Strategic Planning

Since this is SL Strategic Planning, I don't know that there is any at all. There is striking out like petulant brats who never learned self discipline or that the other guy should be taken seriously. Kind of an echo chamber.....

kenl511 wrote:Since this is SL Strategic Planning, I don't know that there is any at all. There is striking out like petulant brats who never learned self discipline or that the other guy should be taken seriously. Kind of an echo chamber.....

That is an incredible simplification. They are looking for victories because they need them politically. The GA has armed up its planets. They tried Manticore. They tried Spindle.

Going after merchant ships creates some problems since you never know where they ships are. But if you go near ports you can wait for them to come for you.

Easiest to do it with neutrals. Take a look at wars here in Earth. The neutrals get dumped on particularly if they're not all that strong.

So there has been some thought to the policy. The problem is that the situation is actually hopeless.

kenl511 wrote:Since this is SL Strategic Planning, I don't know that there is any at all. There is striking out like petulant brats who never learned self discipline or that the other guy should be taken seriously. Kind of an echo chamber.....

To be fair (although it's hard to be fair to the Sollies) they had a very well established, longstanding doctrine for what to do when confronted by hostilities with another star system, and they did it. Filareta represented what had been standing BF doctrine for centuries, especially where a single-star star nation (which, let's face it, the SEM still is in may ways) was concerned. You gather overwhelming force and you steamroller your way through the defenders, taking whatever losses that may entail, until you control the system. At that point, the other side has to surrender and the war is over.

Rajampet had set Filareta's fleet up precisely according to The Book, before any of the details of what had happened to Crandall reached the Sol System. Once those details started coming in — and remember how absolutely incredible, literally, they sounded to anybody in Old Chicago except Daud al-Fanudahi and Irene Teague — the SLN responded by forwarding a new missile to Filareta which represented a quantum leap in the SLN's long-range combat capability. They had no meterstick to realize that, great as that leap was for them, it only put their capabilities hopelessly behind the Grand Alliance's, not totally behind the GA's. Moreover, nobody in Old Chicago had any reason whatsoever to expect that there was a Grand Alliance (since there wasn't when Filareta was dispatched). There was absolutely no reason for them to suspect that the Republic of Haven was going to stand up beside Manticore rather than cheering the Sollies on as they dealt with the star nation with which Haven had been at war for 20-plus years. Frankly, not even Daud or Irene would have seen that one coming.

Now, none of that includes the fact that Rajampet was in the pocket of the Alignment, whether he knew the true identity of his employers or not. So while we are commenting on how stupid the SLN is, we need to remember that as readers you have a hell of a lot more information than anyone in Old Chicago had when Operation Raging Justice was authorized. And among that information you have — and Battle Fleet didn't have — is the fact that not even the Cataphract comes remotely close to matching either the range, the accuracy, or the sheer volume of fire that can be laid down by Grand Alliance podnoughts.

One can certainly argue that the SLN darned well ought to have been much more "situationally aware" of what was going on in the Haven Sector. The fact remains that it wasn't.

In the naval fighting around Guadalcanal in 1942, the American navy was unaware of the range and weight of warhead of the Long Lance torpedo. Even after American destroyers and cruisers started taking torpedo hits at ranges far beyond any range of which an American torpedo would have been capable, the in-theater commanders were as unable as their superiors back in Washington to draw the (theoretically) obvious conclusion that they had grossly underestimated the range Japanese torpedoes could reach. They persisted in assuming that submarines must have been present, because obviously no surface-launched torpedo could have reached their cruisers' gun line.

The situations aren't exact parallels, of course, but it is true that the USN in the 1920s and 1930s had not made a concerted effort to gather additional intelligence data on the Imperial Japanese Navy. Yes, there were language difficulties, but they definitely weren't insurmountable if anyone had chosen to make the effort. They didn't choose to primarily because of complacency. They already "knew" everything they needed to know or could obtain the intelligence they needed from openly available sources. As the war clouds darkened at the end of the decade, they became increasingly aware of the fact that they had very poor deep intelligence on their probable Pacific opponent and began attempting to address that weakness: the code breaking operation at Pearl Harbor is a case in point. However, that navy had been their designated number one opponent for something close to 40 years by 1941. There was a reason that Theodore Roosevelt sent the "Great White Fleet" around the world with specific orders to visit Japan after the Russo-Japanese War, and War Plan Orange (for war against Japan) had been considered far more likely to be needed — and received far more attention in planning and exercises — than the possibility of war against any other opponent. Despite that, they didn't make the effort to secure better intelligence until extraordinarily late in the game.

The SLN didn't spare much of a thought for potential opponents because there weren't any. The neobarbs out in the Haven Sector might be shooting each other, but none of them could conceivably be stupid enough to pick a fight with the Solarian League. And, in fact, that supposition was justified if you look at how concerned Queen Elizabeth and her government were over the potential consequences of Aivars Terekhov having attacked Monica, a Solarian League proxy, and the possibility of a major reaction from the SLN while Manticore was still at war with Haven.

Crandall's defeat at Spindle was regarded by the SLN in general as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor. Obviously, the nefarious and evil Manties had deliberately drawn her into an attack against a star system where they'd spent months – probably years! — building a defense net built around millions of missile pods. The problem wasn't that Manty missiles had been qualitatively superior but simply that they had been available in overwhelming numbers.

That was the go-to conclusion of almost every Solarian analyst. Daud and Irene would have disagreed, but no one was asking them. After all, everyone Daud had spent years trying to warn "knew" that he was a lunatic alarmist, and that being the case, they could already predict what he would say: "Look! Look! I told you the Manties were 3 meters tall and picked their teeth with light cruisers!" Despite that, Filareta was delayed long enough to receive the new missiles.

He then turned up at Manticore, realized that the "lunatic alarmists" had been right all along, and promptly passed the order for his fleet to surrender without firing a shot. There was, however, a minor and unfortunate glitch in the execution of that order. It is not fair, however, to blame Filareta for having misread the disastrous tactical situation into which he had strayed — including that minor matter of the sworn enemies in Landing and Nouveau Paris having suddenly somehow become sworn allies. However intelligent and capable he might have been, he was an officer of a peacetime navy, with no actual fleet combat experience, up against the what were probably the three most war-hardened and experienced navies in galactic history. It really shouldn't be that surprising that Honor was able to "shape the battlefield" so disastrously (from his perspective) given the sheer imbalance in experience and the intelligence available to the opposing fleet commanders. Once he realized what he was up against, he reacted very intelligently to the "argument" Honor presented to him. It wasn't his fault that the Alignment had foreseen that possibility and taken steps to ensure that he couldn't get away with it.

By the time Unconquered begins, Filareta's disaster at Manticore is barely 2 months in the past. The Solarian League already knows what happened because Manticore passed the word via Beowulf, but they've still had very little time to internalize the Lessons Learned. And, to make matters worse, the only information they have on what actually happened to Filareta comes from the Grand Alliance, and therefore has to be considered suspect. (And I would argue that they are absolutely right about looking very skeptically at any information voluntarily provided by their adversaries.)

Despite that, Kingsford has assimilated what happened sufficiently to tell Kolokoltsov that Battle Fleet's entire superdreadnought force is now obsolete and that sending it into combat against a Grand Alliance wall of battle would basically be an act of murder on the part of its own commanders. This is not the response of a stupid man who never bothers to think about appropriate strategy and tactics. (For that matter, it takes a lot of intellectual courage and intestinal fortitude to tell your political masters that the enormous navy they've spent uncounted trillions of credits building and maintaining has just become obsolete overnight.)

Which brings us to Operation Buccaneer. As you get into the book, you'll find a little more about Buccaneer's antecedents, but the bottom line is that Kingsford drew the appropriate conclusion virtually as soon as news of Second Manticore reached Old Chicago. It took Rajampet's suicide to put him into a position to do anything about that conclusion, but he recognized — and accepted, however bitterly humiliating he must have found it as a senior Battle Fleet flag officer — that the navy in which he had served for an entire lifetime was, at best, a second-rate and more probably a third-rate fleet. Despite that, he's charged with somehow fighting the Grand Alliance. Does he think that Buccaneer is a wonderful idea? No, he doesn't. Does he think it would be better to raid the Manties' commerce? Yes, he does. The problem is how he gets at it and what happens when his raiding battlecruisers run into a division of Rolands and get themselves blown out of space without scratching the escorts' paint. (And he has pretty conclusive evidence that that is precisely what could happen.) Moreover, he's the CNO; unlike Rajampet, he is not a Mandarin, and he's charged with carrying out the policy selected by his civilian superiors.

Buccaneer is a deeply flawed response to the threat posed by the grand alliance. That's abundantly clear to us, because we know fully how out-classed the SLN is, and because we are looking in from the perspective of the Grand Alliance rather than looking out from the perspective of an "inside the Kuiper" aparatchik. Kingsford doesn't want to launch Buccaneer. Unfortunately, it's not his call at the end of the day. His only options if ordered to proceed with Buccaneer are to obey or to resign in protest . . . and God only knows who the increasingly desperate Mandarins would nominate to replace him. The one thing he can be sure of is that it wouldn't be someone they expected to follow his example and protest or refuse the orders of his superiors.

It's very easy to decide that the Sollies are all idiots because they keep running back into the buzz saw. What needs to be remembered is that they haven't really been running back into it all that long at this point, and it takes a while for information that doesn't simply challenge but actively demolishes a centuries-long mindset — especially a mindset which has been validated by uninterrupted success for all those centuries — to work its way through the neural net of something the size of the Solarian League and its Navy.

Some of the officers we've seen at the pointy end, like Tamaguchi up against Scotty Tremaine and Sir Horace, definitely have working brains and are obviously willing to accept at least the possibility that the Grand Alliance's war-fighting tech is significantly superior to their own. They, unfortunately, are not the folks back in Old Chicago who are making — and who have to make — decisions where grand strategy is concerned. That doesn't mean there's no one in Old Chicago with a functioning brain. It simply means that they've only had a few months to start trying to find those functioning brains and by any objective standard (except that required for survival, of course) demanding that they do it faster than they have is just a might unreasonable.

runsforcelery wrote:The SLN didn't spare much of a thought for potential opponents because there weren't any. The neobarbs out in the Haven Sector might be shooting each other, but none of them could conceivably be stupid enough to pick a fight with the Solarian League.

FWIW, it seemed to my like a confrontation between Haven and the League would have been all but inevitable if the People's Republic managed to defeat Manticore (and later the Andermani), given the nature of the Legislaturalists and the Committee, even if the Alignment wasn't intending to actively provoke that confrontation.

runsforcelery wrote:

kenl511 wrote:Since this is SL Strategic Planning, I don't know that there is any at all. There is striking out like petulant brats who never learned self discipline or that the other guy should be taken seriously. Kind of an echo chamber.....

To be fair (although it's hard to be fair to the Sollies) they had a very well established, longstanding doctrine for what to do when confronted by hostilities with another star system, and they did it. Filareta represented what had been standing BF doctrine for centuries, especially where a single-star star nation (which, let's face it, the SEM still is in may ways) was concerned. You gather overwhelming force and you steamroller your way through the defenders, taking whatever losses that may entail, until you control the system. At that point, the other side has to surrender and the war is over.

Rajampet had set Filareta's fleet up precisely according to The Book, before any of the details of what had happened to Crandall reached the Sol System. Once those details started coming in — and remember how absolutely incredible, literally, they sounded to anybody in Old Chicago except Daud al-Fanudahi and Irene Teague — the SLN responded by forwarding a new missile to Filareta which represented a quantum leap in the SLN's long-range combat capability. They had no meterstick to realize that, great as that leap was for them, it only put their capabilities hopelessly behind the Grand Alliance's, not totally behind the GA's. Moreover, nobody in Old Chicago had any reason whatsoever to expect that there was a Grand Alliance (since there wasn't when Filareta was dispatched). There was absolutely no reason for them to suspect that the Republic of Haven was going to stand up beside Manticore rather than cheering the Sollies on as they dealt with the star nation with which Haven had been at war for 20-plus years. Frankly, not even Daud or Irene would have seen that one coming.

Now, none of that includes the fact that Rajampet was in the pocket of the Alignment, whether he knew the true identity of his employers or not. So while we are commenting on how stupid the SLN is, we need to remember that as readers you have a hell of a lot more information than anyone in Old Chicago had when Operation Raging Justice was authorized. And among that information you have — and Battle Fleet didn't have — is the fact that not even the Cataphract comes remotely close to matching either the range, the accuracy, or the sheer volume of fire that can be laid down by Grand Alliance podnoughts.

One can certainly argue that the SLN darned well ought to have been much more "situationally aware" of what was going on in the Haven Sector. The fact remains that it wasn't.

In the naval fighting around Guadalcanal in 1942, the American navy was unaware of the range and weight of warhead of the Long Lance torpedo. Even after American destroyers and cruisers started taking torpedo hits at ranges far beyond any range of which an American torpedo would have been capable, the in-theater commanders were as unable as their superiors back in Washington to draw the (theoretically) obvious conclusion that they had grossly underestimated the range Japanese torpedoes could reach. They persisted in assuming that submarines must have been present, because obviously no surface-launched torpedo could have reached their cruisers' gun line.

The situations aren't exact parallels, of course, but it is true that the USN in the 1920s and 1930s had not made a concerted effort to gather additional intelligence data on the Imperial Japanese Navy. Yes, there were language difficulties, but they definitely weren't insurmountable if anyone had chosen to make the effort. They didn't choose to primarily because of complacency. They already "knew" everything they needed to know or could obtain the intelligence they needed from openly available sources. As the war clouds darkened at the end of the decade, they became increasingly aware of the fact that they had very poor deep intelligence on their probable Pacific opponent and began attempting to address that weakness: the code breaking operation at Pearl Harbor is a case in point. However, that navy had been their designated number one opponent for something close to 40 years by 1941. There was a reason that Theodore Roosevelt sent the "Great White Fleet" around the world with specific orders to visit Japan after the Russo-Japanese War, and War Plan Orange (for war against Japan) had been considered far more likely to be needed — and received far more attention in planning and exercises — than the possibility of war against any other opponent. Despite that, they didn't make the effort to secure better intelligence until extraordinarily late in the game.

The SLN didn't spare much of a thought for potential opponents because there weren't any. The neobarbs out in the Haven Sector might be shooting each other, but none of them could conceivably be stupid enough to pick a fight with the Solarian League. And, in fact, that supposition was justified if you look at how concerned Queen Elizabeth and her government were over the potential consequences of Aivars Terekhov having attacked Monica, a Solarian League proxy, and the possibility of a major reaction from the SLN while Manticore was still at war with Haven.

Crandall's defeat at Spindle was regarded by the SLN in general as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor. Obviously, the nefarious and evil Manties had deliberately drawn her into an attack against a star system where they'd spent months – probably years! — building a defense net built around millions of missile pods. The problem wasn't that Manty missiles had been qualitatively superior but simply that they had been available in overwhelming numbers.

That was the go-to conclusion of almost every Solarian analyst. Daud and Irene would have disagreed, but no one was asking them. After all, everyone Daud had spent years trying to warn "knew" that he was a lunatic alarmist, and that being the case, they could already predict what he would say: "Look! Look! I told you the Manties were 3 meters tall and picked their teeth with light cruisers!" Despite that, Filareta was delayed long enough to receive the new missiles.

He then turned up at Manticore, realized that the "lunatic alarmists" had been right all along, and promptly passed the order for his fleet to surrender without firing a shot. There was, however, a minor and unfortunate glitch in the execution of that order. It is not fair, however, to blame Filareta for having misread the disastrous tactical situation into which he had strayed — including that minor matter of the sworn enemies in Landing and Nouveau Paris having suddenly somehow become sworn allies. However intelligent and capable he might have been, he was an officer of a peacetime navy, with no actual fleet combat experience, up against the what were probably the three most war-hardened and experienced navies in galactic history. It really shouldn't be that surprising that Honor was able to "shape the battlefield" so disastrously (from his perspective) given the sheer imbalance in experience and the intelligence available to the opposing fleet commanders. Once he realized what he was up against, he reacted very intelligently to the "argument" Honor presented to him. It wasn't his fault that the Alignment had foreseen that possibility and taken steps to ensure that he couldn't get away with it.

By the time Unconquered begins, Filareta's disaster at Manticore is barely 2 months in the past. The Solarian League already knows what happened because Manticore passed the word via Beowulf, but they've still had very little time to internalize the Lessons Learned. And, to make matters worse, the only information they have on what actually happened to Filareta comes from the Grand Alliance, and therefore has to be considered suspect. (And I would argue that they are absolutely right about looking very skeptically at any information voluntarily provided by their adversaries.)

Despite that, Kingsford has assimilated what happened sufficiently to tell Kolokoltsov that Battle Fleet's entire superdreadnought force is now obsolete and that sending it into combat against a Grand Alliance wall of battle would basically be an act of murder on the part of its own commanders. This is not the response of a stupid man who never bothers to think about appropriate strategy and tactics. (For that matter, it takes a lot of intellectual courage and intestinal fortitude to tell your political masters that the enormous navy they've spent uncounted trillions of credits building and maintaining has just become obsolete overnight.)

Which brings us to Operation Buccaneer. As you get into the book, you'll find a little more about Buccaneer's antecedents, but the bottom line is that Kingsford drew the appropriate conclusion virtually as soon as news of Second Manticore reached Old Chicago. It took Rajampet's suicide to put him into a position to do anything about that conclusion, but he recognized — and accepted, however bitterly humiliating he must have found it as a senior Battle Fleet flag officer — that the navy in which he had served for an entire lifetime was, at best, a second-rate and more probably a third-rate fleet. Despite that, he's charged with somehow fighting the Grand Alliance. Does he think that Buccaneer is a wonderful idea? No, he doesn't. Does he think it would be better to raid the Manties' commerce? Yes, he does. The problem is how he gets at it and what happens when his raiding battlecruisers run into a division of Rolands and get themselves blown out of space without scratching the escorts' paint. (And he has pretty conclusive evidence that that is precisely what could happen.) Moreover, he's the CNO; unlike Rajampet, he is not a Mandarin, and he's charged with carrying out the policy selected by his civilian superiors.

Buccaneer is a deeply flawed response to the threat posed by the grand alliance. That's abundantly clear to us, because we know fully how out-classed the SLN is, and because we are looking in from the perspective of the Grand Alliance rather than looking out from the perspective of an "inside the Kuiper" aparatchik. Kingsford doesn't want to launch Buccaneer. Unfortunately, it's not his call at the end of the day. His only options if ordered to proceed with Buccaneer are to obey or to resign in protest . . . and God only knows who the increasingly desperate Mandarins would nominate to replace him. The one thing he can be sure of is that it wouldn't be someone they expected to follow his example and protest or refuse the orders of his superiors.

It's very easy to decide that the Sollies are all idiots because they keep running back into the buzz saw. What needs to be remembered is that they haven't really been running back into it all that long at this point, and it takes a while for information that doesn't simply challenge but actively demolishes a centuries-long mindset — especially a mindset which has been validated by uninterrupted success for all those centuries — to work its way through the neural net of something the size of the Solarian League and its Navy.

Some of the officers we've seen at the pointy end, like Tamaguchi up against Scotty Tremaine and Sir Horace, definitely have working brains and are obviously willing to accept at least the possibility that the Grand Alliance's war-fighting tech is significantly superior to their own. They, unfortunately, are not the folks back in Old Chicago who are making — and who have to make — decisions where grand strategy is concerned. That doesn't mean there's no one in Old Chicago with a functioning brain. It simply means that they've only had a few months to start trying to find those functioning brains and by any objective standard (except that required for survival, of course) demanding that they do it faster than they have is just a might unreasonable.

A member of these forums with the username 'fester' (don't know if he is still active) did an excellent analysis on Battle Fleet's tactics (go for the capital system) and how well they would work against Manticore over time, and pretty much summed up what runsforcelery said above. The thread was titled (as near as I can remember) 'An Apologia for BattleFleet'. Unfortunately, the entire thread disappeared from the Honorverse forum some time ago.

Vince wrote:A member of these forums with the username 'fester' (don't know if he is still active) did an excellent analysis on Battle Fleet's tactics (go for the capital system) and how well they would work against Manticore over time, and pretty much summed up what runsforcelery said above. The thread was titled (as near as I can remember) 'An Apologia for BattleFleet'. Unfortunately, the entire thread disappeared from the Honorverse forum some time ago.

This forum doesn’t do archives well at all.

I guess SL Strategic Planning can best be summed up "When God gives you lemonade you gotta find the sugar any darn where you can."

JohnRoth wrote:

kzt wrote:As far as attacking the grav sensors, one of the Bu9 guys pointed out they were not nearly as easy to destroy as I thought. Apparently they are more a very large array of objects separated by km that are precisely located and tracked relative to each other so as to detect exceedingly small effects.

So you need to destroy many many objects, which means you pretty much need a ship at energy range to do this in reasonable time frame.. And apparently they are cleverly inside the hyper limit.

Gun Boat Diplomacy wrote:ummm wouldn't old fashioned nuke warheads be easier to use than picking them off one by one with lasers/grasers?

kzt wrote:There are not dozens of them, there are many thousands of them located kms apart from each other. And in space you have to get close to be effective with nukes. It’s pretty much just a really bright x-ray emitter whose intensity drops by the square of the range.

We seem to be talking about the space version of LIGO on steriods. (LISA pathfinder and eLISA) That is, a whole bunch of radar reflectors and laser interferometers. A much easier to hit target would be the computational facility that's needed to integrate the results into something useful.

This conversation makes me wonder, however, about some comments from RFC that "grav waves" are not conventional gravity, so they might need different kinds of detectors.

LIGO: And today the Nobel Prize for LIGO went to Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish. Weiss supervised my Bachelor's thesis. He originally proposed the interferometer detector to a student seminar group. I can confirm that this tale is true, because I was in the audience myself.