Naval Combat in Battlestar Galactica

Above: Battlestars Galactica and Pegasus approach and destroy a Cylon base ship in "Resurrection Ship." Sorry about the image quality.

Colonial military doctrine in Battlestar Galactica mandates that Galactica, a carrier/battleship hybrid, maintain a multi-fighter combat action patrol (“CAP”) around itself and the show’s civilian fleet. When a possible threat appears on Galactica’s radar (called “DRADIS”), the CAP serves an investigatory function and, when appropriate, preliminarily engages Cylon fighters (called “raiders”) until Galactica can launch the remainder of her fighters (called “vipers”). This is sensible when a Cylon attack threatens the civilian fleet; we’re shown in “33” that civilian ships are lightly armored and easily destroyed by gunfire from colonial fighters, so they are presumably vulnerable to raiders as well. Vipers thus profitably destroy raiders in these situations.

The series also includes numerous confrontations primarily between the opposing fleets’ decisive units, the Colonial battlestars (Pegasus being the only other battlestar that appears in the series) and the Cylon base ships. Decisiveness is a function of objective. The Colonial political objective is to ensure survival of the fleet until they can locate Earth; Galactica’s military objective in a capital ship confrontation is therefore to repel attacks while ensuring its own survival, as it is usually the only armed ship in the otherwise helpless fleet. The Cylon political objective is never particularly clear despite the writers’ best intentions, but their military objective is obviously the destruction of Galactica, followed by the civilian fleet.

Battles not involving the civilian fleet are therefore decided when one side destroys the other’s last battlestar or base ship (or when Galactica escapes). That being so, battlestars and base ships are decisive because it appears that only they harbor the nuclear missiles and heavy guns necessary to destroy each other. I don’t believe a viper ever damages a base ship. There are a few instances in the series, however, in which smaller craft carry nuclear weapons, including a scene in the miniseries where three nuclear-armed raiders attack Galactica. In the series finale, “Daybreak,” a small colonial craft called a raptor destroys an enormous Cylon base by firing a number of nukes at it. These appear to be rare sacrifices to narrative convenience, however; if the series generally treated raptors and raiders as able to carry such munitions there would be no need for capital ships to get anywhere near each other.

In capital ship confrontations, colonial fighter doctrine stops making sense. The analysis above dictates that base ships and battlestars should withhold their fighters in the absence of civilian ships, but they don’t. The Cylons always launch a swarm of raiders that Galactica meets with its vipers. Because neither fighter force can meaningfully harm the opposing capital ships, they fight only to destroy each other, having no effect on the outcome of a battle.

One might counter that Galactica launches vipers in order to thin the Cylon raider force in anticipation of the next civilian fleet encounter. The Cylons appear to have a nearly inexhaustible supply of raiders, however, while Galactica has an extremely limited supply of vipers. This renders any raider kills prohibitively expensive (even though viper pilots for some reason almost never die in these encounters).

For the Cylons, the math is reversed; they are correct to take any opportunity to destroy vipers in preparation for the next attack on civilian ships. The Cylons therefore should launch raiders if and only if Galactica launches vipers; but in the absence of the colonial fleet Galactica should never launch vipers. Such battles should therefore not involve fighters at all.

Although the show operates in a technological world with very particular constraints (they are advanced in some ways and not others), in the same vein it is also interesting to note that battlestars and base ships appear not to have any meaningful guidance systems on their munitions. They generally fire at each other by aiming and firing manually.

All of these conditions are perfectly legitimate narrative choices, but the reasons underlying their contravention of even our own technological and tactical realities are interesting and bear examination. Due to aircraft-delivered munitions, carrier-accompanied groups of our real world capital ships found it unnecessary to make visual contact with the enemy after 1942, the Coral Sea being the first battle in which such contact was not made.

Of course, munitions-delivering planes still had to see the enemy to attack him. They also had to see other planes in order to combat them, a condition that persisted for decades and created a popular view of fighter combat as “dogfighting.” World War II-era planes, in a sense the carrier’s “munitions” in that their bomb or torpedo provided destructive force, their pilot provided guidance, and their engine provided propulsion, obviated the visual contact requirement for capital ships; modern radar and guided missiles have since obviated this requirement for aircraft. Technologically advanced fighters are now able to destroy each other from great distances.

But spacefaring fighters in Battlestar Galactica still not only fire manually-aimed machine guns at each other, but fight in many cases for no apparent reason, while battlestars and base ships deliver close-quarters nuclear broadsides like Napoleonic-era ships of the line. This serves not only to provide immediately recognizable narrative tension, but to reinforce our persisting view of war, in some ways an increasingly impersonal activity, as an arena universally conducive to demonstrations of individual heroism, skill, and bravery. This view may be innate in all of humanity; it seems to be at least innate in Western culture. Homer and the 3,200-year-old characters in The Iliad would likely recognize Battlestar Galactica’s fighting conditions and applaud. Any space combat that actually occurs in our future, however, will bear no resemblance to the show at all.