Oh, come on. Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts. The crew still has to decide where and how the vehicle moves, what targets to fire at, with which weapons, which field repairs can and should be done etc. etc. etc.
Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts.
That was because military doctrine had adapted to the invention of radio at that point. That would actually go away at the kind of distances we're talking about. Thirty-second communication lag is enough to ruin the command battlefield view.
Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions, not the crews of the tanks themselves. Those officers had unprecedented battlefield knowledge. None of this would be true of spaceships.
That's not even considering that spaceships operating at interplanetary speeds have far smaller effective maneuvering envelopes than any WW2 vehicle. Even the clumsiest terrestrial vehicle can turn around and leave. A realistic spaceship cannot, unless it had planned for it in advance.
It's an interesting read, but that scenario could only occur due to imperfect information. With nearly-perfect information (like what would be available in space), the German defenders would have been mobilized ahead of time, and it would have been a straightforward battle.
