Not enough military-adjacent sci-fi takes advantage of the humble rearguard action tbh.
(Not talking about hard military sci-fi since I haven’t read enough of it to say one way or the other. I’m talking soft quasi-military sf like Trek)
Like if you think about it narratively they’re incredibly useful because it’s a type of battle where:
1. No matter how spectacularly well the people fighting one do, it’s inherently not gonna successfully take down the big bad. Because the battle that could have done that is already lost. So it’s a time when they can win (achieve their objective of a successful orderly retreat) without winning. Always useful in a story where you need your protagonists to not win until the end.
2. You have an excuse for your Very Clever Plucky Band of Protagonists to be taking on a much much bigger and better armed force without it being just plain stupid to do so. No idiot balls here, just an acknowledgment that we inherently have to be asking a small force to hold off a large one, so the rest of our large force can get clear.
3. Great potential for a heroic sacrifice that doesn’t feel contrived BUT a sacrifice is not required. As mentioned in point 1 your protagonists can also do really well without it screwing up the pacing of the story. This means that your audience will not know for sure which way it is going to go based on the rules of storytelling. So you can get genuine tension/suspense and genuine catharsis.
4. Battle tactics and objectives can be complex and difficult to get across on page or on screen at the best of times, but “cover everyone else’s retreat from a lost battle” is easy to understand, sufficiently high stakes, and emotionally impactful—much more so than any convoluted “get the macguffin” or “take this territory” could ever be.
5. The combo of high stakes, inability to retreat (the whole point is they’re already retreating) and desperation mean it’s a perfect excuse for your protagonists to pull out all the stops. That experimental weapon that has a one in three chance of blowing up? Might as well use it because if we don’t not only are we dead, all our friends retreating behind us are too.
6. A rearguard action is easy to make unambiguously heroic or at least more morally defensible many other kinds of battle. Whatever lead up to this, right now our allies are just trying to not get killed/captured and we are standing between them and a force that wants to overwhelm and kill/capture them. This works even when the antagonist force isn’t evil or dishonorable, because “chase a retreat to try to turn it into a rout or full surrender” is considered pretty acceptable in many kinds of warfare, so your Honorable Enemy is likely to engage in it to an extent—it’s not reserved for the Evil Forces of Evilness.
