The resumption of hostilities was probably agreed upon by the ambassadors in Landing. And the operational decisions were agreed with by the top admirals of the IAN and GSN. Specifically for the latter, that would have been Admiral Judah Yanakov, which was actually the CO of TF 82 that did participate in Lovat.
Whether any of them would have had the wherewithal to raise a concern is a different story. They were not stupid, though (Yanakov became High Admiral after Oyster Bay).
Yanakov specifically was a jumped up commander of a Battle Squadron wearing the TF 82 CO slot as a second hat.
He may or may not have been competent at his job, but an actual military simply doesn’t work this way. Yanakov was way down the chain of command. The fact that he happens to be one of the senior Grayson officers deployed in the Manticore system doesn’t give in a seat at a table he had no business being at.
As said, maybe they had IAN and GSN officers as members of the strategy board. I could totally see that. Wouldn’t make a shred of difference though, since White Haven and the Queen decided unliterary do commit to Sanskrit before consulting anyone on the strategy board.
The ambassadors may have agreed to resume hostilities. The scene as written in AAC doesn’t imply that buy maybe they did or gave the Queen wide ranging authority to deal with the talks however she saw fit.
There was actually some textev for this and I think it's even in the part you posted (sorry, it's late today). See also Galactic Supper's reply: they were expecting any attack in the MBS to take much longer than it actually took. My understanding was that the early attack was only possible because Theisman had been preparing for Beatrice as soon as the summit was cancelled, but Manticore did not consider that possible.
Which of course is quite stupid. If there was even a chance that the Havenites had sabotaged their own summit for their gains, it would stand to reason they had prepared to do something after that happened to obtain some advantage.
Yes quite right, pretty stupid.
But say the earliest possible point in time the Alliance should conceivably expect a decisive attack by Theisman is the date it actually happened – mid July 1921.
You still don’t go to Lovat even if you think you can make it back in time. First, you don’t really now what will happen at Lovat, Eighth Fleet could always run into something to render them combat ineffective no matter what. If you assume you’ll need them 2 weeks later at home you don’t risk that.
Second, if you expect a decisive attack by Theisman, an attack at Lovat would have been pointless. He’s already committed to attacking you, he’s all in with everything he has. Trashing a secondary target won’t change his mind to for broke. In fact, it will only strengthen him in his decision.
And third, you don’t attack at Lovat for the simply fact that you’re still short on Apollo pods in July or even August. You don’t waste any Apollo missiles for a pointless attack on Lovat if you expect you’ll need them at home rather soon.
My new theory is that the Allies completely underestimated the capabilities of the RHN. After all, Theisman had been holding back and this never registered.
[I realise I'm grasping for straws to try and explain something that might not have occurred to David when writing, but that's the fun of the forum]
Their force level projections were pretty accurate all through AAC.
You could also just agree with me that White Haven was not very competent as a strategist and should have consulted Caparellis gang before letting himself get ambushed by the Queen
Obviously RFC wasn’t thinking about any of this when he wrote AAC. A lot of this particular book is just rushed and little more than the bare minimum to get to where he wanted to go. Too much plot for not nearly enough book.
If he had taken more time to edit, at least some of the issues would undoubtable have been fixed and we wouldn’t have to come up with theories about White Haven to explain them.
I would say that they were worried that he could do that. By keeping the RHN off-balance, defending their central worlds, they could not mass for an attack before the system defence pods are ready.
But the entire premise is flawed to begin with. If Theisman commits to an attack at the very top of the spectrum he is all in. Nothing you could do would change is mind. You could threaten to hit two, three four secondary targets, but what does it matter? Theisman has already decided to force the issue at Manticore. Raiding a couple of more targets makes no difference if Theisman is ready to end it once and for all.
The Cutworm raids only sort of had an effect because Theisman didn’t really want to do something post Thunderbolt anyway. He probably was very content with being forced to commit to the defense of his systems. Keeps everyone preoccupied while time passes and Haven margin of superiority just keeps increasing.
Not that any of this matters. The Manticorans were not thinking about any of this. Their strategic thinking never evolved further than ‘yeah Honor can kick ass at Lovat at make it back, YOLO’.
At the same time, showing off Apollo was supposed to make the Havenites think that the home systems were defended by Apollo, exactly like you're proposing they did. It was a bluff to make the RHN calculate they couldn't successfully attack any of the home systems. They would still fight one or two more battles, but not send 2 million spacers on a suicide mission.
The bluff argument only works if you they think Theisman is even stupider than they are. Took him about two seconds to figure it out.
Haven has a binary choice after the reveal of Apollo – surrender or go for broke. They wouldn’t fight another battle or two for the sake of it, they would have lost and Theisman would have flat out refused to sent more of his men and woman to a pointless death.
But in any case, Haven does not really know whether Apollo is rolled out fleetwide or not. There is always ambiguity. And since there is ambiguity, surrender is off the table politically.
They will always to what they ended up doing in the book – roll the dice and go all in.
If Manticore was concerned about any of this (again, they weren’t), they would have needed to reveal Apollo in a much more decisive way. As in blow up Jouett, rearm in enemy space and hit Haven next.
And that might have happened. White Haven and the other admirals are humans and have their failings, biases and blind spots. As I said before, this is like a Black Swan: once it's happened, you can see how inevitable it was. But predicting it would happen is was too outlandish.
May it was, maybe it wasn’t. It’s just a matter of thinking about what Havens options were in a worst case scenario. But even if we grant them that no one at the Strategy Board had time to write a memo about that or White Haven simply failed to read it, we are still left with the closing window of vulnerability.
After the talk collapsed it’s a simple choice for Manticore – if they do nothing an Haven doesn’t do anything outlandish until August either, Manticore will win the war by the end of the year. Or first quarter of 1922. Who cares.
Faced with this outlook the only sane thing is not to show Haven what’s happening. You don’t reveal Apollo. Yes at worst Haven will hit you again before August. But you just eat that attack and go on. They don’t call it war for nothing and the attack will very likely to be inconsequential and aimed at a tertiary or secondary target. Infrastructure is cheap, you can always rebuild. And if this calculation is wrong and Theisman has already decided to go for the head, you can’t deter him anyway and any Apollo pod you have will be much more useful at home than at Lovat.
No, I'm not assuming the unveiling of Apollo as early as February would have looked anything like it did in June. There would be no destroying of squadron after squadron of Soverign of Spaces. But there would have been sufficient evidence to make Theisman pause. It was, after all, the objective of unveiling Apollo.
Yes. The purpose of the original Sanskrit was to buy time. Showing him that Manticoran missile salvos are suddenly x percent more effective would result in Theisman adjusting his plans and Manticore gaining some time. You could make that argument.
But the point is, the Time they war bargaining for was gained through the summit talks. And the way they revealed Apollo in the actual attack was not suited to make Theisman pause. It demonstrated Theisman that he was about to lose the war within a couple of months or even weeks and his only way was to pull the trigger at the head of the snake. Or head of the Manticore rather.
Now if they hadn’t revealed Apollo quite so spectacularly during the actual attack on Lovat and settled for a moderate test scenario with only a couple of Apollo pods mixed with a conventional missile strike it would have been a different story. I would have supported that since it would have been unlikely to incite Theisman into pulling the trigger.
But alas, RMN did everything they could do to show Theisman what was going on.
That's not what I meant. I meant that until you actually do it, you don't know if the Havenites won't accidentally stumble upon something you hadn't thought of. In real life, I work with software development and there's one saying we have, which is that the first thing your user will do upon getting your software is to try something you had not predicted and find a bug. It really did happen to me a few short months ago...
Well sure but even if you apply that to Honorverse, all the more reason not to show off Apollo prematurely. If you’d think the enemy will develop a countermeasure rather quickly you keep in under wraps until you can press home the advantage decisively and end the war with one bold move.
There are levels of "work". They might have calculated that there would be a markedly increase in efficiency and targetting, especially given information for follow-up waves of missiles that get fine-tuned by the mothership TAO to get past defences. We know from Hypatia that Kotouč's TAO was adjusting the missile waves after each successful attack based on the data from Ghost Rider. But that was adjusting with a one minute light lag, so any missiles closer to the enemy than 60 seconds of flight time would be unable to receive further adjustments.
They were some eighty percent there. Yes they still underestimated the effectiveness of Apollo at were not utilizing it to its fullest potential yet. But the result of the battle wasn’t a surprise to them, it was about what they expected what will happen. Hence they should have thought what it mend strategically to reveal the weapon system in such a decisive manner.