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SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.

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SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by namelessfly   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 5:17 pm

namelessfly

The SLN will not beginning many space battles any time soon because of the technology advantage.

To buy time the SLN could prep insurgencies on planets at risk of being taken by the GA.

Deploy cadre of OFS goons trained in guerilla warfare and preposition weapons supplies. Identify and recruit people likely to be loyal to SL or reject Manticoran rule.

When the RMN takes the system, the insurgents revolt. Attacking any manticoran or Quadrant Guard troops is obvious. Attacking "collaborator" government or it's supporters is more effective. The SEM will then need to provide troops to garrison "liberated" planets or accept anarchy which is very bad PR.

Given the nominal 500:1 troop ratio needed for counter insurgency, Manticore would need 500,000 troops to occupy a planet with only one billion people. Occupying only 100 planets (1/2% of the SL with maybe only 1/10% of the population) with say 2 billion people each results in a need to police 200 billion people. Manticore wouldneed an army of 100 million.


The cost and trauma of multiple insurgencies would halt the RMN advance.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by Vince   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 5:42 pm

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namelessfly wrote:The SLN will not beginning many space battles any time soon because of the technology advantage.

To buy time the SLN could prep insurgencies on planets at risk of being taken by the GA.

Deploy cadre of OFS goons trained in guerilla warfare and preposition weapons supplies. Identify and recruit people likely to be loyal to SL or reject Manticoran rule.

When the RMN takes the system, the insurgents revolt. Attacking any manticoran or Quadrant Guard troops is obvious. Attacking "collaborator" government or it's supporters is more effective. The SEM will then need to provide troops to garrison "liberated" planets or accept anarchy which is very bad PR.

Given the nominal 500:1 troop ratio needed for counter insurgency, Manticore would need 500,000 troops to occupy a planet with only one billion people. Occupying only 100 planets (1/2% of the SL with maybe only 1/10% of the population) with say 2 billion people each results in a need to police 200 billion people. Manticore wouldneed an army of 100 million.


The cost and trauma of multiple insurgencies would halt the RMN advance.

I think the problem with this strategy is the planets that are most likely to be "taken" by the Grand Alliance at least in the near term are ones in the Verge or Shell, that are already garrisoned by OFS. Sending in more OFS goons from off-planet wouldn't help much, since it is doubtful that they could blend in. One of the prerequisites for an even partially effective insurgency is a larger population that supports them, or at least is willing to turn a blind eye to what the insurgents are doing because they sympathize with the insurgents. This lets the insurgents blend into the population. When the population is opposed to what insurgents are doing, the insurgents tend to be outed much faster.

Also, many of the planets in the Verge or Shell (under OFS rule) already have their own homegrown insurgencies that are opposed to the Office of Frontier Security. Not to mention that the planetary populations hate OFS's and the transtellars' guts

The one place that this strategy might work (for a while) is on Kornati where there is already a homegrown insurgency opposed to the Star Empire. Even then, the strategy Firebrand took is probably the best - provide material support, but not manpower. And the support of the population for the insurgents will fade if they see the Star Empire making their lives better, and the insurgents carry out more and more extreme measures that the planetary population disapproves of.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by kzt   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 6:12 pm

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Evidence to date is that the amount of troops actually deployed by OFS is pretty small. They don't deploy garrisons as much as offer support to the puppet government.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by namelessfly   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 7:49 pm

namelessfly

I was thinking covert OF rather than overt.

Also, target planets that had already had a civil war which had Vicente OFS a pretext to invade

Vince wrote:
namelessfly wrote:The SLN will not beginning many space battles any time soon because of the technology advantage.

To buy time the SLN could prep insurgencies on planets at risk of being taken by the GA.

Deploy cadre of OFS goons trained in guerilla warfare and preposition weapons supplies. Identify and recruit people likely to be loyal to SL or reject Manticoran rule.

When the RMN takes the system, the insurgents revolt. Attacking any manticoran or Quadrant Guard troops is obvious. Attacking "collaborator" government or it's supporters is more effective. The SEM will then need to provide troops to garrison "liberated" planets or accept anarchy which is very bad PR.

Given the nominal 500:1 troop ratio needed for counter insurgency, Manticore would need 500,000 troops to occupy a planet with only one billion people. Occupying only 100 planets (1/2% of the SL with maybe only 1/10% of the population) with say 2 billion people each results in a need to police 200 billion people. Manticore wouldneed an army of 100 million.


The cost and trauma of multiple insurgencies would halt the RMN advance.

I think the problem with this strategy is the planets that are most likely to be "taken" by the Grand Alliance at least in the near term are ones in the Verge or Shell, that are already garrisoned by OFS. Sending in more OFS goons from off-planet wouldn't help much, since it is doubtful that they could blend in. One of the prerequisites for an even partially effective insurgency is a larger population that supports them, or at least is willing to turn a blind eye to what the insurgents are doing because they sympathize with the insurgents. This lets the insurgents blend into the population. When the population is opposed to what insurgents are doing, the insurgents tend to be outed much faster.

Also, many of the planets in the Verge or Shell (under OFS rule) already have their own homegrown insurgencies that are opposed to the Office of Frontier Security. Not to mention that the planetary populations hate OFS's and the transtellars' guts

The one place that this strategy might work (for a while) is on Kornati where there is already a homegrown insurgency opposed to the Star Empire. Even then, the strategy Firebrand took is probably the best - provide material support, but not manpower. And the support of the population for the insurgents will fade if they see the Star Empire making their lives better, and the insurgents carry out more and more extreme measures that the planetary population disapproves of.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by Crown Loyalist   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 8:10 pm

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The Manties are likely to have all kinds of insurgency problems even without League encouragement, and are a lot less likely to use KEWs to eliminate the problem. It's not a winning strategy for the League, though, because the Manties care more about taking the systems away from the League than they do about governing those systems.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by kzt   » Sat Mar 22, 2014 8:32 pm

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Crown Loyalist wrote:The Manties are likely to have all kinds of insurgency problems even without League encouragement, and are a lot less likely to use KEWs to eliminate the problem. It's not a winning strategy for the League, though, because the Manties care more about taking the systems away from the League than they do about governing those systems.

It depends.

There are two reason why you care about such matters. First is your internal laws and regulations, if you violate them you will have issues that get worse and worse. The second is public opinion, both the SEM and SL. Evicting OFS to turn a planet into Rwanda writ large will make the news everywhere, because the news in the SL is largely both directed by the MA and the SEM has not yet realized this, much less figured out how to deal with it.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by Crown Loyalist   » Sun Mar 23, 2014 12:06 am

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kzt wrote:It depends.

There are two reason why you care about such matters. First is your internal laws and regulations, if you violate them you will have issues that get worse and worse. The second is public opinion, both the SEM and SL. Evicting OFS to turn a planet into Rwanda writ large will make the news everywhere, because the news in the SL is largely both directed by the MA and the SEM has not yet realized this, much less figured out how to deal with it.


The fact of the matter is that David Weber's books are hugely optimistic about the protagonists abilities to fight/defeat/prevent insurgencies without being ruthless about it. A lot of these planets are going to turn into hopeless, hopeless quagmires. But, on the other hand, most of those planets have only not been hopeless quagmires because the people extracting all their wealth to fund the Solarian League's government have used ruthless tactics whenever anyone looked like they might get uppity.



Most of these worlds are effectively in civil wars that have been frozen because one side has KEWs and the will to use them and the other doesn't. Manticore is going to be unfreezing those civil wars (as Mesa's wrangling effectively did in Moebius).

The result is going to be some worlds the side that's been suppressed will be able to easily overwhelm their opposition once KEWs are out of the picture (as the resistance would have done in Moebius), and they'll be fighting small-scale insurgency until they find a way to incorporate all parties into a representative government.

Other worlds, the two sides will be more closely matched and you'll get vicious fighting.

Luckily, situations where the Solarian-favored government has the martial power to overwhelm Manticore's preferred non-Solarian partners in the absence of Solarian/Gendarme support should be rare, given Solarian policies in the verge.


The turning of these places into quagmires will not, however, in and of itself cause Manticore to lose the war. Manticore simply doesn't have the resources to fight them all, barring Terekhov's strategy of killing all the offworlders with a precision strike writ-large. It'll take the public opinion hit out of the inability to do anything else. That's not going to change the end result, though. The bad propaganda about Manticore ruining planets on the verge isn't likely to help the League stay together in the long-term.


Manticore needs to be building these planets back into stable ones. That means functional popular governments. That means everyone living on the planet needs to feel that their rights are protected by the government, including those who previously supported the Solarian protectorate arrangement and benefited from it. Or they need to get hit by a KEW.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by kzt   » Sun Mar 23, 2014 1:04 am

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Crown Loyalist wrote:The turning of these places into quagmires will not, however, in and of itself cause Manticore to lose the war. Manticore simply doesn't have the resources to fight them all, barring Terekhov's strategy of killing all the offworlders with a precision strike writ-large. It'll take the public opinion hit out of the inability to do anything else. That's not going to change the end result, though. The bad propaganda about Manticore ruining planets on the verge isn't likely to help the League stay together in the long-term.

You realize that the objective of the MA is the destruction of the SL? So no, of course that won't help the SL. Or the SEM.

Manticore needs to be building these planets back into stable ones. That means functional popular governments. That means everyone living on the planet needs to feel that their rights are protected by the government, including those who previously supported the Solarian protectorate arrangement and benefited from it. Or they need to get hit by a KEW.

It's more traditional and less destructive to the infrastructure to just shoot the people you can't get to to vote for you, along with their families. The SEM could assign that the the OFS troops they captured. The MA will be glad to supply the video coverage.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by namelessfly   » Sun Mar 23, 2014 1:38 am

namelessfly

I have been perplexed by Weber's account of the easy acceptance of OFS intervention in the Verge. The example of Mobius suggests that OFS intervenes when planets have civil wars that perhaps escalate to use of WMD or threaten to escalate to use of WMD. One can make a cogent argument that OFS intervention is justified to prevent genocide, but the OFS corruption enables the transtellar corporations to exploit the occupation to loot the system.

The Talbott annexation provoked turmoil that Mesa could exploit to incite insurgencies but it appears that there was no previous civil wars. Once Firebrand was exposed, Westman was willing to be peaceful. Tekerov was lucky to catch Nordblant's arms shipment. These two examples are not representative of what the RMN is likely to encounter as they liberate OFS planets. Afghanistan and Iraq would be more relevant examples. Both the Taliban and the Bath party had been suppressing conflicts that were 1,000 years old. Once the goons were gone, the various factions resumed hostilities against each other and attacked the US.

I would expect that Iraq and Afghanistan are more probable paradigms for the situations that the RMN is likely to encounter.

Adm Henke mentions the moral responsibility to provide security and maintain order at Meyers which she was unable to do without the active cooperation of the intact police forces because she had only a few thousand troops. She is unlikely to be so lucky.

Of course Adm Henke could follow the Arab Spring paradigm by just liberating systems from the OFS then just withdrawing to leave them in anarchy.


Crown Loyalist wrote:
kzt wrote:It depends.

There are two reason why you care about such matters. First is your internal laws and regulations, if you violate them you will have issues that get worse and worse. The second is public opinion, both the SEM and SL. Evicting OFS to turn a planet into Rwanda writ large will make the news everywhere, because the news in the SL is largely both directed by the MA and the SEM has not yet realized this, much less figured out how to deal with it.


The fact of the matter is that David Weber's books are hugely optimistic about the protagonists abilities to fight/defeat/prevent insurgencies without being ruthless about it. A lot of these planets are going to turn into hopeless, hopeless quagmires. But, on the other hand, most of those planets have only not been hopeless quagmires because the people extracting all their wealth to fund the Solarian League's government have used ruthless tactics whenever anyone looked like they might get uppity.



Most of these worlds are effectively in civil wars that have been frozen because one side has KEWs and the will to use them and the other doesn't. Manticore is going to be unfreezing those civil wars (as Mesa's wrangling effectively did in Moebius).

The result is going to be some worlds the side that's been suppressed will be able to easily overwhelm their opposition once KEWs are out of the picture (as the resistance would have done in Moebius), and they'll be fighting small-scale insurgency until they find a way to incorporate all parties into a representative government.

Other worlds, the two sides will be more closely matched and you'll get vicious fighting.

Luckily, situations where the Solarian-favored government has the martial power to overwhelm Manticore's preferred non-Solarian partners in the absence of Solarian/Gendarme support should be rare, given Solarian policies in the verge.


The turning of these places into quagmires will not, however, in and of itself cause Manticore to lose the war. Manticore simply doesn't have the resources to fight them all, barring Terekhov's strategy of killing all the offworlders with a precision strike writ-large. It'll take the public opinion hit out of the inability to do anything else. That's not going to change the end result, though. The bad propaganda about Manticore ruining planets on the verge isn't likely to help the League stay together in the long-term.


Manticore needs to be building these planets back into stable ones. That means functional popular governments. That means everyone living on the planet needs to feel that their rights are protected by the government, including those who previously supported the Solarian protectorate arrangement and benefited from it. Or they need to get hit by a KEW.
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Re: SLNwinning strategy, Insurgency.
Post by runsforcelery   » Sun Mar 23, 2014 6:48 am

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namelessfly wrote:
Crown Loyalist wrote:The fact of the matter is that David Weber's books are hugely optimistic about the protagonists abilities to fight/defeat/prevent insurgencies without being ruthless about it. A lot of these planets are going to turn into hopeless, hopeless quagmires. But, on the other hand, most of those planets have only not been hopeless quagmires because the people extracting all their wealth to fund the Solarian League's government have used ruthless tactics whenever anyone looked like they might get uppity.



Most of these worlds are effectively in civil wars that have been frozen because one side has KEWs and the will to use them and the other doesn't. Manticore is going to be unfreezing those civil wars (as Mesa's wrangling effectively did in Moebius).

The result is going to be some worlds the side that's been suppressed will be able to easily overwhelm their opposition once KEWs are out of the picture (as the resistance would have done in Moebius), and they'll be fighting small-scale insurgency until they find a way to incorporate all parties into a representative government.

Other worlds, the two sides will be more closely matched and you'll get vicious fighting.

Luckily, situations where the Solarian-favored government has the martial power to overwhelm Manticore's preferred non-Solarian partners in the absence of Solarian/Gendarme support should be rare, given Solarian policies in the verge.


The turning of these places into quagmires will not, however, in and of itself cause Manticore to lose the war. Manticore simply doesn't have the resources to fight them all, barring Terekhov's strategy of killing all the offworlders with a precision strike writ-large. It'll take the public opinion hit out of the inability to do anything else. That's not going to change the end result, though. The bad propaganda about Manticore ruining planets on the verge isn't likely to help the League stay together in the long-term.


Manticore needs to be building these planets back into stable ones. That means functional popular governments. That means everyone living on the planet needs to feel that their rights are protected by the government, including those who previously supported the Solarian protectorate arrangement and benefited from it. Or they need to get hit by a KEW.



I'm a little too tired at the moment to deal with this at any great length, but you seem to be misreading the situation in the Verge quite badly in some respects.

There are, indeed, systems which have been openly taken over, lock, stock, and ballot box, by the OFS with system governors installed to control every aspect of the local government. These systems, however, are quite rare. Many (though by no means all) of them are the consequence of the sort of shooting or cold war situation you have described above, and the OFS presence is very open and overbearing in those instances.

The more common OFS methodology, however, is to worm its way into, corrupt, and then prop up a local government (which was not in the throes of civil war or anything of the sort) through advice, the supply of weapons and other technology, and covert operations which are normally carried out with the knowledge and consent of the official local government. This is the case for the systems which are controlled directly (if invisibly) by OFS (and milked for the funds the SL government requires). In systems which have been handed over to one of the transtellars to be run as wholly owned subsidiaries in return for hefty "fee" payments into the SL government coffers, OFS (normally) fades into the background while the transtellars in question find accommodating local front men of their own to form nice, legal governments which simply want to do whatever the transtellars think might be a good idea.

The Talbott Sector came under none of these models. The one OFS planned to extend to it would have consisted of offering someone like the New Tuscany oligarchs all the money they can steal as long as they're willing to be the League front men, propped up by League economic manipulation, advisers, technology, etc. The propaganda the MA leveled against the Manties inside the Sector was effective in direct proportion to the extent to which the locals could be convinced that Manticore intended to do exactly the same thing OFS would have done. Once it became evident that the Manties weren't interested in cutting sweetheart deals with cliques already in power --- and, in fact, insisted upon the extension of a sector-wide franchise limited only by the need to pay taxes in order to qualify --- it cut the legs out from under most of the potential local resistance movements. Political posturing, splinter groups, and even the occasional lunatic bomber may still be out there, but there's nowhere near the level of unrest which might threaten the general domestic peace or the processes of government.

Any propaganda value the MA got out of the Talbott annexation in the League, on the other hand, couldn't bother the Manties less (see below). For that matter, most of the outrage in the League stems more from the notion that the Manties might get in before OFS or --- even worse --- be preferable to OFS and the League in the locals' eyes.

In the case of the planets under outright, open OFS control, the Manties may well find occupation inevitable, at least in the short term. In the case of planets with existing constitutions which are simply being twisted/used to empower a façade democracy (or whatever) with the OFS operating behind the scenes, the only thing the Manties can do, morally and pragmatically, is to encourage the formation of some sort of coalition government to get the official constitution up and running properly (with amendments as needed) or write a new one from scratch, with Manty economic support to encourage economic stability and the provision of training cadres for military and security forces. In the case of governments which are basically fronts shilling for the transtellars, another variant of the coalition government/constitutional convention would have to be pursued.

The Manties have absolutely no interest in adding anyone to the SEM except on a purely voluntary --- as in "They asked us if we'd let them join" --- basis. They feel no obligation to replace one bad outside controlling power with another one, even if the new one might be "better" for the locals, and while their starship captains may wear white berets, Manticore does not see itself as the moral arbiter of other star nations.

You might be surprised by how willing they'll be to break a few eggs if they absolutely have to, but the reasons would have to be pretty damned compelling (and consist of more than "But you've got money and an open system of government so of course it's your responsibility to help us!"), and if they do feel their national interest requires them to intervene, they won't give a good goddamn for what the SL or the MA may do with that propaganda-wise. There is no Manticoran equivalent of the White Man's Burden, and despite the Liberals' posturing and vapors over Medusa, they're actually pretty damned pragmatic. Moreover, they already know all about negative propaganda, having been hammered with it throughout the Havenite Wars, and there's not a hell of a lot SL or MA propagandists can do that's likely to affect any of the relationships which are really critical to them: Haven, Beowulf, the Andermani, Grayson, Smoking Frog, etc.

Manticore will be perfectly willing to keep a lid on any sort of interstellar adventurism in the Verge, but self-determination is really high on their list of values. They'll keep other people from interfering; aside from that, it's up to the people who frigging live there to decide what they want to do with their lives and their planet. If the locals screw up badly enough to produce a Rawanda-like situation (which, by the way, is highly unlikely on most Verge planets), the GA as a whole might well see no option but to intervene, but it's very unlikely Manticore is going to be doing any nation-building with the dewy-eyed belief that "All we have to do is explain democracy to them, and of course they'll embrace it!"


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