Gotcha. In addition to Happy Clam’s answer, I just want to state that the war for Earth was space combat only - I don’t think the Kzin actually landed on Earth in any of the original or M-K stories (besides The Colonel’s Tiger). So the entire population didn’t have to be turned into soldiers, just those directly involved in the war, which was presumably a relatively small number.
As I recall, the conversion of the launching laser network into a system-wide weapon was the work of maybe three people, working in secret. The leader of the cell was an ARM, or former ARM, working without the knowledge or approval of the organization–he planned it while he was “up” on the paranoia drugs. The beginning of the effort was described in a short story, but I don’t recall the title, and I’m don’t have my copies of the various anthologies on hand to look for it. It was set before the beginning of the Man-Kzin wars–possibly even before the events in “Warriors”.
“Madness has it’s Place”. It was written by Larry Niven, unlike most of the M-K series, and was actually the first story he wrote specifically for it (The Warriors is from the 60’s). It’s pretty much a direct sequel to “The Warriors” - the guy who was still in the ARM told his friend the former ARM about the info beamed back from the Angel’s Pencil. They, along with the wife/girlfriend they soft of shared, started planning what to do. The reason the former ARM was needed was that he was a natural paranoid schizoprenic, so they took him off his meds for a while to let him plan how to fight the war. He did come up with some neat stuff - like figuring out what percentage of the population they’d “lose” converting the rest to a war-time economy & mindset.
Robert Silverberg’s The Alien Years was pretty good. Some of the chapters were originally short stories published elsewhere and, in my opinion at least, sometimes worked better as stand-alone stories, but the book was pretty good overall.
At first, the aliens simply ignored us. Their landing sparked fires that destroyed wide swathes of countryside and resulted in hundreds or thousands of deaths. They paid no attention. When we tried to nuke them, they turned off the electricity. All of it. No electric power worked anywhere for two years. In seconds, humans were reduced back to a pre-industrial level of technology. Cars didn’t work because of the electrical systems. Millions around the world died. There was still no communication between us and them. Our attempts to make contact were ignored. Over the next 50 years, we tried to come to terms with a vastly changed world, occupied by aliens that few ever saw and who ignored us as thoroughly as we would a bunch of gnats.
Some of John Varley’s books, starting with The Ophiuchi Hotline, are set in a future where humans were basically evicted from Earth. The aliens either came from Jupiter or had a base there; no one knows for sure. All we know is that no human is allowed much closer to Earth than the Moon’s orbit and that apparently the reason we were kicked out was because the aliens wanted to protect the few whales left. The alien invasion part is in the past, but it hangs over much of the story, with mentions sprinkled here and there throughout. The technology disparity was so great that they swatted aside Earth’s defenses as if they didn’t exist.
Could easily be, it has the right kind of satiric tone, but the bibliography in the Wikipedia entry for him doesn’t ring any bells in this decrepit brain of mine.
Another vote for the invasion sequence in Battlefield Earth, regardless of the other flaws in the book. Aliens gas the major population centers from basically invincible aircraft/spacecraft, then send in smaller forces to attack any remaining military threats, then ignore the remnants of humanity and begin mining. Now, maybe nukes or asteroids are more effective, but gas probably wouldn’t cause a nuclear winter.