First Havenite war

kzt wrote:Every single Haven acquisition had been executed by coup de main, nowhere had they tried an attritional strategy. Their fleet was not appropriate for a long war, it was designed for short hard fights and for oppressing restive populations.

So of course they decided to completely disregard everything they had perfected and practiced and try a new and untested strategy that they were neither trained or equipped to carry out because?

We don't know for sure that there wasn't a large-scale fleet-on-fleet action. I do expect that if any happened, it was quick because there wasn't anyone who could stand up against the PN, but that doesn't mean no one could put up a fight. We do know that San Martin did have a good sized navy and they fought. The fact that the PN had built up hundreds of wallers probably means there were some navies there with BBs and DNs.

Wasn't there a story too on the ships from a conquered system being used in the vanguard of the next assault? I might be mixing my Sci-Fi universes here.

The PRN would still be able to maintain its story that it was just defending itself and the annexation was for the population's own good. They only had to infiltrate the government or society to cause some unrest, conduct a black flag operation to give them causus belli then move in.

That is not too different from what they tried with the Alliance. They were trying to cause government unrest, but that didn't work on Manticore. Then they tried the surprise attack. If they had captured Hancock they would have been able to resupply much closer to the objective. And if they had managed to prevent any ships from escaping -- and they had ships outside the hyperlimit during the engagement, so that was even potentially their intention -- then they could do it at their leisure.

But as others have said, they knew this time it would be different. They didn't know about the tech disparity, but they knew that Manticore had the third largest navy in the known galaxy. They were going for a war.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Haven couldn't move all of those forces because quite a few of the systems in their backyard were still rebellious and would definitely break free from the central government if given half a chance. Those hundreds of BBs couldn't be moved from their internal policing action, plus they had no business in a modern wall as the Fourth Battle of Yieltsin proved.

How many systems in their backyard have anything that would threaten an old style LAC let alone a destroyer and/or light cruiser?

They may have no business in the wall but they still represent a lot of firepower. Having 320 BB’s distributed in 1/2/3 squadron detachments isn’t meant to fight wallers its meant to force Manticore to detach large forces to threaten the rear something they won't be able to afford to do if the threat is a weeks travel time from Manticore. If a system has 3 squadrons as a system picket and we assume that BBs are 4 equals to 1 RMN SD then 3 squadrons would equal to 6 RMN SD’s. The RMN cannot send 6 SD’s to attack a system with 24 BB’s they need to send 2 or 3 times as many SD’s to ensure that they won’t take losses, now for the RMN to manage to find 12-16 SD’s to essentially take out of commission for weeks or months when there is a fleet of 160-200 wallers a week away seems unlikely.

If they had moved such a large proportion of their fleet, they might end up capturing a few systems on the Manticore Alliance side, maybe even the MBS, at the cost of losing a large proportion of the republic.

They get to decide when they attack, where they attack and in what strength they attack. Concentrated forces that have been drilled for months or years together and are kept ready can be dispatched at a moments notice and any spies that Manticore has would have to take a roundabout journey to get the information out by which time the war has started. Manticore cannot justify dispatching dozens of wallers to attack Havenite systems weeks or months away while there is a massive threat right next door. Any ship sent out to attack Haven is a ship not in position to defend Manticore. Whats more any system captured don’t need to be occupied any more than a destroyer or two watching over the space borne infrastructure after any naval ships are destroyed. If more is required occupy the space born infrastructure but occupation of the planets and civilian population can wait for post war. Any system they lose will be reconquered at a later date because there aren’t any nations nearby that can threaten Haven aside from Manticore.

The systems most likely to revolt would be the ones most recently annexed and thus the most productive ones, so this would be a case of winning a battle but losing the war or maybe a Pyrrhic victory.

That is not even remotely true. Deploying a destroyer or a cruiser in a system that has no naval assets will keep that system in the republic. They can kick haven off the planet but they cannot kick Haven out of the system and if by some miracle and with the help of the RMN they do manage that, detaching a few BB’s from other defensive duties to reconquer the system will settle that until the republic can reconquer.

The other problem is that they had no infrastructure to move such a large number of ships.

The ships move by themselves, they conquer Grayson and the reinforcement from the republic bring merchant ships loaded with all the materials and munitions to establish a base in Yeltsin.

The Peep fleet formations (and, quite frankly, everyone else's) did not have a long-range and deep strike capability.

Exactly what constitutes as a long range deep strike capability?

I don't know what kind of fleet train capabilities and logistics the PN had at the start of the war, but it looks like it had none (that's actually unlikely, but an insufficient fleet train is effectively the same as no fleet train).

They hit a system, they destroy the picket, they occupy the system and use their merchant marine to fortify Grayson and build up the system facilities. That is precisely why years before the war starts the RHN would have to consolidate and figure out what they need. You go to war with the military you have not the military you want, and considering that Haven was the one deciding WHEN the war started they should have prepared for it.

They needed to arrive at a forward fleet base to resupply before going off on their actual attack targets.

Resupply with what?

We also don't know how likely their ships were to develop engineering problems just because of transit, but given what we've heard of the state of their technical education and what we later learned about how they conducted maintenance, it's entirely possible those ships needed a great deal of refit at that fleet base too, not just resupply of perishables and bunkerage.

Then maybe starting a war is not the greatest idea if their ships can’t be relied to make it to the front. They decided when the war will start, they should have prepared for the war. If they don’t have the logistics to support 1 large operation then they won’t have the logistics to support many smaller operations. Starting a war when you cannot operate too far from your bases is peak stupidity and nowhere does it say in the books the Republics military leadership pre Harris Assassination was that incompetent.

So they couldn't have launched such a massive attack at this point even if they had thought to do so.

Here we come back to the fact that THEY DECIDED WHEN THE WAR WILL START! War isn’t high school, can’t leave preparing for a war to the night before and hope for the best, Manticore has spent decades preparing for a war they knew was coming and the country that got to decide when the war starts didn’t?

Then we get to the problem of failure of imagination: they never thought to do that.

They had enough imagination to absolutely infiltrate a number of the Manticore Alliances systems with stealth platforms, they had enough imagination to launch dozens of minor operations to set the conditions for the war, they had the imagination to launch an offensive with 11 waller squadrons in Grayson and 5 in Hancock yet they could imagine putting all of their offensive power in 1 fleet for one devastating attack?

That’s not how wars were conducted at this point and most importantly, it's not how Haven had been conducting its annexations.

They send a large fleet to the capital of the system in question and make them surrender. Except here the capital is too well defended and its a multi system alliance so send a large force to attack a system with a relatively large picket near the enemy capital so they can’t do anything more than keep their wallers at home.

Aside from Trevor's Star and probably no more than a handful of others, there was little to no resistance. Haven managed to corrupt government officials into peacefully asking for annexation, causing civil unrest that justified it bringing a battle squadron to resolve the situation, or just plain crushed any kind of military defence those systems had. They had always annexed systems one by one (it seems). So it didn't occur to Parnell and the Harris administration that they'd need more force than they were already preparing to use -- which was already more than any previous war in human history.

How on earth can you write that down… it never occurred to them to use more force to attack a near peer navy they knew was powerful? Seriously? If they were so stupid and incompetent how on earth did they find manage to make it to Yeltsin and Hancock? They should have all died on the way there or accidentally attacked the league because they are that incompetent… right?

They expected Manticore to roll over too.

That is BS.

They had been injecting massive amounts of cash into the Manticore opposition trying to cause that change in government that I mentioned above. The assassination of King Roger III stands out too.

So let me get this straight, in the 18 years between the assassination of King Roger and the start of the war it never occurred to them that Manticore wasn’t falling to their tricks? It never occurred to them that the hundreds of wallers that the RMN had were going to be a threat? I am going to guess that Haven had a pretty good guess what the RMN’s strength was at the begging of the war…

Then they had two political problems that hamstrung the military matters even further. First, the galactic public opinion: they had been flooding the Solarian newswaves with stories that they were the modern Republic, the nice guys, against the tyrannical and backwater monarchy in Manticore, which also happened to be a chokepoint and competitor to Solarian shipping. The Solarian public opinion was on their side (the MAlign pulling the strings behind the scenes probably helped too) and they didn't want to lose that by looking too imperialistic.

Again this is BS. Solarian public opinion would have sided with Haven regardless, the vast majority of the pre war incidents happened in Alliance territory hitting alliance infrastrure and destroying alliance warships. They had about as much justification when they attacked as they would have had if they didn’t mess around and attacked straight. The SKM didn’t play their game, they were quiet so Haven didn’t get their “justification” yet they still attacked.

Second, their domestic public opinion. Harris needed a short victorious war for a reason, and that included the fact that they were bankrupting themselves with the Dole.

So launching a weak offensive on multiple fronts that would have accomplished nothing but guarantee a long war was supposed to accomplish exactly what? What would have been the next step if Haven had managed to catch 2nd fleet with only 32 wallers and destroyed half of them? They would have to go home because even if they took no casualties they would have only 88 wallers in Grayson and Manticore can very well take a risk to retake the system.

Again if Haven did not have the fleet train for one large attack, they won’t have the fleet train for dozens of smaller attacks especially if they have to return to base after each battle.

They didn't have the funds to pay for a high-tempo war with a large deployment of assets and definitely couldn't afford to run out of funds faster by doing that.

They had the resources to capture Grayson and park 200 wallers a weeks time from Manticore Home system. At that point the war will be fought in the Manticore Alliance territory within 31 LY of Manticore not in Trevor’s star 210 LY from Manticore.

The latter would cause civil unrest, probably led by dolist managers who had better education and were kept away from power by the Legislaturalists. Like a certain Robert Stanton Pierre.

So starting a war that was almost guaranteed to take a decade or two was better? Really?

Haven cannot win a long war with someone who has the SL one WH transit away. They have to win fast, before the enemy leadership starts to accept they are going to lose and starts to think about other options. Options that are undesirable but less undesirable than being executed along with their families by Haven.

So any war plan that takes more than a month or three before they drag the queen out of the palace isn’t sane.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
We don't know for sure that there wasn't a large-scale fleet-on-fleet action. I do expect that if any happened, it was quick because there wasn't anyone who could stand up against the PN, but that doesn't mean no one could put up a fight. We do know that San Martin did have a good sized navy and they fought. The fact that the PN had built up hundreds of wallers probably means there were some navies there with BBs and DNs.

Wasn't there a story too on the ships from a conquered system being used in the vanguard of the next assault? I might be mixing my Sci-Fi universes here.

The PRN would still be able to maintain its story that it was just defending itself and the annexation was for the population's own good. They only had to infiltrate the government or society to cause some unrest, conduct a black flag operation to give them causus belli then move in.

That is not too different from what they tried with the Alliance. They were trying to cause government unrest, but that didn't work on Manticore. Then they tried the surprise attack. If they had captured Hancock they would have been able to resupply much closer to the objective. And if they had managed to prevent any ships from escaping -- and they had ships outside the hyperlimit during the engagement, so that was even potentially their intention -- then they could do it at their leisure.

But as others have said, they knew this time it would be different. They didn't know about the tech disparity, but they knew that Manticore had the third largest navy in the known galaxy. They were going for a war.

Taking Hancock and destroying the picket was not in the cards because they assigned insufficient forces for the offensive. Even if Admiral Rollins had waited for the reinforcements he would have attacked with ~48 SD's and and 7 DN's against a force of 16 SD's and 26 DN's with Admiral Danislov's Squadron because it would have been there by then. Basically the force sent to take Hancock was with such narrow numerical superiority that it might as well have not existed once the RMN's tech advantage they knew about was accounted for... that's the tech advantage they knew about not counting for all the other little surprises the RMN had for them. Thats why sending overwhelming force should have happened wetter the overwhelming force hit Grayson and then Hancock or Hancock and then Grayson by the time Manticore can react and fire off orders the Havenite Navy could have taken out Hancock Station AND 2nd Fleet with or without Admiral Danislov's Squadron. An offensive of that nature would have have destroyed more than 36% of the RMN's wall and forced them to abandon every allied system as well as every base outside the Home System. All that accomplished by outnumbering the defenders 7 to 1 in Hancock and 3.5 to 1 in Grayson... at the beginning of the war those numbers would have guaranteed victories with or without missile pods and tech advantage. On top of that such a large concentration of wallers would bring a large escort force 180-200 DD's and 120-150 CL's all used to thicken missile defence.

Sigs wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The Peep fleet formations (and, quite frankly, everyone else's) did not have a long-range and deep strike capability.

Exactly what constitutes as a long range deep strike capability?

The ability to operate further from your bases, to operate for longer without returning for refuel, resupply, reload, maintenance, etc.

Some Peep ships would have longer internal endurance, such as cruisers used to picket and surveil enemy systems or battlecruisers used to raid enemy commerce. They'd have larger fuel tanks, more area devoted to carrying spare parts, supplies, possibly even more redundancy in key components -- in other words they'd be less combat effective pound for pound than a ship of the same technology optimized for shorter range combat.

And for ships not designed for longer endurance missions you can, to some degree, compensate by supplying a larger fleet train. Tankers to refuel the fleet away from its bases, freighters full of supplies, missile colliers to reload them, more freighters full of spare parts and some repair ships to assist the undertrained Peep crews in doing the maintenance that's normally done by base or yard crews.

But that take investment in specialized ships and training their crews to refuel, reload, resupply, and repair ships in distant systems; without base support.

Sigs wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:We also don't know how likely their ships were to develop engineering problems just because of transit, but given what we've heard of the state of their technical education and what we later learned about how they conducted maintenance, it's entirely possible those ships needed a great deal of refit at that fleet base too, not just resupply of perishables and bunkerage.

Then maybe starting a war is not the greatest idea if their ships can’t be relied to make it to the front. They decided when the war will start, they should have prepared for the war. If they don’t have the logistics to support 1 large operation then they won’t have the logistics to support many smaller operations. Starting a war when you cannot operate too far from your bases is peak stupidity and nowhere does it say in the books the Republics military leadership pre Harris Assassination was that incompetent.

Lacking the logistics for one big longer range operation does not mean that they lack the logistics for many smaller shorter ranged one. It's easier to operate closer to their developed forward bases - and the kind of ship you need to shuttle supplies to those bases is far different from the kind of ship you need as a fleet train to support a fleet away from it's bases.
That kind of short operational range around bases was very common in the ironclad era - which is one reason the British has bases scattered all over the world; so they didn't need to build such high endurance into their ships anymore. Those ships were never that far from a base where they could get supplies, fuel, ammo, and repairs. In contrast the US navy had to invest in far longer ranged ships (once it turned its gaze beyond its own coasts) because it was worried about war in the Pacific and lacked numerous bases out there.

The kind of fleet train the US build up in WWII to support its Pacific war, from turning places like Ulithi atoll into floating forward bases to the replenishment at sea ships it developed, built and deployed in large numbers, were an utterly unprecedented logistical achievement.

Sigs wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Aside from Trevor's Star and probably no more than a handful of others, there was little to no resistance. Haven managed to corrupt government officials into peacefully asking for annexation, causing civil unrest that justified it bringing a battle squadron to resolve the situation, or just plain crushed any kind of military defence those systems had. They had always annexed systems one by one (it seems). So it didn't occur to Parnell and the Harris administration that they'd need more force than they were already preparing to use -- which was already more than any previous war in human history.

How on earth can you write that down… it never occurred to them to use more force to attack a near peer navy they knew was powerful? Seriously? If they were so stupid and incompetent how on earth did they find manage to make it to Yeltsin and Hancock? They should have all died on the way there or accidentally attacked the league because they are that incompetent… right?

Um, it seems kind of a tautology. Since Parnell and the Harris administration could choose when to start the war, and could choose how much of their navy to devote to the initial strikes then if it had occurred to them that they needed to use more force then they'd have assigned more force to those attacks, or else delayed the attacked until more force was available.
It seems clear that it didn't occur to them that they'd need more force than they were already preparing to use -- else they'd have prepared to use more force than they historically did.

Stupidity would be to realize they were applying insufficient force and go ahead and start the losing war anyway.

They made their best estimate. They were wrong. That doesn't automatically make them stupid and incompetent. Nobody had ever fought a war on this scale and so there were no good benchmarks to use for working out sufficient force.


And, yes, with the benefits of hindsight we can clearly say that they weren't prepared to use sufficient force - and that rolling the dice on one massive battle for the MBS was likely their best option. (Not least, for them, because if they'd won that success would likely have headed off the Pierre coup)

Jonathan_S wrote:The ability to operate further from your bases, to operate for longer without returning for refuel, resupply, reload, maintenance, etc.

They have a fleet train otherwise an offensive war would be impossible. If you attack a system, defeat the enemy picket and force them to flee only to retreat to your base to rearm, refuel, load up on consumables and do all the minor repairs they need done you give the enemy to reoccupy the same system. If they didn’t have the fleet train necessary to make them combat effective after the battle Haven will be fighting over the same 5 systems till the end of time.

Imagine Haven attacks system A and defeats the picket and then has to return to Base X to rearm, refuel and top up on consumables only to return back to system A and find a Manticoran Picket back in the system where they have to defeat it again, force them to fleet and repeat again. On the defensive you also need a fleet train if you are defending newly conquered systems that do not have the basing facilities needed or all the RMN would need to do is attack, force the picket commander to fire off their ammunition and eventually even if the Havenite Navy is victorious they would have to retreat from the system because they are out of ammunition, low on fuel, low on consumables and minor damage cannot be repaired.

The very nature of war in the series indicates that there is a need for a fleet train in anything over a system defence force. If your navy won’t leave your system having a fleet train is not necessary if your fleet is expected to leave the system on offensive or defensive operations you need a fleet train.

Some Peep ships would have longer internal endurance, such as cruisers used to picket and surveil enemy systems or battlecruisers used to raid enemy commerce. They'd have larger fuel tanks, more area devoted to carrying spare parts, supplies, possibly even more redundancy in key components -- in other words they'd be less combat effective pound for pound than a ship of the same technology optimized for shorter range combat.

Which of the Havenite ships are optimized for short range combat? I doubt that any of the ships have a significant difference in endurance other than LAC’s. Just because DD’s, CL’s, CA’s and BC’s are sent on long range commerce raiding and anti piracy patrols doesn’t mean that BB’s, DN’s and SD’s are not capable of going as far or being gone as long it just means sending a 4.4 million ton ship to do a job that a 200 thousand ton ship can do can do it better seems like a waste.

But that take investment in specialized ships and training their crews to refuel, reload, resupply, and repair ships in distant systems; without base support.

Something they would need if they were going to war. Something they would need if they were conducting offensive operations. Something they would need if they were conducting defensive operations because if the basing facilities are damaged or destroyed it means the fleet without a fleet train has one battle in them before they have to retreat.

Lacking the logistics for one big longer range operation does not mean that they lack the logistics for many smaller shorter ranged one.

Where exactly are you getting this information that their logistics are short range? Every time logistics are brought up or hinted it seems like the Havenite fleet train is not the most efficient and capable but at no point did the RMN consider the Havenite Navy as incapable of launching major offensives due to logistics.

It’s easier to operate closer to their developed forward bases - and the kind of ship you need to shuttle supplies to those bases is far different from the kind of ship you need as a fleet train to support a fleet away from it's bases.

How so? Is the process to rearm an SD different based on the distance from a friendly base?

Look at the later books and the Battle of Hypatia as an example, the SLN had three transports for missile pods. Does it mean that every battle we have seen in the series that didn’t indicate the presence of missile colliers meant that none were present or just that they were not important to the story and therefore were not mentioned. You are basing your opinion on assumptions that don’t really make sense because everything else in the series indicates that a fleet train is absolutely necessary and present to make any offensive actions.

That kind of short operational range around bases was very common in the ironclad era - which is one reason the British has bases scattered all over the world; so they didn't need to build such high endurance into their ships anymore. Those ships were never that far from a base where they could get supplies, fuel, ammo, and repairs. In contrast the US navy had to invest in far longer ranged ships (once it turned its gaze beyond its own coasts) because it was worried about war in the Pacific and lacked numerous bases out there.

And if you have professional and capable officers who know that a war is coming and have known that an offensive war was coming for 40+ years maybe investing in a fleet train that would make the offensive war possible would be a good idea. Assuming that the Havenite senior officers were all so stupid and incompetent to not be able to see that a fleet train is in fact needed seems like a stretch.

Um, it seems kind of a tautology. Since Parnell and the Harris administration could choose when to start the war, and could choose how much of their navy to devote to the initial strikes then if it had occurred to them that they needed to use more force then they'd have assigned more force to those attacks, or else delayed the attacked until more force was available.

Manticore was arming at an incredible pace but was also handicapped due to their domestic political situation. Doing a halfassed attack on the Alliance with no hope of quick victory in the war seems like a loosing proposition when the enemy in this case can double, triple or quadruple their warship construction once war starts. Haven was faced with a number of reasons that reinforced a need for a quick war, reasons that if ignored would make a long war that much more uncertain. Economic pressure was definitely one of them but as I mentioned above another was the fact that Manticore was building wallers at a fraction of what it could actually build and another one was the League itself getting involved if the SKM started to lose. If Haven could not afford their navy or their domestic economic spending then starting an expensive and long war was not the way to go. If Haven couldn’t win a quick war against Manticore when they were building ships at 5%/10%/15% or 20% of their full capacity is also not the way to go. Then the last one was the SKM asking to join the League which would be a real possibility. After all if the war drags on for years and it starts looking like a Havenite victory is inevitable the SKM might decide League membership is so much more preferable than conquest by Haven.

It seems clear that it didn't occur to them that they'd need more force than they were already preparing to use -- else they'd have prepared to use more force than they historically did.

How did it not occur to them to attack a near peer navy with more force to destroy a bigger slice of the RMN’s wallers in one go? Sending overwhelming forces to crush an enemy in the opening phases of a war is not a new concept, it’s been done for thousands of years.

Stupidity would be to realize they were applying insufficient force and go ahead and start the losing war anyway.

Stupidity is sending insufficient forces to kill insignificant enemy forces and to warn the alliance that war was coming and try to trick them into making the target LESS significant and thereby a victory that much less significant as well. Again, this is not a new concept.

They made their best estimate. They were wrong. That doesn't automatically make them stupid and incompetent. Nobody had ever fought a war on this scale and so there were no good benchmarks to use for working out sufficient force.

The offensive makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Tricking the RMN into cutting the picket by half while sending inadequate forces to Seaford 9 when they had accurate and ongoing intelligence to indicate those forces would not be enough seems like a pretty stupid idea. Hancock had 4 squadrons of the wall and since Haven was kind to warn the RMN that war was coming the picket was reinforced by a 5th squadron. If the Seaford 9 task force had waited for all reinforcements they would have like had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6-7 squadrons. That is 40 wallers against 48-56 wallers knowing that the RMN enjoys a technological advantage and make it a conservative 1.2 to 1 and with all the tricks they didn’t know about it was likely worse than that. The offensive makes no sense because it doesn’t end the war quickly and it gives away Haven’s best advantage which was the decision when and where to attack and how.

And, yes, with the benefits of hindsight we can clearly say that they weren't prepared to use sufficient force - and that rolling the dice on one massive battle for the MBS was likely their best option. (Not least, for them, because if they'd won that success would likely have headed off the Pierre coup)

It’s a simple concept, I an in charge of the Havenite Navy and I know that they have 390 wallers and 320 BB’s in active service. If I want a short and victorious war I will commit everything I have aside from pickets for absolutely critical systems, especially considering there is no immediate risk of surprise attacks from Manticore. If the fleets are deployed to bases in the right way even if the SKM had spies in those bases by the time those spies can get that information to the SKM it would be too late. Organizing the operation to cause the maximum number of casualties in the opening operation of the war while suffering the least amount myself would be paramount.


I would try to force Manticore to send more ships of the wall INTO Grayson not to send ships of the wall AWAY from Grayson. Hit the largest concentration of ships of the wall outside the Home system and crush it and then hit every other concentration of ships of the wall outside of Manticore hoping to catch them before orders to come home are sent out. If the Havenite Navy had launched an offensive of 30 Squadrons of the wall and managed to catch 12 RMN squadrons in Grayson and destroy them, rearm and hit Grendelsbane, Hancock, Talbot and any other concentration outnumbering the RMN in each and every engagement the RMN takes massive losses at the beginning while the Havenite Navy takes smaller losses because at every engagement they outnumber by a wide margin. Even if Haven managed to destroy 12 in Grayson and 8 others deployed to allies between Grayson and Hancock but missed Hancock forces the RMN would be outnumbered by a great margin.. Done right the RMN would be so outnumbered that Haven can hit the home system punch through Home Fleet and force a surrender.

Nobody launches a surprise attack with just enough forces especially when you can overwhelm the target with numbers to guarantee compete destruction yet keep their casualties an minimum. You hit hard, you hit fast and you keep hitting until the enemy stops fighting back. Knowing the war is coming means you have to plan on how you would fight that war, stockpile parts, ammunition, fuel etc… build up the logistics network to support the offensive operations you would need and work hard to get caught up on refits. Concentrating your forces in large fleet formations means those formations can drill with each other and as a result be more confident and capable when war starts. This all calls for planning well before the war starts, preparing for the war and building the war stocks that would be needed. You go to war with the fleet you have not the fleet you wish you had, in this case Haven being the aggressors and knowing that they will eventually go to war they should have planned to build the fleet they wanted to go to war with and build a plan to end the war quickly and most importantly use the fleet they build to fight the war they start.

Sigs wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:The ability to operate further from your bases, to operate for longer without returning for refuel, resupply, reload, maintenance, etc.

They have a fleet train otherwise an offensive war would be impossible. If you attack a system, defeat the enemy picket and force them to flee only to retreat to your base to rearm, refuel, load up on consumables and do all the minor repairs they need done you give the enemy to reoccupy the same system. If they didn’t have the fleet train necessary to make them combat effective after the battle Haven will be fighting over the same 5 systems till the end of time.

Imagine Haven attacks system A and defeats the picket and then has to return to Base X to rearm, refuel and top up on consumables only to return back to system A and find a Manticoran Picket back in the system where they have to defeat it again, force them to fleet and repeat again. On the defensive you also need a fleet train if you are defending newly conquered systems that do not have the basing facilities needed or all the RMN would need to do is attack, force the picket commander to fire off their ammunition and eventually even if the Havenite Navy is victorious they would have to retreat from the system because they are out of ammunition, low on fuel, low on consumables and minor damage cannot be repaired.

The very nature of war in the series indicates that there is a need for a fleet train in anything over a system defence force. If your navy won’t leave your system having a fleet train is not necessary if your fleet is expected to leave the system on offensive or defensive operations you need a fleet train.

Some Peep ships would have longer internal endurance, such as cruisers used to picket and surveil enemy systems or battlecruisers used to raid enemy commerce. They'd have larger fuel tanks, more area devoted to carrying spare parts, supplies, possibly even more redundancy in key components -- in other words they'd be less combat effective pound for pound than a ship of the same technology optimized for shorter range combat.

Which of the Havenite ships are optimized for short range combat? I doubt that any of the ships have a significant difference in endurance other than LAC’s. Just because DD’s, CL’s, CA’s and BC’s are sent on long range commerce raiding and anti piracy patrols doesn’t mean that BB’s, DN’s and SD’s are not capable of going as far or being gone as long it just means sending a 4.4 million ton ship to do a job that a 200 thousand ton ship can do can do it better seems like a waste.

But that take investment in specialized ships and training their crews to refuel, reload, resupply, and repair ships in distant systems; without base support.

Something they would need if they were going to war. Something they would need if they were conducting offensive operations. Something they would need if they were conducting defensive operations because if the basing facilities are damaged or destroyed it means the fleet without a fleet train has one battle in them before they have to retreat.

Lacking the logistics for one big longer range operation does not mean that they lack the logistics for many smaller shorter ranged one.

Where exactly are you getting this information that their logistics are short range? Every time logistics are brought up or hinted it seems like the Havenite fleet train is not the most efficient and capable but at no point did the RMN consider the Havenite Navy as incapable of launching major offensives due to logistics.

It’s easier to operate closer to their developed forward bases - and the kind of ship you need to shuttle supplies to those bases is far different from the kind of ship you need as a fleet train to support a fleet away from it's bases.

How so? Is the process to rearm an SD different based on the distance from a friendly base?

Look at the later books and the Battle of Hypatia as an example, the SLN had three transports for missile pods. Does it mean that every battle we have seen in the series that didn’t indicate the presence of missile colliers meant that none were present or just that they were not important to the story and therefore were not mentioned. You are basing your opinion on assumptions that don’t really make sense because everything else in the series indicates that a fleet train is absolutely necessary and present to make any offensive actions.

That kind of short operational range around bases was very common in the ironclad era - which is one reason the British has bases scattered all over the world; so they didn't need to build such high endurance into their ships anymore. Those ships were never that far from a base where they could get supplies, fuel, ammo, and repairs. In contrast the US navy had to invest in far longer ranged ships (once it turned its gaze beyond its own coasts) because it was worried about war in the Pacific and lacked numerous bases out there.

And if you have professional and capable officers who know that a war is coming and have known that an offensive war was coming for 40+ years maybe investing in a fleet train that would make the offensive war possible would be a good idea. Assuming that the Havenite senior officers were all so stupid and incompetent to not be able to see that a fleet train is in fact needed seems like a stretch.

Um, it seems kind of a tautology. Since Parnell and the Harris administration could choose when to start the war, and could choose how much of their navy to devote to the initial strikes then if it had occurred to them that they needed to use more force then they'd have assigned more force to those attacks, or else delayed the attacked until more force was available.

Manticore was arming at an incredible pace but was also handicapped due to their domestic political situation. Doing a halfassed attack on the Alliance with no hope of quick victory in the war seems like a loosing proposition when the enemy in this case can double, triple or quadruple their warship construction once war starts. Haven was faced with a number of reasons that reinforced a need for a quick war, reasons that if ignored would make a long war that much more uncertain. Economic pressure was definitely one of them but as I mentioned above another was the fact that Manticore was building wallers at a fraction of what it could actually build and another one was the League itself getting involved if the SKM started to lose. If Haven could not afford their navy or their domestic economic spending then starting an expensive and long war was not the way to go. If Haven couldn’t win a quick war against Manticore when they were building ships at 5%/10%/15% or 20% of their full capacity is also not the way to go. Then the last one was the SKM asking to join the League which would be a real possibility. After all if the war drags on for years and it starts looking like a Havenite victory is inevitable the SKM might decide League membership is so much more preferable than conquest by Haven.

It seems clear that it didn't occur to them that they'd need more force than they were already preparing to use -- else they'd have prepared to use more force than they historically did.

How did it not occur to them to attack a near peer navy with more force to destroy a bigger slice of the RMN’s wallers in one go? Sending overwhelming forces to crush an enemy in the opening phases of a war is not a new concept, it’s been done for thousands of years.

Stupidity would be to realize they were applying insufficient force and go ahead and start the losing war anyway.

Stupidity is sending insufficient forces to kill insignificant enemy forces and to warn the alliance that war was coming and try to trick them into making the target LESS significant and thereby a victory that much less significant as well. Again, this is not a new concept.

They made their best estimate. They were wrong. That doesn't automatically make them stupid and incompetent. Nobody had ever fought a war on this scale and so there were no good benchmarks to use for working out sufficient force.

The offensive makes no sense no matter how you look at it. Tricking the RMN into cutting the picket by half while sending inadequate forces to Seaford 9 when they had accurate and ongoing intelligence to indicate those forces would not be enough seems like a pretty stupid idea. Hancock had 4 squadrons of the wall and since Haven was kind to warn the RMN that war was coming the picket was reinforced by a 5th squadron. If the Seaford 9 task force had waited for all reinforcements they would have like had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6-7 squadrons. That is 40 wallers against 48-56 wallers knowing that the RMN enjoys a technological advantage and make it a conservative 1.2 to 1 and with all the tricks they didn’t know about it was likely worse than that. The offensive makes no sense because it doesn’t end the war quickly and it gives away Haven’s best advantage which was the decision when and where to attack and how.

And, yes, with the benefits of hindsight we can clearly say that they weren't prepared to use sufficient force - and that rolling the dice on one massive battle for the MBS was likely their best option. (Not least, for them, because if they'd won that success would likely have headed off the Pierre coup)

It’s a simple concept, I an in charge of the Havenite Navy and I know that they have 390 wallers and 320 BB’s in active service. If I want a short and victorious war I will commit everything I have aside from pickets for absolutely critical systems, especially considering there is no immediate risk of surprise attacks from Manticore. If the fleets are deployed to bases in the right way even if the SKM had spies in those bases by the time those spies can get that information to the SKM it would be too late. Organizing the operation to cause the maximum number of casualties in the opening operation of the war while suffering the least amount myself would be paramount.


I would try to force Manticore to send more ships of the wall INTO Grayson not to send ships of the wall AWAY from Grayson. Hit the largest concentration of ships of the wall outside the Home system and crush it and then hit every other concentration of ships of the wall outside of Manticore hoping to catch them before orders to come home are sent out. If the Havenite Navy had launched an offensive of 30 Squadrons of the wall and managed to catch 12 RMN squadrons in Grayson and destroy them, rearm and hit Grendelsbane, Hancock, Talbot and any other concentration outnumbering the RMN in each and every engagement the RMN takes massive losses at the beginning while the Havenite Navy takes smaller losses because at every engagement they outnumber by a wide margin. Even if Haven managed to destroy 12 in Grayson and 8 others deployed to allies between Grayson and Hancock but missed Hancock forces the RMN would be outnumbered by a great margin.. Done right the RMN would be so outnumbered that Haven can hit the home system punch through Home Fleet and force a surrender.

Nobody launches a surprise attack with just enough forces especially when you can overwhelm the target with numbers to guarantee compete destruction yet keep their casualties an minimum. You hit hard, you hit fast and you keep hitting until the enemy stops fighting back. Knowing the war is coming means you have to plan on how you would fight that war, stockpile parts, ammunition, fuel etc… build up the logistics network to support the offensive operations you would need and work hard to get caught up on refits. Concentrating your forces in large fleet formations means those formations can drill with each other and as a result be more confident and capable when war starts. This all calls for planning well before the war starts, preparing for the war and building the war stocks that would be needed. You go to war with the fleet you have not the fleet you wish you had, in this case Haven being the aggressors and knowing that they will eventually go to war they should have planned to build the fleet they wanted to go to war with and build a plan to end the war quickly and most importantly use the fleet they build to fight the war they start.

Sigs, it's mentioned in the RHN Jayne's guide that the PRN was very reliant on depot maintenance - their their engineers and technicians were so sparse, they couldn't afford to put them on ship, and the average shipborne crew member didn't have the educational base to do functional repair and troubleshooting beyond following the colorful pictured/limited word work card and replacing the "purple" module when the indicator light went out. So the fleets were usually tied to a Fleetbase where they could cycle in and out of maintenance easily. So while they had fleet trains, they had to send more ship back to bases, more often for standard maintenance options, than other 1st tier navies did.

This is why they built Seaford 9, Barnett, Chealsie, Casca, Nightengale,..... All these were forward operating bases that the PRN could support their fleets from, and any operating tempo was based off the closest base.

Also remember, the PRN had never taken on a near peer in recent memory. Almost every target was a single system polity, and the PRN could easily produce enough force to overwhelm any small navy, even if they had up-armed, as was mentioned in the beginning of OBS. But more importantly, they never had to worry about anyone striking back - or first. And their Motto - "Win on the first Salvo"; they didn't plan on having to fight a 2nd battle.

So to date the process had been build a fleet base or 2 in the region, base fleets there, politically destabilize the neighbors, then start knocking off everything in range one by one - rinse, repeat.

This is not to say they didn't have ANY fleet trains. Of course you would want reloads, and hospital ships and personal ships. of course you would need a couple repair ships to take care of the ships that were too beat up to move under their own power - But the PRN only knocked out one lightly defended target at a time - they didn't require the means for a rapid op tempo, and didn't take massive damage because they overwhelmed their target 20-1.

The RMN was a different animal - but they tried their old tricks, fleet bases on the fringes, political subterfuge to paralyze their opponent, attempting to interfere with their economies, attempting to spread out their defensive assets so their could locally overwhelm them, etc, etc.

Theemile wrote:
Sigs, it's mentioned in the RHN Jayne's guide that the PRN was very reliant on depot maintenance - their their engineers and technicians were so sparse, they couldn't afford to put them on ship, and the average shipborne crew member didn't have the educational base to do functional repair and troubleshooting beyond following the colorful pictured/limited word work card and replacing the "purple" module when the indicator light went out. So the fleets were usually tied to a Fleetbase where they could cycle in and out of maintenance easily. So while they had fleet trains, they had to send more ship back to bases, more often for standard maintenance options, than other 1st tier navies did.

Depot maintenance doesn’t mean they are tied to a base, depot maintenance means that when a component malfunctions and in a better trained navy that component will be repaired by a well trained and very capable technician in the Havenite Navy that component will be pulled out and replaced and the faulty component will be shipped back to depot for actual repairs. That was mentioned a number of time, Havenite technicians on ships didn’t fix as much as they replaced parts and its a lot easier to teach people how to pull components out and replace them than it is how to fix them. Navies with well trained and competent technicians will fault find and fix on the spot only sending components to repair depots when they require more extensive work whereas Havenite kit is designed for people who can get to the general area where the problem is and pull out the faulty component. Considering it seems from the books that Haven keeps making their kits modular so that it is easy to pull out and replace even by poorly trained technicians. One requires a much bigger investment up front in education in general and then specific training while the other requires significantly more investment in transportation and spares.

This is why they built Seaford 9, Barnett, Chealsie, Casca, Nightengale,..... All these were forward operating bases that the PRN could support their fleets from, and any operating tempo was based off the closest base.

That may be so but those FOBs don’t negate the need for a fleet train. Any offensive would require a fleet train wether it is 10 LY or 1,000 LY. The further you go the bigger your fleet train requirement simply because you would be further from supply but you still need it. You need a fleet train to rearm and refuel your ships after a victory and conquest of a system otherwise the system has to be abandoned in order to go back and rearm at home. Otherwise you need twice the fleet, one to win the battle, the second to hold the system while the first goes back to a base to rearm and refuel. Not to mention how crippling it would be to lose Seaford 9 and be unable to threaten Alizon, Zanzibar and Yorik because the nearest support base was taken out,.

Also remember, the PRN had never taken on a near peer in recent memory. Almost every target was a single system polity, and the PRN could easily produce enough force to overwhelm any small navy, even if they had up-armed, as was mentioned in the beginning of OBS. But more importantly, they never had to worry about anyone striking back - or first. And their Motto - "Win on the first Salvo"; they didn't plan on having to fight a 2nd battle.

That is a great point which underlines my issue… you don’t win on the first salvo if you send insufficient forces and you don’t go for the throat. In 1905 Manticore was a one system nation and the Alliance was a one system alliance, doesn’t matter if the alliance has a dozen or two dozen members if only one has an actual fleet of SD’s and DN’s and 95% of the capital ship construction happens there. You can leave 90%-95% of the alliance untouched and win the war by hitting the one system that truly matters. If Manticore could see in 1860 that war was on the horizon and it was confirmed in 1880 with the conquest of Trevor’s Star then the people who are most likely to start the war should have spent the preceding 40 years building up their capabilities to fight the war they will have. It was brought up several times in the series how Admiral Parnell and other senior officers were very good at their jobs to assume that they overlooked something as simple as the logistics of the war they were preparing to fight for 40 years seems unlikely.

So to date the process had been build a fleet base or 2 in the region, base fleets there, politically destabilize the neighbors, then start knocking off everything in range one by one - rinse, repeat.

Except they had 40+ years to figure out that wouldn’t work and make other arrangements to win the war they knew was coming.

This is not to say they didn't have ANY fleet trains. Of course you would want reloads, and hospital ships and personal ships. of course you would need a couple repair ships to take care of the ships that were too beat up to move under their own power - But the PRN only knocked out one lightly defended target at a time - they didn't require the means for a rapid op tempo, and didn't take massive damage because they overwhelmed their target 20-1.

They had 40 years to plan this war, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the People’s Navy at all. They should have war gamed this war and planned it out not base it on previous wars that had nothing to do with future war. Thats the basis of the problem, they faced single system navies with little economic power to build and maintain substantial forces and if they based the war with the SKM that can build and maintain substantial fleets on their previous conquests then they were absolutely incompetent.

The RMN was a different animal - but they tried their old tricks, fleet bases on the fringes, political subterfuge to paralyze their opponent, attempting to interfere with their economies, attempting to spread out their defensive assets so their could locally overwhelm them, etc, etc.

As I said they should have known the war is coming because they were going to start it. They should have known that the war needs to be quick due to previously stated concerns such as domestic financial situation, the SKM’s financial resources which can lead to substantial ships of the wall fleets if given enough time without peacetime economic restrictions and the potential for the SKM asking for League membership if they were to start losing the war. Cant really say they planned to fight the same old war yet they didn’t fight the war the same old way by going for the capital system in the first place they hit a minor ally after trying to trick the RMN into weakening the picket thereby making the victory if it happened that less decisive,

Sigs wrote:Depot maintenance doesn’t mean they are tied to a base, depot maintenance means that when a component malfunctions and in a better trained navy that component will be repaired by a well trained and very capable technician in the Havenite Navy that component will be pulled out and replaced and the faulty component will be shipped back to depot for actual repairs. That was mentioned a number of time, Havenite technicians on ships didn’t fix as much as they replaced parts and its a lot easier to teach people how to pull components out and replace them than it is how to fix them. Navies with well trained and competent technicians will fault find and fix on the spot only sending components to repair depots when they require more extensive work whereas Havenite kit is designed for people who can get to the general area where the problem is and pull out the faulty component. Considering it seems from the books that Haven keeps making their kits modular so that it is easy to pull out and replace even by poorly trained technicians. One requires a much bigger investment up front in education in general and then specific training while the other requires significantly more investment in transportation and spares.

You're arguing against the author's words.

It's established that the kind of maintenance and repair that replacing parts aboard could achieve was limited. It might be possible to keep a ship in combat readiness for a long period if it is not fighting, but once it takes on real damage, the type of repair that the on-board technicians could achieve was too limited. Those ships could probably be patched together so they could make the trip back to a location where the properly-trained technicians could effect repairs.

It's also established that those technicians did not travel.

That may be so but those FOBs don’t negate the need for a fleet train. Any offensive would require a fleet train wether it is 10 LY or 1,000 LY. The further you go the bigger your fleet train requirement simply because you would be further from supply but you still need it. You need a fleet train to rearm and refuel your ships after a victory and conquest of a system otherwise the system has to be abandoned in order to go back and rearm at home. Otherwise you need twice the fleet, one to win the battle, the second to hold the system while the first goes back to a base to rearm and refuel. Not to mention how crippling it would be to lose Seaford 9 and be unable to threaten Alizon, Zanzibar and Yorik because the nearest support base was taken out,.

I'm not entirely disagreeing, but the nature of those fleet trains are very different.

The fleet train for all the conquests prior to the outbreak of the war was an occupation force. It probably was a heavy on ground-pounders and with loads of orbital weapons. I agree it must have had resupply of some consumables, because one couldn't count on getting food from the occupied system. It probably did have some technicians too who could perform some field repairs.

But once the PRN had won on the first shot, they only had to hold the system, against an enemy who would have nowhere to rearm and resupply. Even if they had to retreat to try again, they could come back with fresh forces, against a system whose defence would have already taken a beating. Besides, they could hold the system with light defences that come up from behind, second-rank units with second-rank COs who don't have to be anywhere near strategically- or tactically bright.

That's very different from having a fleet train to resupply you and repair you to move on to another, unbloodied enemy who has had even longer to prepare fixed defences and, if they're smart, has been collecting intelligence on you. To persecute a war against multiple targets, you're going to need your best people and your best ships. Admirals may be able to shift their flags to other units, but that doesn't mean the COs aboard those ships are as capable, or have as good a relationship with the flag officers.

Finally, on distance: I would tend to agree with you that 10 light-years or 1000 shouldn't make a difference, but David says it does and says that lighter ships (destroyers, mostly) don't have the legs to make such a long journey. Without recon drones, fleets need destroyers as beaters and scouts.

It was brought up several times in the series how Admiral Parnell and other senior officers were very good at their jobs to assume that they overlooked something as simple as the logistics of the war they were preparing to fight for 40 years seems unlikely.

It was also brought up that Peep Office of Internal Security had a large blind spot on pure military affairs. They focused on political espionage and attempting to corrupt the target governments. They missed the technological gap that the RMN was widening.

I don't think they were so incompetent as to miss the build up of hundreds of wallers, but what assessment they passed on to NavInt and ultimately to Parnell is unknown. We do know it was faulty. Fatally faulty.

They had 40 years to plan this war, it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the People’s Navy at all. They should have war gamed this war and planned it out not base it on previous wars that had nothing to do with future war. Thats the basis of the problem, they faced single system navies with little economic power to build and maintain substantial forces and if they based the war with the SKM that can build and maintain substantial fleets on their previous conquests then they were absolutely incompetent.

But taking the argument from the end backwards, we must conclude they gamed something with faulty initial conditions and came to all the wrong conclusions. InSec focused on the wrong thing, the analysts at NavInt wrote reports that would please their superiors, Adm. Parnell was a political animal who missed the forest for the trees. The administration also probably concluded that once the war started and systems started getting conquered, the Alliance would fracture, with some systems suing for peace in exchange for better conditions when being admitted into the Republic or in exchange for a temporary cease-fire.

Plus, they couldn't plan that well because no one had ever fought a war in this scale. There was no historical data to base assumptions on, not just in recent memory with modern technology, but ever.

This means they concluded their worst case scenario they wouldn't conquer Manticore and would have to re-fight in 10 years, but they would have added several systems, got that much closer to Manticore, weakened the Alliance, and obtained samples of the Manticore matériel. Though truth be told, I don't think Parnell told Harris this.

Theemile wrote:Sigs, it's mentioned in the RHN Jayne's guide that the PRN was very reliant on depot maintenance - their their engineers and technicians were so sparse, they couldn't afford to put them on ship, and the average shipborne crew member didn't have the educational base to do functional repair and troubleshooting beyond following the colorful pictured/limited word work card and replacing the "purple" module when the indicator light went out. So the fleets were usually tied to a Fleetbase where they could cycle in and out of maintenance easily. So while they had fleet trains, they had to send more ship back to bases, more often for standard maintenance options, than other 1st tier navies did.

This is why they built Seaford 9, Barnett, Chealsie, Casca, Nightengale,..... All these were forward operating bases that the PRN could support their fleets from, and any operating tempo was based off the closest base.

Also remember, the PRN had never taken on a near peer in recent memory. Almost every target was a single system polity, and the PRN could easily produce enough force to overwhelm any small navy, even if they had up-armed, as was mentioned in the beginning of OBS. But more importantly, they never had to worry about anyone striking back - or first. And their Motto - "Win on the first Salvo"; they didn't plan on having to fight a 2nd battle.

So to date the process had been build a fleet base or 2 in the region, base fleets there, politically destabilize the neighbors, then start knocking off everything in range one by one - rinse, repeat.

This is not to say they didn't have ANY fleet trains. Of course you would want reloads, and hospital ships and personal ships. of course you would need a couple repair ships to take care of the ships that were too beat up to move under their own power - But the PRN only knocked out one lightly defended target at a time - they didn't require the means for a rapid op tempo, and didn't take massive damage because they overwhelmed their target 20-1.

The RMN was a different animal - but they tried their old tricks, fleet bases on the fringes, political subterfuge to paralyze their opponent, attempting to interfere with their economies, attempting to spread out their defensive assets so their could locally overwhelm them, etc, etc.

And it's not like "fleet train" is a binary thing that you either have or you don't.

You can have various numbers of ships in the train or various capabilities. Haven, it seems, put less maintenance/repair capability into their fleet train.

Also logistical requirements aren't linear with distance. If you want to project a fleet twice as far its usually requires significantly more than twice as much logistical support. (Because, among other things, the logistics ships themselves start consuming more of the logistics they're carrying just to get there and back)

So it take less fleet train support for two simultaneous, shorter ranged lunges from a fleet base (say 2.5ish days, 30 LY each) than you can a combined strike at twice that distance (say 5ish days, 60 LY). Not only can damaged ships more easily fall back on the starting base, but each logistics convoy spends far less time in transit so you need fewer of them to maintain the same pace of supplies.

And remember, Haven though that Masada/Grayson, at under 40 LY from Manticore, was well possitioned to launch an attack on the MBS from. That seems to be the kind of strike range they were generally envisioning - at least if they were planning to hold the system afterwards. (You can push further for a pure raid because you don't need to logistics to support your forces forward long enough to set up a base; they just strike and withdraw. That lets you rely more on just the stores the attack force itself carried)


Any you're right, nobody had every fought a war like this. Nor had anybody thought in terms of war plans based around making really deep attacks - at least not ones where you planned to hold the system afterwards. And if your warplans don't call for a capability then it's unlikely you'd devote the peacetime resources needed to build up that capability.



As someone calling people stupid for not having the right fleet train, I guess that makes the 1930s US Navy stupid.
Their actions were extremely limited in the early war in the Pacific as, among other things, they lacked the fast oiler support necessary to let them actually deploy the bulk of their (surviving) navy forward. (Leading to their battleships "defending" the West Coast out of San Diego because they didn't have the oilers initial to operate them any further forward.

Given limited peacetime budgets, when given the choice to pay for a warship that would take 3-5 years to build or a fast oiler that could be built in 1-2 they opted for the slower building big warships nearly every time (which also led to them being chronically short of modern destroyers or cruisers). They had just enough oilers to test out the concept - but not enough to actually support their current fleet. (But they, rightly, believed that when war came they'd get the money for vastly more ships, so make sure the pre-war fleet was tilted heavily towards the slowest building types; and make due until the war emergency building programs churned out the quicker building ships to flesh out your escorts, scouts, and fleet train)