OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

No, 250 RHN vessels is what utterly destroyed Home Fleet. The extra ones just helped to kill 3rd.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Kind of a Black Swan. Who would have thought the Havenites would commit the majority of their fleet to an all-or-nothing attack?

Exactly. It's a hail mary ploy.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But was that something the planners would have thought of? At the time, the RoH was still seen as "Peeps" in Manticore and thus couldn't afford to lose the majority of its fleet, even if it won. Even if it was thought of, the likelihood may have been low enough that D'Orville never exercised a lot in it.

Absolutely yes, if only from the scale of defense standpoint. By that I mean do you plan to be able to defend against 100 SDs, 200, 300? How big does Home Fleet have to be, how many system defense pods, how many forts?

They knew Haven had hundreds of SDs and were building more faster than they could. It should have occurred to someone to game out what would happen if 250 SDs were thrown at defenses sized to defeat 200 SDs, for example, even if it was only done on the scale of a couple dozen people working in Harrington's game room. I have no doubt that it would have been done at least once if Harrington had still been in command of the Crusher, even if it wasn't part of her command responsibility. to do so.

The us military wargames everything. Every once in awhile, you hear some journalist report that the US is developing plans to invade Paris, or Berlin, or whatnot.

The truth is there are plans to fight a Zombie uprising in Columbus, Ohio, Aliens in Hawaii, and anyone... Anywhere.

You wargame it out in advance on your table/Sim of choice and have plans ready to go at a moment's notice, so when the Gopher uprising strikes Nebraska, someone pulls out the relevant folders, updates the force availability, and hands them to the commander so he has an idea of how to proceed.

There's a code Zulu- there should be plans on how to respond to code Zulu dispersed to all the defensive commanders. And in those plans should be advice on how to properly use MDM pods against massive fleets, in the event the SLN secretly updates all 10,600 SDs in their inventory to 1919 Bellerophon standards, and sends them against the Star Kingdom.

The 3 invasion fleet thing might not be in the syllabus yet, but fleet moustrapping should be by now, and any fleet chief of staff should be able to get the relevant tactical recommendation at a moment's notice.

Honor used to wargame everything. In one particular sim, she once gave one of the opposing sides Apollo. Well that wasn't fair. But it isn't about being fair, it's about being prepared. Her Uncle Jacques taught her that. You don't plan for the obvious, you plan for what isn't, obvious. Like learning to shoot objects that are moving.

Home Fleet should have gamed out anything and everything under the sun. That's what you do. Game out being attacked by a 1000 SDs. It'll be a crazy day in the sims where it should be, instead of a crazy day if it happens. Home Fleet should have rehearsed it until they could perform in their sleep. Especially since they were oh so close to doing the same thing to Haven before Saint Just pulled a rabbit out of his hat.

Recall the Manties were afraid of having to fight two wars simultaneously. At least Home Fleet should have asked itself, "What do we do if both the SLN and the RHN happen to arrive in-system simultaneously?"

Not only that, Astro Control should have been more prepared for a mass transit. Although I'm quite proud of Stephania Grimm's performance.

By the way, the complacency I was referring to was directed at Home Fleet, and not the entire RMN.

If they would have gamed out any and everything, D'Orville would have been too busy to be so bored as he was moments before BoM.

The tried really hard to get in a war with Haven and the Andies. Even having the head of the Navy quit didn’t dissuade them.

Though I still wonder how he managed to get out of the building before an armored limo with a very nice invitation from someone named Beth arrived.

Galactic Sapper wrote:If by "sidelined" you mean put back into his position as First Space Lord, I guess. He got sidelined by Janecek, White Haven brought him back.

Ah but he didn’t bring him back. Not really anyway.
During the first war, Caparelli run the show.

He was responsible for setting strategy and formulating operational plans. His First Lord of the Admiralty, Baroness Mourncreek, didn’t interfere in any way and Caparelli produced spectacular results.

Under White Haven Caparelli didn’t even have a seat on the table. The First Lord ignored his job description, reduced Caparelli to a powerless figurehead and split the duties of the First Space Lord between himself and Eighth Fleet CO who happened to be his wife.

In real life terms this would basically be comparable to John J. Pershing taking over as Secretary of War in the 1940s and sidelining Eisenhower by pitching Pattons offensive plans directly to Roosevelt. Utterly ridiculous but this is how the Manties run the Second Havenite War. With predictable disastrous results.

kzt wrote:No, 250 RHN vessels is what utterly destroyed Home Fleet. The extra ones just helped to kill 3rd.

And if D'Orville had done his job right, Home Fleet and 2nd would have destroyed themselves, but the Manticore Binary System would be safe. 250 Havenite SD(P)s was defensible against.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Kind of a Black Swan. Who would have thought the Havenites would commit the majority of their fleet to an all-or-nothing attack?

Exactly. It's a hail mary ploy.

Not exactly. A Hail Mary assumes you have a chance at victory. On the other hand, if you assuming that the RoH was still the PRN and had to hold its members systems by force, committing 350 SDs meant that they would lose even if they won the battle.

Anyway, I'm not disputing that there were serious errors. Uncharacteristic errors, even. Home Fleet should have wargamed this and more, D'Orville should have done better.

IIRC, textev stated that Honor is the only one that might've seen the possibility of BoM. Again, the RMN was a stone's throw from invading Haven's Home system as well, so vice versa shouldn't have been as much of a surprise to such a seasoned navy.

I was also surprised that mousetrapping worked so easily in the Home system, especially since it was a popular page in the Peep playbook.

Perhaps White Haven wasn't quite keen on MDM warfare. After all, he did get a slow start on the efficacy of the new threat environment. Did he and Honor ever talk tactics? Honor's husband should have sat in on some of her classes during her teaching stint.

Star Knight wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:If by "sidelined" you mean put back into his position as First Space Lord, I guess. He got sidelined by Janecek, White Haven brought him back.

Ah but he didn’t bring him back. Not really anyway.
During the first war, Caparelli run the show.

He was responsible for setting strategy and formulating operational plans. His First Lord of the Admiralty, Baroness Mourncreek, didn’t interfere in any way and Caparelli produced spectacular results.

Under White Haven Caparelli didn’t even have a seat on the table. The First Lord ignored his job description, reduced Caparelli to a powerless figurehead and split the duties of the First Space Lord between himself and Eighth Fleet CO who happened to be his wife.

In real life terms this would basically be comparable to John J. Pershing taking over as Secretary of War in the 1940s and sidelining Eisenhower by pitching Pattons offensive plans directly to Roosevelt. Utterly ridiculous but this is how the Manties run the Second Havenite War. With predictable disastrous results.

Is there any text evidence that he took disproportionate control of anything that wasn't the highly politically charged operations of 8th fleet? Certainly he didn't exert that level of control on 10th fleet, and d'Orville called Caparelli and not White Haven to consult on his plan to defend Sphinx.

Then again, if you're making that case against White Haven you'd also have to make it against Willy and Elizabeth herself, as Harrington routinely consulted with both regarding 8th Fleet operations. The fact is you're seeing disproportionate political control on the one fleet that is engaged in highly politically charged operations and not seeing that political involvement with, well, basically the rest of the Navy.

Eighth Fleets operations were as ‘politically charged’ as Sixth Fleets operations during the First War when Caparelli, not Morncreek was directing fleet operations.

But let’s look at some stuff from AAC.
In Chapter Seven, we get a meeting the First Space Lord had with the Crown on the progress of the war. He gives a very detailed report on the (disastrous) military situation, especially concerning ship construction on both sides. When appropriate he relies heavily on Admiral Givens and White Haven is mostly silent.
This changes however as soon as the Queens ask what they should do now and the discussion moves from general overview of the situation to operations.
White Haven jumps in with both feet and takes over from Caparelli. The role reversal couldn’t be more pronounced.

"So what do we do?" Elizabeth asked simply after silence had lingered for several seconds.
"For the immediate future, we're effectively forced to stand primarily on the defensive," Hamish said. "I don't like it, and neither does Sir Thomas, but that's simply the reality we face. We're still working on ways in which we might be able to modify that defensive stance in order to put at least some pressure on Haven, and we'll be discussing those possibilities with Admiral Harrington and her staff over the next several days. Hopefully, we'll come up with something that will prevent the other side from retaining sole possession of the strategic initiative, but we'll probably still be forced to adopt a mainly reactive stance until our own new construction begins to come forward in large numbers."

This bit is an accurate microcosm of his failures as First Lord.
It’s simply not his job to get involved in the operational planning at all. According to the author the First Lord is responsible for the ‘overall coordination of naval policy as directed by Cabinet’, while the First Space in conjunction with the Second Space Lord focus on overall strategic direction, deployment and operational & tactical planning.

White Haven has no business whatsoever to get involved in moving Battle Squadrons around or to plan which system is wife is going to raid next. Frankly, his only job at that point it to support whatever Caparelli and Givens are coming up with while making sure that his brothers' Cabinets pushes the necessary legislation and executive decision to enable the naval forces to continue to fight the war. Nothing more, nothing less.

But White Haven never understood that the office of First Lord is a political and administrative position. It’s a civilian office to boot and very much not in the chain of command. The First Space Lord, not the First Lord has supreme command over all naval forces.
Interjecting himself in operational planning of the First and Second Space Lord and associated planning and strategy boards is a grass overstep of his authority and should have triggered the resignation of Caparelli and Givens.

But it doesn’t even end there, because apparently it’s also fine for the First Lord to hand over strategic planning to the command staff of a glorified task group.
This is so mind-blowingly absurd it’s hard to put into words. In real word terms, it would be something like the Secretary of War Henry L Stimson telling President Roosevelt that he will plan the invasion of Europe with George Patton and Eisenhower better play along because he knows what.

It’s no wonder Admiral Kuzak apparently harbored resentments towards Honor over this crap.

It only gets worse as the book and the war continues, but it wrote about all that before. Link at the top of the previous page.

If you want to know how the Admiralty and the war should have been run look no further than The Short Victorious War. It’s the best book in the series in my opinion and the antithesis to AAC.
I have no doubt that if the RMN would have been run the way it was at the start of the first war, Manticore would have conquered the Haven system instead of the Battle of Manticore.