the *Armour* and *Oberth-*class ships is probably the best known, the truth was that even the most successful weapons were compromised at a number of levels through deliberate design choices. That many of the Destroids, Mecha that were intended to fight similarly scaled opponents, were armed with light autocannons or anti-personnel machine guns or flamethrowers is an able demonstration of some of these seemingly questionable choices.

This then raises the question; why? What motivated the UEG to plan their weapons in the way that they did? While there are any number of reasons, two main ones most heavily predominated in their thinking.

Outwardly the most important issue was one of technology. By the time of the first Robotech War, the Zentraedi were armed with fully mature weapons systems at every level, from their infantry rifles to their massive warships. These designs had been in service for centuries, and were the end point of a technological development that had lasted for centuries before that. Furthermore, it needs to be said that even before the advent of Robotechnology, the Tirolian people were already an advanced society that were well ahead of where Earth had been at the time of the SDF-1's arrival.

Comparatively, the UEG had only a decade to catch up with that progress. That they achieved as much as they did in that decade is nothing short of miraculous, especially when you consider the state that the world was in at the time. The Global Civil War was fought with fossil fuel driven tanks, naval vessels and jet fighters carrying projectile weapons and guided missiles. A decade later the UEDF was wielding Destroids that were armed with particle beams and building armed space vessels, all of which represented a massive leap in capability. Furthermore, they had developed the Veritech, a technological innovation that had no counterpart among the Zentraedi forces, nor for that matter, any other alien species.

However, the lack of technology was also tied in to the second problem, which was the war that the UEDF anticipated fighting. Working from what little they knew of the culture that had built the SDF-1, they made a series of projections on every potential aspect of that culture and how it would wage war. And, it needs to be said, almost every one of them proved to be wrong.

The first, and probably biggest mistake was an issue of scale. The UEDF had no idea just how large the Zentraedi armada was and had no real way to conceptualise it. The idea that a fleet of nearly five million warships could exist was simply too vast an idea to comprehend. Recall how Lisa Hayes' recounting of her first-hand experiences were dismissed as exaggeration or fabrications by both the SDF-1's analysis department and then the UEG.

Instead, the UEG had assumed that a 'typical' Zentraedi force would consist of a small fleet of two dozen or so vessels, centred on a craft of the same class as the SDF-1. Their reasoning was that it was the largest ship in the Zentraedi fleet, again based on the fact that it was far larger than any pre-existing Earth vessel. Based on this, it was assumed that the rest of the fleet would consist of ships in the 350 – 700 meter range that were armed with the same weapons as the SDF-1, sans the Reflex Cannon.

Based on this estimate of enemy capability, the UEG had constructed its fleet accordingly. The *Oberth*-class would act as mobile destroyers, while the *Armour-*class would serve as a combination heavy cruiser and carrier. While the idea of building a duplicate of the SDF-1 had been thrown around, the simple fact was that not enough was known about the ship to replicate it from the ground up. As such, the *Tokugawa-*class were developed to act as the centre of a naval taskforce. This plan was never fully implemented, as none of the *Tokugawas* entered service during the First Robotech War; even then, when they finally did launch, they had undergone considerable redesigns from their initial specifications.

The second part of this problem was based on the failure to understand what the Zentraedi plan for Earth would be. The UEG had assumed that the aliens intended to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth, and had developed many of their weapons systems to counter such an event. However, it again needs to be said that the UEG had failed to understand the scale of the issue that they were facing, and instead had modelled their expectations of the Zentraedi military machine on how Human armies worked.

Investigation of the ruins of the SDF-1 yielded fragmentary information about the Zentraedi weapons. The UEDF were aware of the existence of the Tactical Battle Pod and Fighter Pod and had rough estimates of their ability. However, they had also assumed that the majority of a Zentraedi force would instead be infantry, albeit still giant-sized, and that the Battle Pods acted as mechanised cavalry. This was based on both tying to apply human tactical thinking to the enemy, and again the underestimating the size and capabilities of the Zentraedi fleet.

It was against this reasoning that the UEDF pursued so many weapons based around ground combat platforms, with the Destroids being the most obvious example. The VA-1A Thunderstrike, an atmospheric use only ground-attack Veritech was another case, being a craft that had absolutely no use in a space war. Finally there was their slew of conventional platforms, ranging from new technology like the Slepnir tank to updates of Civil War era platforms like the Dragon II and Comanchero. While many of these vehicles clearly were intended to be interim designs until newer technologies became available, they still had a part in the UEDF's planning.

So then what had the UEDF assumed was going to happen when the Zentraedi arrived? Their first step was to assume that the aliens would be hostile, a plan that was based on fragmentary records found on board the SDF-1. They figured that the enemy would arrive with a fleet of about one hundred to a hundred and fifty ships, divided into about six 'battlegroups', each consisting of a SDF-1-class vessel and its smaller escort craft. In response, the UEDF were going to engage them in Earthspace with their own fleet of *Armour* and *Oberth-*class ships, lead by the SDF-1 (and hopefully at least one of the *Tokugawas* had they reached service in time). Hopefully at that point, the firepower of the SDF-1's reflex cannon, supported by the combined particle-beam and missile arsenals of the other ships would be enough to stop the alien fleet. And, of course, the UEDF had the Grand Cannon to help destroy the enemy fleet, with additional weapons possibly also on-line.

Should the fleet defence fail, the UEDF had assumed that the Zentraedi's next step would be a full-blown planetary invasion. This would have turned into a battle for air superiority in the upper atmosphere, with the UEDF hoping that the sheer number of fighters they could get into the sky would be a decisive factor. Those landing craft that made it to the ground were expected to contain a mixture of Zenteaedi infantry and Battle Pods that would be engaged by Destroids and other conventional forces.

Finally, should these efforts to hold off the invaders fail, the UEDF had several contingency plans ready for use. The first was to use the *Prometheus* and *Daedalus* class ships as bases of operations for guerrilla campaigns against the occupying forces. The other was to make use of the stockpile of legacy tactical and strategic nuclear weapons that they had inherited from their member-states.

Ultimately, the UEDF's planning proved to be disastrously off the mark in almost every respect. However, it is also difficult to fault them for their planning, given how little information they had to work with. And it needs to be said that even despite these shortcomings, many of the weapons developed for this war still proved to be quite capable, from the VF-1 Veritech to the Grand Cannon, even if it only was used once.