n7axw wrote:I'm not convinced we will see widespread desertions or even mutiny unless some fleet crews become convinced that their idiot of an admiral is deliberately leading them into a suicidal situation.
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The real rot seems to be in the officer corps, especially its upper ranks. But what little we know of the lower ranks, that is noncom and down, gives us no reason to believe that its personell will be less commited to its duty than any other military would be.
Don
The long-service personnel will be people who have come to accept the nature of that officer corps though. They may have cherished the ideal of the League when they enlisted, and had it reinforced during training, but since then, they've had decades to discover this isn't the SLN of their dreams of youth - it's the SLN of Joseph Byng, Sandra Crandall, Massimo Filareta, Rajampet Rajani. It's a tool of the OFS, of the transtellars - at its
best, of corrupt bureaucrats and decadent and corrupt naval dynasties.
Some of them are carrying on out of professionalism. Some - few - may combine that professionalism with some degree of patriotism for a nation they
know does not deserve it, like many officers (maybe NCO's too) of the late PRN, in the last years of the Legislaturalists or the CPS. But a lot of them, I'd figure most, are carrying on because they can live with that SLN. They can claim their own smaller cut of the take, benefit from petty corruption. That, and/or they saw it as a job with tremendous security, security that has decisively
ended. (Think of the miscreants aboard HMS Wayfarer in Silesia, who'd been kept by the RMN despite being disciplinary hazards precisely because they needed every capable body for the war - and those capable bodies, in this case, had zero interest in participating in a war when they realized it was on and serious.)
In the case of either of those motivations, the seasoned NCO's are not sorts ready to die for the League. They may, at best, not have an effective plan for getting out of the line of fire, and may well be doing their professional best deep inside a superdreadnought that's become a target. But if they had a shot at a mutiny that would deliver them from being under RMN guns, they'd leap at it.
