NEED TO KNOW

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:Thanks for that passage. I was certain I had recalled the need to know policy mentioned.

It can cut both ways too. IINM, at one point Honor was harboring a secret or two that she might should have shared with the Admiralty if she didn't; if you recall the time she met with the Havenite's top spy aboard her ship.

But she did not keep it a secret, in the very next paragraph (56) in At All Costs she informed the Prime Minister:

"Anton Zilwicki didn't come to visit me by himself," she said. "He brought a Mr. Cachat with him."
"Cachat," Grantville repeated. It was apparent the name was ringing bells, but that he hadn't quite put his mental hand on the memory.
"Victor Cachat," Honor said helpfully. "As in the same Victor Cachat who engineered the entire Torch gambit in the first place."
"A Peep spy?" If Grantville's expression had been incredulous before, it was dumbfounded now. "You had a Peep spy aboard your flagship?"
"Not just any old spy." Honor couldn't help it. Despite the anger beginning to bubble under the shock in Grantville's mind-glow, she felt a certain manic glee in the admission. "As a matter of fact, he's now the Havenite chief of station for their entire Erewhon-based intelligence net."
The Prime Minister stared at her. Then he shook himself.
"This isn't funny," he said coldly. "It's entirely possible someone could make a case for treason out of what you've just admitted to me."
"How?" she challenged.
"You had a known senior secret agent of a star nation with whom we're at war aboard your flagship in a restricted military area, and from what you're saying, I feel quite confident he's not still there in a cell. Is he?"
"No, he isn't," she said, meeting his cold anger with a hard eye.
"And just what information did you allow him to take away from this completely unauthorized meeting, Admiral?"
"None he didn't bring with him."
"And you're prepared to prove that before a court-martial, if necessary?"
"No, Prime Minister, I'm not," she said in a voice of matching ice. "If my word isn't sufficient for you, then file charges and be damned to you."

At the end of that paragraph:

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said. "I think they're right, at least about whether or not what's happened represents the official policy of the Pritchart Administration."
"I realize that," Grantville said, and looked into her eyes. "And because I know you genuinely feel that way, I have to ask you. Are you still prepared to carry out your orders, Admiral Alexander-Harrington?"
She looked back, hovering on the brink of the unthinkable. If she said no, if she refused to carry out the operation and resigned her commission in protest, it would almost certainly blow the entire question wide open. The consequences for her personally, and for her husband and wife, would be . . . severe, at least in the short term. Her relationship with Elizabeth might well be permanently and irreparably damaged. Her career, in Manticoran service, at least, would probably be over. Yet all of that would be acceptable—a small price, actually—if it ended the war.
But it wouldn't. Grantville had put his finger squarely on the one insurmountable weakness: the lack of proof. All she had was the testimony of two men, in private conversation. At best, anything she said about what they'd told her would be hearsay, and there was simply no way she could expect anyone outside her immediate circle to understand—or believe—why she knew they'd told her the truth.
So the war would continue, whatever she did, and her own actions would have removed her from any opportunity of influencing its conduct or its outcome. That would be a violation of her responsibility to the men and women of Eighth Fleet, to her Star Kingdom. Wars weren't always fought for the right reasons, but they were fought anyway, and the consequences to the people fighting them and to their star nations were the same, whatever the reasons. And she was a Queen's officer. She'd taken an oath to stand between the Star Kingdom and its enemies, why ever they were enemies. If the Star Kingdom she loved was going back into a battle in which so many others who'd taken that oath would die, she couldn't simply abandon them and stand aside. No, she had no choice but to stand beside them and face the same tempest.
"Yes," she said quietly, her voice sad but without hesitation or reservation. "I'm prepared to execute my orders, Willie."

We even know from chapter 20 of Storm from the Shadows that a report of that meeting has gotten back to Bardasano and Detweiler.

cthia wrote:How long did it take her to come clean? She could have popped a communique off to the Admiralty by dispatch. I think she sat on it.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:How long did it take her to come clean? She could have popped a communique off to the Admiralty by dispatch. I think she sat on it.

There is no mention of how much time passed, but it was during her first return to the capitol. She wanted to make the report face to face (there is no way a proper explanation could be put into a written report) and did it when she was officially back on Manticore for a final meeting at Admiralty House before launching Operation Sanskrit.

cthia wrote:There is also a lot of need to know going on between Alliances. Didn't Grayson withhold the fact that they kept building ships during High Ridge's tenure?

Although I can't recall why it was important that they conceal that fact, High Ridge had all but pissed on the alliance anyway.

cthia wrote:There is also a lot of need to know going on between Alliances. Didn't Grayson withhold the fact that they kept building ships during High Ridge's tenure?

Although I can't recall why it was important that they conceal that fact, High Ridge had all but pissed on the alliance anyway.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't think you can really hide that you're building ships when you have exactly one major shipyard and it's in your home system. No, they didn't hide from High Ridge that they kept building ships. In fact, weren't the High-ridgies amusing themselves thinking that Grayson would bankrupt itself soon? They even sold the older ships to Grayson too.

They were probably tactful about not rubbing High Ridge's nose on it, though, and that might be what you're thinking. Janacek and Jorgensen knew all about what the Blackbird shipyards was building; but so long as that never came up in politics, they wouldn't need to bring up to High Ridge, other than at a high level.

He cocked an eyebrow at the First Lord, and Janacek made a sound which the less charitable might have described as an irritated grunt.
"No other navy in space has so far commissioned any pod superdreadnoughts," he pronounced with the infallibility of God. "Admiral Jurgensen and his analysts at ONI have amply confirmed that! We, on the other hand, have a solid core of over sixty. That's more than sufficient to defeat any conventional navy, especially with the CLACs to support and scout for them."
"No other navy?" North Hollow repeated. "What about the Graysons?"
"I meant, no potentially hostile navy, of course," Janacek corrected somewhat testily. "And while no one but a planet full of lunatic religious fanatics would be idiotic enough to pour so huge a percentage of their gross planetary product into their naval budgets at a time like this, at least they're our lunatics. Exactly why they think they need such an out-sized navy is open to different interpretations, of course, and I, for one, don't happen to believe their official explanations are the whole truth."
In fact, as all of his colleagues knew, Janacek nursed more than a few dark suspicions about Grayson. Their religious ardor made them automatically suspect, and he did not find their argument that the lack of a formal peace treaty required them to continue to build up their defenses convincing. It was entirely too convenient a pretext . . . as he and the rest of the Cabinet had already discovered. Besides, Graysons were uppity, without the proper respect and deference such a planet full of hayseed neobarbs ought to show the Alliance's senior navy. He'd already had three venomously polite exchanges with their High Admiral Matthews—who'd only been a commodore, for God's sake, when Grayson signed the Alliance—that amply demonstrated Grayson's overinflated opinion of its interstellar significance.
One confrontation had been over the long overdue security restrictions he'd found it necessary to institute at ONI after getting rid of Givens. The previous Second Space Lord's "open door" policy with second-rate navies like Grayson's had been a standing invitation to disastrous security breaches. In fact, the risk had been even greater with Grayson than any of the Alliance's other minor navies, given Benjamin Mayhew's willingness to trust ex-Peep officers like Admiral Alfredo Yu, the de facto commander of his grandiosely titled "Protector's Own." A man who would turn his coat once was always capable of turning it again if it seemed advantageous, and the restoration of the old Havenite constitution would actually provide a moral pretext for doing so. Yet the Graysons had steadfastly refused to cut such officers out of the information loop. They'd actually had the effrontery to dismiss the Admiralty's entirely legitimate security concerns on the basis that the officers in question had "proven" their loyalty. Of course they had! And the ones most likely to go running home to Haven were the ones who would have taken the greatest care to be sure they'd proved they wouldn't. No doubt they could even justify their deceit on the basis of patriotism, now that the StateSec regime they'd fled had been demolished!
Well, Janacek had put a stop to that nonsense, and if the "High Admiral" had a problem with the closing of the open door he'd so willfully abused, that was his lookout.
The second confrontation had been over the First Lord's decision to shut down the joint Manticore-Grayson R&D programs. There'd been no need to continue funding them—not when what they'd already produced would provide at least twenty T-years worth of development work under peacetime budgetary constraints. Besides, it was obvious to Janacek that what the "joint programs" really amounted to was little more than a way for Grayson to siphon off technology from Manticore without footing the bill for developing it on its own. It was hardly surprising Matthews had been miffed when he cut off access to the trough . . . especially after the way the Cromarty Government and Mourncreek Admiralty had coddled and cosseted their Grayson pets.
And as for the third one . . . There was no way Matthews could have been unaware of the insult to the First Lord involved in granting that asshole White Haven the rank of a full admiral in their precious Navy. And it would be a cold day in Hell before Janacek forgot it, either.
"Whatever it is they think they're doing, though," he went on after a moment, "not even Graysons are stupid enough to think they could hope to accomplish anything significant on an interstellar scale without our support. Whether they want to be or not, they're as much in our pocket as the Erewhonese, and they know it. So their navy—even assuming both that they could find some way to sustain it at its present size for more than a year or two without bankrupting themselves and that they knew what the hell they were doing with it without us to hold their hands—is really a non-factor in our security considerations. Except inasmuch as it actually increases 'our' modern warship strength, that is."
It never occurred to anyone in the room to question that assessment of their ally, and the Trade Secretary shrugged.

cthia wrote:How exactly would, let's say an Ensign - who has a need to know - handle being browbeat by a superior officer who does not have a need to know but has an improper desire to know?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:How exactly would, let's say an Ensign - who has a need to know - handle being browbeat by a superior officer who does not have a need to know but has an improper desire to know?

Why would an ensign have a need to know when his chain of command doesn't?

cthia wrote:Because shit happens and in the Navy it stinks something awful.

If an Ensign aboard HMS Fearless (CM-56) had been privy to Apollo, and he ran into Pavel Young in the Basilisk System, Young damn sure wouldn't have had a need to know.