cthia wrote:A very poignant point. Which necessitates that the Forakers should step up to the plate and identify themselves -- in which my previous post seems to give indication of possibly happening. Great navies are an amalgamation of great single individuals and one great naval officer can make a difference -- placing the Salamander on referenced exhibit.
Do note that that was al-Fanudahi to his Frontier Fleet coworker, Irene (cannot remember her last name). He's a pariah with a career that was practically dead for having been insistent about being remotely realistic, and he's cautioning her to keep an eye out because they still cannot count on anyone ever listening to
him.
Great navies are an amalgamation of individuals of whatever caliber able to do great things together. The SLN's been picked out of officers able to advance their careers in an utterly satisfied, peacetime-forever Battle Fleet or a Frontier Fleet that's a tool of transtellars seizing poor star systems under cover of an idealistic white-wash. Some people have gotten somewhere in it
despite ideals or patriotism; actual tactical aptitude, beyond an ability to keep up with 50+ year old basics, hasn't been an actual impediment like that but it hasn't really helped. So for any of your Great Men or Great Women to make a difference, they have to shoulder aside that whole institution. In the RMN, PN, or RHN, that institution got behind their excellent leaders and consummate professionals - more or less, if not with all the reliability or exclusivity one may have liked, especially before Basilisk in the RMN or under the CPS for Haven.
The SLN simply isn't organized to fight that way.
One of the main problems I see on behalf of the SLN is the unwillingness of competent officers to want to risk their careers thinking, and accepting facts, outside of the box for fear of professional suicide. They are ineffective against their own institutional arrogance. Yet, it would only take key members within the SLN to 'put it on the line' and be damned, for the sake of the League's survival. That isn't such a difficulty now nor can it any longer be so quickly thought of as professional suicide. Their disastrous battles has seen to that.
It would take more than that. No one is going to follow them. Oh, plenty of people would
want to. Plenty would think maybe they should. But everyone in the SLN has joined and served and reached a position where they've got the rank to do anything or be seen or heard precisely by knowing what will or will not fly and lead to promotion in the SLN. It'd take a heroic turnaround by a flag officer with an independent command to do anything of that sort without being immediately bucked down by a superior, and it's a rare bird who'd hide that independent streak that well and get that senior who can still exercise it that well. Tom Theisman managed it fairly well, but he had a lot of close calls, a lot of luck, Denis LePic running interference,
and still a Navy that was vastly more institutionally prepared to back him - and he still had to fight a civil war afterward.
Running around screaming about neo-barb technical superiority is - to put it mildly - not what leads to a successful career in the SLN officer corps, but it's a pretty good way to put what candid realism would demand about now.
Even al-Fanudahi is getting listened to now less as a matter of people thinking that he's really saying believable things than as a matter of everyone needing to look like they're Doing Something Serious and getting briefings by the institution's resident prophet of doom is that - while they are all of them
aching to catch him out in something that's clearly overly pessimistic, defeatist, or both, so as to nail him and get a happy sense of relief. That's why he's prepping Irene to bear the job, or at least play a more conservative back-up - so
some voice of reason can survive his inevitable disgrace and purge.
