There’s an interesting caveat, looking at recent war history ……
War technology has always been a “battle” between offensive technology and defensive. However in recent years, offensive dominates. We may have reached the limits of physical materials such that there is no defense. Certainly a lot of todays fighting requires stopping the attack or making it miss, rather than trying to survive it.
There’s no reason to expect that shields can exist, so it’s quite possible we can hurt the aliens and their advantages are standoff and intelligent weapons, reconnaissance, targeting. Looking at recent wars, would we be like Iraq, appearing similar in destructive ability but overwhelmed, or more like Ukraine, appearing to have no chance but successfully fighting back? Ukraine’s advantage is partly economic: using cheap drones to destroy expensive or nonreplaceable tech. Imagine the Aliens as Russia, with all the apparent advantages in size, tech, experience …… but they only have the weapons they came with and we can at least sting them, we can make them spend irreplaceable weapons on our much cheaper technology
Or think of Stargate SG-1. Humans technology was primitive, but the weapons could still kill. A combination of unwieldy political structure of the aliens and clever application of force managed to minimize the impact of the technology advantages. Then of course making the right friends enabled those humans to leapfrog ahead
There’s an interesting caveat, looking at recent war history ……
War technology has always been a “battle” between offensive technology and defensive. However in recent years, offensive dominates. We may have reached the limits of physical materials such that there is no defense. Certainly a lot of todays fighting requires stopping the attack or making it miss, rather than trying to survive it.
There’s no reason to expect that shields can exist, so it’s quite possible we can hurt the aliens and their advantages are standoff and intelligent weapons, reconnaissance, targeting. Looking at recent wars, would we be like Iraq, appearing similar in destructive ability but overwhelmed, or more like Ukraine, appearing to have no chance but successfully fighting back? Ukraine’s advantage is partly economic: using cheap drones to destroy expensive or nonreplaceable tech. Imagine the Aliens as Russia, with all the apparent advantages in size, tech, experience …… but they only have the weapons they came with and we can at least sting them, we can make them spend irreplaceable weapons on our much cheaper technology
Or think of Stargate SG-1. Humans technology was primitive, but the weapons could still kill. A combination of unwieldy political structure of the aliens and clever application of force managed to minimize the impact of the technology advantages. Then of course making the right friends enabled those humans to leapfrog ahead