Not sure whether any dopers out there have even read this series. Its basically military SciFi. I read the series a while ago but wanted to discuss some of the military implications and flaws I found in the book with anyone interested in the series.
In general, the Posleen, the alien creatures who are the enemy in the series, are huge centaur like creatures who use mass attacks in battle and are bent on conquering the entire galaxy (though no idea why…no reason given, though hints so far). They use heavy unaimed fire (except for the God Kings) with a mixture of advanced and primitive weapons and rely mostly on shock and overwhelming force to achieve victory. They have never been defeated or even seriously challenged…until they run up against the humans. They have a mix (which is unexplained so far in the series) of advanced weapons and star ships, but have curious holes in their tactics and doctorine. One of these holes seems to be that they have no defense or even doctorine for unaimed ballistic artillary fire.
This brings up the first of my questions or comments. Why can’t the humans capitalize on this more? I know that in the later books they do, to a certain extent, but it seems to me that, even with todays artillary capabilities, a mass of aliens totally unprepared for artillary, who don’t even know to duck and cover or spread out even, no matter how many of them there are, would have zero chance of moving even into position to attack the humans. I can understand that millions and millions of these creatures mass for an attack, but come on. Batteries of a few thousand of even traditional tube artillary using cluster munitions would totally slaughter unprepared troops in the open long before they even got in range, wouldn’t they? And thats not even taking into account atomic shells (or anti-matter shells). I saw a History Channel show the other day that talked about Atomic Annie and though, why couldn’t they just line up a few of those and pound the snot out of the Posleen? I realize the President doesn’t like to use Nukes, but we are talking very small tactical nukes here…certainly SOMEONE would have suggested this to her sometime.
This brings up the next of my questions/points: I realize that the Posleen in the books breed like rabits, but how could ANY species take the kinds of losses that would be inflicted on them (and WERE inflicted on them in the book) in such a short period of time and maintain combat?
On the human side, I can’t understand why, in the later books, there are so few trained combat personnel of quality in the books. In the later books the strategic situation is pretty much static warfare in the US (the rest of the world is pretty much toast…more on this in my next question :)), but the humans are holding fairly well. But why are the humans so poorly trained and motivated? I mean, wouldn’t they be pretty HIGHLY motivated, especially after all thats happened? Wouldn’t the incentive to train hard to survive be pretty high? It seems that only the ACS and the 10,000 are highly motivated and trained (and skilled) with the rest of the military below even todays standards. I realize that most of the combat forces of today are off planet in the books, but there is still plenty of time to train up new people and they should be singularly motivated to learn the skills of combat, no?
Last thing (this is getting to long as it is) I wanted to discuss is, it seemed that the other major powers went down pretty fast. Does this seem realistic? Why, for instance, would the Chinese not be able to hold out better? Why not the Russians? Europe? Certainly they all knew what was coming, why couldn’t they withdraw their people and fort up, as the Posleen seem to be pretty bad at taking fixed fortifications and have no way of dealing with ballistic weapons like support artillary.
Anyway, no idea if anyone will even respond to this at all as I don’t know how popular this series is. I really wanted to talk about the military implications of such mass attacks, and how its handled in the books. If anyone IS interested, give your thoughts on the book, any flaws or comments you see…whatever you like. 
-XT
Fear the God King, baby!!
-Bunbun
Thats what you get when you let rednecks play with anti-matter!!
-Mike O’Neal