kzt wrote:namelessfly wrote:All Weberhad todotomake that aspect of BoM credible is have Honor wait until Chin was inside the hyper limit then annihilate herewith repeated salvos of quadruple stacked Apollo pods. Home Fleet seemed to screw up by the numbers, but given the context of how the fleet at Zanzibar was defeated it was a plausible judgement call.
I'm not at all certain that 5th would have entered the hyperlimit. 2nd was perfectly capable of crushing what was left of the defences. At bast I'd expect that 5th would go to Manticore B and "open negotiations" there.
The assumption by HH that 5th wouldn't hyper out seems really odd. Chin had already blowed up 3rd, so her work was done, and she knew this new fleet almost had to be 8th. She knew that 8th had Apollo, she just didn't know how much or what range. She also had just seen 8th fire off half their ammo from crazy long, range, which seems very odd given that all the other RMN units had closed to less than 50% of max powered range before shooting.
It all seems very suspicious. So why hang around instead of hyper jumping either closer into 8th or to either Manticore B or just the other side of Manticore A? Or just crossing the wall for a few minutes until the missiles are gone?
Plus the whole idea that the missiles can't find 5th seems odd. It's not like 5th is hard to see on a grav sensor, and IIRC, the command loop time is still short enough to make it work by simply telling the missiles where to start looking for 5th and the search algorithm to use.
Sigh.
I’ve given a relatively detailed description of the reasoning involved in the Battle of Manticore (and the decision to deploy Apollo with Eighth Fleet), which I believe has, in fact, been cited by another poster in this thread. I believe that KZT actually agreed that the Manticoran decision on where and how to deploy Apollo was plausible, but this seems to be the Topic That Will Not Die.
I have also explained that (1) a passage in which the reader was given the maximum theoretical range of Apollo, as determined by Haven’s analysts, was accidentally deleted because I decided to move it from where it originally appeared to a more logical point in the manuscript (as a briefing to Chin and Tourville before the operation was mounted) and failed to actually get it reinserted in the editing process and that (2) people seem to persistently forget that there is a cycle time built into hyper generators. You don’t simply turn the key and jump into hyper, and Chin’s “left it just too late” is because even from a ready state, there is still an unavoidable minimum cycle/activation time on the generator. Her original estimate that Honor had fired that missile storm as some sort of bluff to convince her to hyper out instead of continuing the engagement against Third Fleet’s remnants was the result of the briefing she’d been given on the maximum effective range of the Apollo control link. Her natural tactical instincts overcame that original estimate very quickly, really, but it took her long enough for instinct and experience to overcome faulty intel that her fleet was caught with hyper generators still cycling when Honor’s salvo arrived. I don’t think it’s possible to explain any more clearly than that why she didn’t try “hyper jumping either closer into 8th or to either Manticore B or just the other side of Manticore A? Or just crossing the wall for a few minutes until the missiles are gone?” She couldn’t do any of the above in the time window she had, given her initial response based on the intelligence briefing preceding Operation Beatrice.
She clearly understood that Honor’s arriving forces were Eighth Fleet, and as KZT indicated, she knew (or realized when Honor arrived, at any rate) that what she had thought was Eighth Fleet was, in fact, Kusak’s Third Fleet. However, she (1) didn’t know what percentage of Eighth Fleet had Apollo to begin with, (2) did know that the fleet she’d just shot to pieces had possessed at least some of the RMN’s Apollo platforms, and (3) believed that she was beyond effective Apollo range of Eighth Fleet (for reasons discussed — again — above). She therefore had every reason to consider hanging around to beat up on the new arrivals (if possible) rather than simply abandoning Second Fleet, which was trapped inside the hyper limit. She was there not simply to mousetrap Eighth Fleet and/or Third Fleet, but to watch Second Fleet’s back. The instant that she concluded that she must, in fact, be inside rather than outside the Apollo envelope, she ordered her entire force to hyper out. Had she hypered out before Honor’s salvo gutted her force, she would have returned to at least find out what the heck had happened and do what she could to retrieve the situation. After her command was hammered, she no longer had that option.
Namelessfly’s idea that Honor should simply have waited until Chin entered the hyper limit is based on the assumption that Chin would have been stupid enough to do that, which she would not have been. She could engage Eighth Fleet (assuming that Eighth Fleet hadn’t had enough Apollo capacity to kick her butt) from outside the limit, and what was left of Lester Tourville’s command was more than adequate to deal with what was left of Theodosia Kuzak’s command. In other words, if the battle was winnable at all, there was no need for her to enter an area of space where she would be pinned and unable to retreat into hyper, and she wouldn’t have done it.
In another thread, dealing with events related to the same battle, it’s been proposed that Thomas Theisman should have resigned or been fired after the disastrous failure of Operation Beatrice. That the Haven Navy should have mutinied before undertaking such an obviously “suicidal” mission. And, in what I believe is yet another thread, that Theisman should have opened the war with an Operation Beatrice. For that matter, I believe it’s been argued that Amos Parnell and Sidney Harris should have opened the first round of the Havenite Wars with a decapitation strike on Manticore. Then there is the assertion that Manticore understands offensive operations but sucks at the offensive operations.
This is just . . . wrong, people.
Thomas Theisman was both Minister of Defense and Chief of Naval Operations, but he was also the fellow who had restored the Republic and win a multi-year, multi-sided civil war which had prevented the reimposition of StateSec rule not simply in the Haven System itself, but anywhere else in the one-time People’s Republic of Haven. He was the officer who had rebuilt a modernized Navy, who had produced a stunning series of initial victories over the Manticoran Alliance after the resumption of hostilities, and who every single serving man and woman of the Republican Navy knew — they didn’t just think; they knew — had their backs in a way that none of their previous “national command authority” (Legislaturalist or Committee of Public Safety) ever had. The senior officers mounting the operation thoroughly understood the basis of his logic, and I remind all of you again that his assessment of the degree to which Apollo had been deployed by Manticore was essentially correct. So, he’s the highly competent, highly trusted, venerated savior of his nation and the source of his Navy’s tactical, strategic, and moral salvation, who has produced an entire series of victories, the other side has resumed hostilities after deep-sixing an agreed-upon peace conference, his Navy’s senior officers know that the clock is ticking on any conceivable window of victory thanks to a technological superiority they can't overcome but may be able to preempt, and his head of state has ordered the operation as the Republic of Haven’s commander-in-chief. Against that background, his officers and personnel are supposed to mutiny against him? In what conceivable universe would that have happened? This wasn’t a case of the High Seas Fleet being ordered to carry out a clearly and obviously suicidal military operation when the men and officers aboard the ships knew that their political masters were already negotiating their nation’s surrender. If you really want something to compare this to, try the Battle of Midway and ask yourself how many of the men aboard those carriers — on either side — would have mutinied because their orders were “suicidal.”
As for firing him or his deciding to resign his post following the Battle of Manticore, why should he? True, his navy lost the battle, but the “winners” had been reduced solely to the units of Eighth Fleet and his basic reasoning for launching Operation Beatrice had been demonstrated to be valid. The men and women of the Republican Navy didn’t blame him for what had happened to them, and he’d done what it was exactly his job to do: come up with the best available strategy to achieve the war aims — and simple survival — of his star nation and its system of government. He lost the battle, but the only legitimate reason to fire a military commander for losing is when he loses the battle through incompetence, and that was clearly not the case here. Moreover, removing him from command would have been more demoralizing to the RHN, not less. The only way he would have been fired — or would have chosen to resign — was if Eloise Pritchart had decided that she needed a scapegoat for the consequences of Operation Beatrice for political reasons, and Eloise Pritchart doesn’t think that way.
I’m not going to dignify the argument that Manticore doesn’t understand defensive strategy and/or operations with a response.
As for the notion that the Manticore Binary System ought to have been crushed by either Amos Parnell at the beginning of the first round of the Havenite Wars or by Thomas Theisman instead of launching Operation Thunderbolt, can we say “Monday morning quarterbacking”?
As has been pointed out, Roger Winton had presented Sidney Harris and Amos Parnell with a problem they'd never faced before — a large, astrographically dispersed, Hydra-headed opponent. They were dealing with a multi-star system strategic problem for just about the first time in galactic military history, and they had to worry about their own rear area security. They also knew that Manticore had a technological advantage, although they badly underestimated the extent of that advantage. They'd analyzed the RMN’s deployment stance, and they knew that Home Fleet was being maintained at a strength which Manticore (who knew exactly what the Manticore Binary System’s fixed defenses consisted of) believed was adequate to defeat the heaviest attack Haven was likely to be able to mount, but that significant numbers of Manticoran (and Allied) units were dispersed among the associated minor star systems and bases of the Manticoran Alliance. As a consequence, it was entirely logical of them to conclude that with the advantage of the aggressor they could inflict punishing losses on the RMN’s ship strength in a series of defeats in detail. Remember that Parnell was “mouse trapped” at Yeltsin’s Star. Haven had the advantage of knowing when, where, and how it meant to attack. That meant it should achieve at least tactical surprise and that it was in a position to concentrate what ought to have been overwhelming force against isolated detachments of the enemy fleet. Absent the extent to which Manticore’s technological advantage surpassed their prewar estimates and absent the disinformation Patricia Givens fed them about the state of Yeltsin’s defenses, they would have succeeded in their objectives and Manticore would have found itself severely weakened for the attritional warfare which would almost certainly have followed that initial Peep success.
Even given the . . . unfortunate results of the initial Peep operations of the First Havenite War, the Peoples Navy remained substantially stronger than the RMN and its allies. The Pierre coup and the Committee of Public Safety’s reign of terror had a calamitous effect on the survivors of the war’s opening battles. I think you can safely assume that had Parnell, his command team, and the experienced Legislaturalist senior officers corps, remained intact rather than being effectively totally eliminated by the Committee the degree of operational and strategic clumsiness upon which Hamish Alexander and the rest of the RMN capitalized would have been much less pronounced.
As for Theisman’s failure to “Beatrice” the Manticoran home system in the opening phase of the Second Havenite War, why in God’s name should he have done anything of the sort? Neither he nor Eloise Pritchart wanted to conquer the Star Kingdom of Manticore. They had limited military objectives. I trust most of you will be aware of how the United States of America reacted to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The essential Japanese war aims were to carve out the overseas empire it thought it required (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere) and then make the price tag to break up that empire sufficiently painful that the United States and/or its allies would choose to negotiate instead and leave them with what they considered to be there minimal actual requirements. If you will recall, that strategy proved . . . less than ideal, and one reason it did was because the attack on US territory galvanized the US' readiness to fight and pretty much blew away any traces of US isolationism. How do you think the US would have reacted if Japan had begun the war by attacking Los Angeles, New York, and Washington DC, instead of Pearl Harbor? How do you think Japan would have expected the US to react to that sort of attack? An all-out assault on the Manticore Binary System, would have left Pritchart no option but to seek the total military defeat of the Star Kingdom, which was never her objective until after the Manticoran introduction of Apollo, cancellation of the peace conference, and resumption of operations convinced her that her only remaining options were to secure the total defeat of Manticore or accept the total defeat of the Republic of Haven.
One may argue with Pritchart’s reasons for resuming hostilities and one may argue with her war aims, but within that framework (which was the one in which Theisman was responsible for operating), Theisman’s strategy was just about infinitely superior to the notion of launching an all-out attack on the Manty home system. Indeed, the one faulty element I deliberately built into Theisman’s opening strategy was the decision to send Tourville off to Silesia. That was a mistake, although it wouldn’t have been remotely near a fatal mistake without the introduction of Apollo.
