The Two General's Problem

tlb wrote:But I think you are wrong about the Yawata Strike being a necessary condition, since Herlander was accompanied by Zilwicki. Zilwicki is also why it would not have been saved for later, if Honor were still at Haven then the evidence would have been presented to both parties.

If the attack had occurred later, then there might already have been a peace treaty signed. We can have differences over the timing of the Grand Alliance; the Yawata Strike made it certain, but a manipulated SLN might still have faced a united front in its absence.

That's fair, I agree Pritchart and Theisman would have brought the evidence to Manticore, either through Honor if she were still there, or by diplomatic dispatch. But would Haven have joined an alliance to fight the MAlign? To fight the League? The Andermani might have anyway due to Hofschulte Incident (covertly as they did), and Grayson would be tied to the hips, but I'm not so sure about Haven. Why should they want to ally with their recent enemies against the single largest polity to have ever existed?

Besides, if the Strike hadn't occurred, then the full military might of the RMN logistics would still be available, so the Manticore Alliance would probably not have needed the Havenite components to the Grand Fleet anyway. And thus, without the Strike, we would not have a Grand Alliance replacing the Manticore Alliance, and there would be no Adm. Sonja Hemphill sent to Bolthole.

Simões' data indicated the MAlign had been manipulating Haven too, at least as far back as DuQuesne and his Plan, but Haven would have been skeptical. They'd have wanted to do some very deep investigation to see if it could be true and I doubt it could be proven (or disproven). So in the end it might have come to pass anyway, once it became clear that the League was being manipulated into making stupid/irrational decisions, such as sending Adm. Chin to attempt a transit or the Parthian Shot operations, but it would have been much delayed and not guaranteed to come to pass.

On the other hand, Adm. Gold Peak would not have to share the credit of the liberation of Mesa with Lester Tourville.

Jonathan_S wrote:And the worst part is the MAlign pretty much had to have known of that history around Pearl Harbor when they chose to call their surprise attack in time of peace Oyster Bay. So they had to have known about how a tactical success can make a strategic defeat inevitable -- and they did it ANYWAY!

You can find a number of other examples in history where a tactical surprise attack did result in sufficient destruction of the capabilities of the would-be enemy and prevent them from persecuting a successful war, even if it doesn't prevent a war completely. In light of what's happening tonight, we must hope this is such a case.

So I don't think I can fault the MAlign that much. This was the result of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It nearly worked too: if Simões hadn't defected, with data from McBryde, the GA might not have happened and, even if it did, it might not have known where to direct its attention.

A fight with the League at this time was inevitable and so was Manticore's victory. The Strike did limit what Manticore could do, this giving the SLN some fighting chance in some of the engagements. If the Strike hadn't happened, the RMN and GSN would have deployed squadrons of Saganami-C and Nikes, all equipped with Apollo MDMs and full loads of Mk16.

The really smart thing would have been to abandon the petty personal grievances of the original MAlign and change the laws and perceptions around "genies" by shaping public opinion and other soft power tactics.

Indeed. This is where those Inner Onion Alphas show their arrogance: there is an easier way to achieve the original Leonard Detweiler and Alignment goals. But no, their current objective is to create a caste society based on genetics with them at the top.

The fairly smart thing would have been to realize that the plan wasn't going to work once the Haven sector went through its unexpected Dreadnaught revolutions and disrupted the military power paradigm and pulled back until they had time to adjust their plans, infiltrate any new sleeper families, corrupt players in the new power structures, and revisit their operational plan to shatter the League after the preconditions for that were reestablished. After all they'd been working on this secret plan for over four hundred years; what's an extra several decades to let the new military technology inevitable disseminate to all players.

Right. The Plan had gone off the rails when the Haven Sector navies far outpaced the League. The correct thing to do - which RFC was going to write before Eric came along asking for an enemy for Torch - was to drip-feed the League some technology so they could catch up. That would have allowed a much more even fighting, which would have opened possibilities for the atrocities the Plan called for.

And would also have allowed the spider ships to be finished.

But no, this generation was "the one" and wasn't willing to step back, do the smart thing, and later a later generation bring the plan to a successful fruition. So they improvised, and scrambled, and made a hash of it. Hardly what you'd expect from true genius.

It wouldn't even be another generation. I'm not sure how old they are; I'd have said Albrecht was in his 60s and Benjamin in his mid-30s, but I'm probably off by a decade or two. Even if Albrecht was pushing 100 and Benjamin is in his 60s like Honor, they'd still have another 150 years of life. There's no reason to think they couldn't get the plan back on track in their lifetimes. More importantly, they'd believe they could do that.

tlb wrote:Pearl Harbor is a very good analogy for what they accomplished, which was to unite their enemies by making them angry. The Japanese thought that they just had to win one major battle and the US would sue for peace. Now the Detweilers have to reformulate their Plan and hope that the Renaissance Factor does not fall apart in the meantime.

Jonathan_S wrote:And the worst part is the MAlign pretty much had to have known of that history around Pearl Harbor when they chose to call their surprise attack in time of peace Oyster Bay. So they had to have known about how a tactical success can make a strategic defeat inevitable -- and they did it ANYWAY!

Even if the RF doesn't fall apart with Haven & Manticore united and the League well on its way to reform, the MAlign lost the preconditions they needed for the RF to become the core of the galaxy's power and government. So even if the RF stays coordinated and each member retains every association they've picked up, the plan is still hopelessly derailed and the MAlign will need to back up and try something different. (After their existence has been exposed so people are looking for them and looking for their attempts to influence things)



The really smart thing would have been to abandon the petty personal grievances of the original MAlign and change the laws and perceptions around "genies" by shaping public opinion and other soft power tactics.

The fairly smart thing would have been to realize that the plan wasn't going to work once the Haven sector went through its unexpected Dreadnaught revolutions and disrupted the military power paradigm and pulled back until they had time to adjust their plans, infiltrate any new sleeper families, corrupt players in the new power structures, and revisit their operational plan to shatter the League after the preconditions for that were reestablished. After all they'd been working on this secret plan for over four hundred years; what's an extra several decades to let the new military technology inevitable disseminate to all players.

But no, this generation was "the one" and wasn't willing to step back, do the smart thing, and later a later generation bring the plan to a successful fruition. So they improvised, and scrambled, and made a hash of it. Hardly what you'd expect from true genius.

Don’t want to be a butt about this. But that argument, again, only shows that they are human. A lot of the plan went offrail because of the human element.

Emotion affects people. Heck, when their daddy died – because of something the Manticorans did – who is to say we would not have reacted the same way? But that is no ding on a six hundred year old plan. That was a weakness of the flesh.

Can you imagine that many brothers assembled and their ground zero, daddy, has been killed by the enemy?

“I don’t give a flying phuck about the plan! Right now I plan to phuck somebody up!”

You ever wonder which brother was the most susceptible to emotion?

Come on guys, their daddy was killed. It is human to lose your battle with emotion. But no ding on the plan. Blame that on the loose warhead of a cannon Michelle Henke.



About the derailment. I simply won’t accept that this was a full derailment. Some wheels came off the track. And possibly one or two cars of a centuries long train moving at low speed. There sinply won’t be a full derailment of six centuries worth of cars while moving at low speeds. It is barely crawling at six centuries. Especially considering the source who we know has a middle name of paranoia and most certainly are smart enough to have contingencies ready, and to know not to put all of their eggs in one basket.

Besides, all of their eggs won’t fit in a basket.

I also disagree that the plan was not advanced. The SL is huge. And it takes a lot of inertia to topple a huge gorilla. They have managed that enertia. The dominoes are falling. The dominoes have felled.

And who says the RF don’t have options? I can pull one off the top of my head …

‘In light of the recent activity in the galaxy, and the seemingly unsafe aspect of splintered states of the SL, and the fact that this enemy cannot be found, we, the RF, have formed to ensure our own safety.’

P.S. Is a lack of ruthlessness a sign of weakness?

penny wrote:Don’t want to be a butt about this. But that argument, again, only shows that they are human. A lot of the plan went offrail because of the human element.

Emotion affects people. Heck, when their daddy died – because of something the Manticorans did – who is to say we would not have reacted the same way? But that is no ding on a six hundred year old plan. That was a weakness of the flesh.

Can you imagine that many brothers assembled and their ground zero, daddy, has been killed by the enemy?

“I don’t give a flying phuck about the plan! Right now I plan to phuck somebody up!”

You are quite right, this is exactly what happened.

The problem is that they had thought themselves superior to the human norm and therefore ought not to have behaved themselves like that. They succumbed to their grief and let their emotions overrule the logic and rationality they had for so long held made them superior.

About the derailment. I simply won’t accept that this was a full derailment.

Their own assessment is that "the Plan was well and truly off the rails." That's Benjamin Detweiler's own inner thoughts while he's arriving at Galton at the beginning of TEiF. I wouldn't argue with him on the state of the Plan.

Though he does follow that thought with thinking the Plan can be put back on track, but it will take decades to do so.

I also disagree that the plan was not advanced. The SL is huge. And it takes a lot of inertia to topple a huge gorilla. They have managed that enertia. The dominoes are falling. The dominoes have felled.

No, that part of the Plan failed. The plan was to pulverise the League and draw elements into the RF. That did not happen. The League survived, in diminished state, but still the largest single polity, with a renewed Constitution and more powerful institutions. They did not want that.

The Shards of the League are also way too powerful by themselves, especially the one headed by Beowulf-Hypatia.

And who says the RF don’t have options? I can pull one off the top of my head …

‘In light of the recent activity in the galaxy, and the seemingly unsafe aspect of splintered states of the SL, and the fact that this enemy cannot be found, we, the RF, have formed to ensure our own safety.’

That's exactly what they did. Again, in TEiF we hear about their formation in the conversation about states recently formed in the wake of the hostilities.

But the RF is nowhere near the most important, most powerful, most relevant or most stable of those successor states.

This means the RF's formation is inconsequential. It doesn't seem to hamper the Plan, but neither does it help the Plan. With Galton discovered and Darius pulling its horns in, it seems the RF is left out to dry. It will be just "one among many" of the successor states, probably accruing a few members, but it will not be able to advance the cause of genetic uplift the way the Plan called for.

Now, wouldn't it be ironic if the RF actually managed to advance the cause? If Darius and the Onion aren't closely tinkering with their politics, they could actually do it. Mesa will be doing it, with the Enhancement (BAlign) pushing for it with support from the GA (even if Beowulf wrinkles its nose at it) as a way to counter the MAlign, so the RF's leaders would have little choice but to join the push too.

And then... the RF becomes a target?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:And the worst part is the MAlign pretty much had to have known of that history around Pearl Harbor when they chose to call their surprise attack in time of peace Oyster Bay. So they had to have known about how a tactical success can make a strategic defeat inevitable -- and they did it ANYWAY!

You can find a number of other examples in history where a tactical surprise attack did result in sufficient destruction of the capabilities of the would-be enemy and prevent them from persecuting a successful war, even if it doesn't prevent a war completely. In light of what's happening tonight, we must hope this is such a case.

So I don't think I can fault the MAlign that much. This was the result of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It nearly worked too: if Simões hadn't defected, with data from McBryde, the GA might not have happened and, even if it did, it might not have known where to direct its attention.

A fight with the League at this time was inevitable and so was Manticore's victory. The Strike did limit what Manticore could do, this giving the SLN some fighting chance in some of the engagements. If the Strike hadn't happened, the RMN and GSN would have deployed squadrons of Saganami-C and Nikes, all equipped with Apollo MDMs and full loads of Mk16.

The really smart thing would have been to abandon the petty personal grievances of the original MAlign and change the laws and perceptions around "genies" by shaping public opinion and other soft power tactics.

Indeed. This is where those Inner Onion Alphas show their arrogance: there is an easier way to achieve the original Leonard Detweiler and Alignment goals. But no, their current objective is to create a caste society based on genetics with them at the top.

The fairly smart thing would have been to realize that the plan wasn't going to work once the Haven sector went through its unexpected Dreadnaught revolutions and disrupted the military power paradigm and pulled back until they had time to adjust their plans, infiltrate any new sleeper families, corrupt players in the new power structures, and revisit their operational plan to shatter the League after the preconditions for that were reestablished. After all they'd been working on this secret plan for over four hundred years; what's an extra several decades to let the new military technology inevitable disseminate to all players.

Right. The Plan had gone off the rails when the Haven Sector navies far outpaced the League. The correct thing to do - which RFC was going to write before Eric came along asking for an enemy for Torch - was to drip-feed the League some technology so they could catch up. That would have allowed a much more even fighting, which would have opened possibilities for the atrocities the Plan called for.

And would also have allowed the spider ships to be finished.

But no, this generation was "the one" and wasn't willing to step back, do the smart thing, and later a later generation bring the plan to a successful fruition. So they improvised, and scrambled, and made a hash of it. Hardly what you'd expect from true genius.

It wouldn't even be another generation. I'm not sure how old they are; I'd have said Albrecht was in his 60s and Benjamin in his mid-30s, but I'm probably off by a decade or two. Even if Albrecht was pushing 100 and Benjamin is in his 60s like Honor, they'd still have another 150 years of life. There's no reason to think they couldn't get the plan back on track in their lifetimes. More importantly, they'd believe they could do that.

Darn good post!

penny wrote:Don’t want to be a butt about this. But that argument, again, only shows that they are human. A lot of the plan went offrail because of the human element.

Emotion affects people. Heck, when their daddy died – because of something the Manticorans did – who is to say we would not have reacted the same way? But that is no ding on a six hundred year old plan. That was a weakness of the flesh.

Can you imagine that many brothers assembled and their ground zero, daddy, has been killed by the enemy?

“I don’t give a flying phuck about the plan! Right now I plan to phuck somebody up!”

You ever wonder which brother was the most susceptible to emotion?

Come on guys, their daddy was killed. It is human to lose your battle with emotion. But no ding on the plan. Blame that on the loose warhead of a cannon Michelle Henke.

But, Michelle Henke was both NOT a "loose warhead of a cannon" and NOT responsible for the death of their "father". He and his wife committed suicide over the failure of the expedited Houdini Plan, another one of their plans that did not survive the real world.

It is precisely a "ding on a six hundred year old plan", because there will ALWAYS be a human element in a plan of any but the shortest duration. The TV Tropes website describes a bunch of gambits; one of which is the "Xanatos Gambit", where all probable outcomes result in advancing the villain's plan. That is what the superior villain tries to set up.

As we have have discussed in other places, the Detweiler Plan first began to go off the rails when the combatants developed weapons and strategies that the corruptly incompetent SLN had no chance to counter. By the time that the Detweiler "sons" threw a temper tantrum over the death of Albrecht, it was clear that everything would need to be rethought. And then they lost Galton.

tlb wrote:But, Michelle Henke was both NOT a "loose warhead of a cannon" and NOT responsible for the death of their "father". He and his wife committed suicide over the failure of the expedited Houdini Plan, another one of their plans that did not survive the real world.

Or possible, in part to atone for the mega-deaths that the expedited Houdini Plan had required.

They may not have felt they deserved to live after directly killing so many Mesan innocents to cover the tracks of those who'd already evacuated; and then having to kill the remaining planned evacuees.

After all they could have attempted to hide and sneak away from Mesa later, only killing themselves if capture seemed likely. An entire planet is a vast place to disappear into. Even if they thought that island base compromised they didn't have to go out in a nuclear fireball with it. They chose to stand there and die -- and that isn't necessarily just because the revised plan wasn't 100% successful.

tlb wrote:But, Michelle Henke was both NOT a "loose warhead of a cannon" and NOT responsible for the death of their "father". He and his wife committed suicide over the failure of the expedited Houdini Plan, another one of their plans that did not survive the real world.

Jonathan_S wrote:Or possible, in part to atone for the mega-deaths that the expedited Houdini Plan had required.

They may not have felt they deserved to live after directly killing so many Mesan innocents to cover the tracks of those who'd already evacuated; and then having to kill the remaining planned evacuees.

After all they could have attempted to hide and sneak away from Mesa later, only killing themselves if capture seemed likely. An entire planet is a vast place to disappear into. Even if they thought that island base compromised they didn't have to go out in a nuclear fireball with it. They chose to stand there and die -- and that isn't necessarily just because the revised plan wasn't 100% successful.

I am not sure that there is a great difference between what you and I stated. If it were possible to emigrate after the conquest of Mesa and there was no clear way to mark many of the planned evacuees as being members of the Onion, then the mega-deaths were unnecessary and a failure of the expedited Houdini Plan as such.

What would it have hurt if Gail Weiss, for example, had just traveled to the Sol system to meet her pickup there? Why did people have to die to cover her going away? Why couldn't several passenger ships just taken people away? What was gained by trying to hide the evacuee list, when only the Detweilers and a few others really needed the anonymity?

I agree that Albrecht and his wife committed suicide partly to atone for the deaths. I just think that many of the deaths were due to a failure to plan something better. Just like the destruction of the forts at Galton, it was also to demonstrate defiance to the people that stood in their way.

tlb wrote:What would it have hurt if Gail Weiss, for example, had just traveled to the Sol system to meet her pickup there? Why did people have to die to cover her going away? Why couldn't several passenger ships just taken people away? What was gained by trying to hide the evacuee list, when only the Detweilers and a few others really needed the anonymity?

They didn't need anonymity, but they needed family and loved ones to not look for those people, because that would tip authorities that a lot of people had disappeared. Even the old corporate government with Manpower leading would have had a hard time to dismiss all those investigations because those were prominent families in Mesan society.

I agree that Albrecht and his wife committed suicide partly to atone for the deaths. I just think that many of the deaths were due to a failure to plan something better. Just like the destruction of the forts at Galton, it was also to demonstrate defiance to the people that stood in their way.

In this case, I'm not sure what it could have been. Houdini called for a slow evacuation and that had to be accelerated due to the unrest on the planet and the expansion (perceived or otherwise) of the SEM into now the Meyer sector. They couldn't execute the slow set of explainable deaths.

What could they have done instead?

tlb wrote:

penny wrote:Don’t want to be a butt about this. But that argument, again, only shows that they are human. A lot of the plan went offrail because of the human element.

Emotion affects people. Heck, when their daddy died – because of something the Manticorans did – who is to say we would not have reacted the same way? But that is no ding on a six hundred year old plan. That was a weakness of the flesh.

Can you imagine that many brothers assembled and their ground zero, daddy, has been killed by the enemy?

“I don’t give a flying phuck about the plan! Right now I plan to phuck somebody up!”

You ever wonder which brother was the most susceptible to emotion?

Come on guys, their daddy was killed. It is human to lose your battle with emotion. But no ding on the plan. Blame that on the loose warhead of a cannon Michelle Henke.

But, Michelle Henke was both NOT a "loose warhead of a cannon" and NOT responsible for the death of their "father". He and his wife committed suicide over the failure of the expedited Houdini Plan, another one of their plans that did not survive the real world.

It is precisely a "ding on a six hundred year old plan", because there will ALWAYS be a human element in a plan of any but the shortest duration. The TV Tropes website describes a bunch of gambits; one of which is the "Xanatos Gambit", where all probable outcomes result in advancing the villain's plan. That is what the superior villain tries to set up.

As we have have discussed in other places, the Detweiler Plan first began to go off the rails when the combatants developed weapons and strategies that the corruptly incompetent SLN had no chance to counter. By the time that the Detweiler "sons" threw a temper tantrum over the death of Albrecht, it was clear that everything would need to be rethought. And then they lost Galton.

It does not matter if you and I don't think Henke is a loose warhead. I am paraphrasing one of the Detweilers.

"Daddy would still be alive if it weren't for that loose warhead Henke noseying about at Mesa."

Can't remember which book or the exact words, but then the Detweiler in the passage goes on to say that he warned his daddy to get out sooner.