What good are our ground defenses if they are incompetent at flushing out terror cells?
they are sky-scraper tall interplanetary batteries fixed permanently towards the heavens meant to shoot down orbiting fleets
I would be
incredibly annoyed if Alex made them affective in countering bombings & sabotage being carried out by people on foot beneath them lol
edit: but, that mindset just might guarantee you a comfy seat in high command within the US military lol
I feel rather conflicted posting this because it really sounds like the sort of thing horrible dictators like to do...
TLDR stuff ->
Spoiler
IRL (effective) counter-espionage actually looks a lot like building infrastructure for vulnerable communities for free with the only caveat being that the communities you do it for are those willing to oust saboteurs to you. Like, it's normal to picture certain super-powers bombing cities into dust from orbit bc a country three countries over did a terrorism when you imagine "counter-terrorism", but that's just the hilariously ineffective stratagem that has led to them achieving little-to-nothing in a long enough time that there were people born after the initiation of said war who became old enough to sign up for and then die in said same war).
Consider also: China's annexation of Tibet, which achieved a lot more by just building a train line from Beijing to cause Tibetans to have a lot of Chinese Nationals as neighbors and co-workers, or the USSR's annexation of Ukraine where they did basically the same thing (except way more awfully) and have resulted in the Ukraine's political ability to maintain independence of post-collapse Russia being crippled even to this day.
TLDR; counter-insurgency doesn't have to look like the gestapo, it just does when it's poorly done. Counter-pather insurgency in SS could just be your administrator running a program where augmented citizens have their housing subsidized if they move near and work in light industry & farming districts that use little-if-any heavy machinery, so that Pather sympathisers who'd prefer to move and work in light industries that mesh well with their ideologies have a much harder time othering industrialized urbanites bc now their neighbor and coworker Jim is half cyborg himself and he's not such a bad fellow.
Or also that low-industry districts of a colony (that are heavy on Pather recruitment) that out Pather cells within themselves get bumped up to the top of the line for having their infrastructure refurbished, while those that don't have their infrastructure projects accidentally dropped out of the queue so they're economically pressured to comply -- and if one community persistently harbors saboteurs and never turns any in, they'd long-term flounder into poverty compared to their neighboring communities who do who then begin to consume their community until the harborers are basically gentrified out of their own homes.
shoot, my TLDR is longer than the original text. Aw well, hit post
