kzt wrote:Well, you know, this is the SLN that can just say no. 'Sorry, that isn't part of our mission any more, so we are no longer budgeted for that kind of deployment.'
They don't seem to be saying no. The section of textev in TEiF is several pages long and there are all sorts of interesting tidbits in it.
“Actually, it’s a proposal.”
“What I was afraid of.” Kingsford sighed again. “So what is it?”
“I want your permission to get in touch with Montaigne—it will be done discreetly—and see if I can get her to agree for the Anti-Slavery League to start working—again, discreetly—with the Navy.”
The admiral’s eyes widened.
“Working with us on what?”
“Rooting out the slave trade—the whole apparatus involved with it, not just the slave ships and depots.”
<snip>
“And you’d be right,” Gannon agreed. “Unfortunately, the police agency that ought to be doing it, especially in the Shell and the Verge, where it’s most deeply encysted, used to be called the Office of Frontier Security. Which, you may recall, is in the process of disbandment as one of the Grand Alliance’s surrender demands. Not that it’ll make that much difference. Too much of OFS was in bed with the slavers to begin with.”
“The Gendarmerie—”
“The Gendarmerie is undoubtedly going to wind up with final responsibility for this, and Attorney General Rorendaal hates the trade as much as I do.” Gannon said. “She’s going to push hard to convince Prime Minister Yon to officially instruct the Navy to begin applying the equipment clause. But as far as the Gendarmerie is concerned, Gaddis is up to his ass in alligators cleaning house right here on Old Terra. It’s going to be a while before he’s able to start culling out the bad apples in the Gendarmes who were assigned to work with OFS. Or on most of the Verge worlds, for that matter.”
“We can’t just start crosscutting jurisdictional lines,” Kingsford objected. “The entire League’s in a state of flux right now. Gaddis and I are agreed that the last thing we can afford right now is to even look like we’re getting into some sort of turf war. Having the military and the police at odds—or even looking like they’re at odds—isn’t going to engender a lot of confidence in the Provisional Assembly or the Constitutional Convention.”
“I’m not proposing anything of the sort,” Gannon said patiently. “For this to work, it would have to be a cooperative effort with the Gendarmerie, as well. In fact, I’ve already, um, discussed certain hypothetical concerns with Brigadier Gaddis.”
<snip>
“I can follow all that, but you still haven’t explained why the Navy should do it. Oh, I’ll grant that the slave trade is vile. That it’s a cancer that corrupts and poisons everything it touches. Hell, I’ll go further. Somebody needs to stomp on it, and stomp on it hard. But for Christ’s sake, Chuck!”
He shook his head, his expression like iron.
“You know better than almost anybody how many millions of men and women the Navy just lost. But in case you haven’t been thinking about that, let me put it into perspective for you. Our total casualties amount to almost thirty-two percent of Battle Fleet’s prewar standing strength. Thirty-two percent, Chuck. There’s not a single serving officer or rating who didn’t lose someone they knew. And every one of our surviving capital ships is completely obsolete, every one of our surviving officers and ratings knows we got our clock cleaned every single time we went up against the Grand Alliance, and every single one of them knows we surrendered the capital system of the League—hell, the entire League itself—without firing a single shot at Harrington! You say Gaddis has his hands full repairing and rebuilding the Gendarmerie? What the hell do you think I’m doing? I’ve got way too much on my plate to be looking for additional missions!”
Gannon looked back at him levelly for several seconds. Then—
“Winston, the biggest thing—by far—that the Solarian League Navy has on its plate is rebuilding itself without doing it around a revanchist spinal cord. You’re right about how brutally we got hammered. Mostly because of stupid fucking admirals and even stupider politicians who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot, maybe, but you’re right. We lost damned near a third of Battle Fleet’s peacetime strength. And how many of the people we didn’t lose, do you think, are happy about that? How many of them are sitting around thinking about the next time they go up against the Grand Alliance…this time with matching tech. Hell, they’d be more than human if they weren’t thinking exactly that!
“But we can’t afford for them to think anything of the sort. You’re just as worried about that as I am—we’ve talked about it Winston, a lot. We want the war with the Grand Alliance to be over. Done. Finished—for good and ever. The last thing we want is to just put it back on a shelf until the Navy’s got the equipment to fire it back up and rip the human race apart all over again. This time on a scale I don’t even want to think about!”
“Of course that’s the last thing we want,” Kingsford said just a bit testily. “That’s why I’m about to sign off on Willis’s force restructuring!”
<snip>
Completely disbanding Battle Fleet would probably evoke the loudest screams…at least from Battle Fleet’s existing hierarchy, Gannon thought. But Battle Fleet had to go. Jennings was absolutely on target with that. The SLN’s formal division into Frontier Fleet, charged with executing the Navy’s day-to-day duties and discharging its routine responsibilities, and Battle Fleet, charged with actually fighting any wars that came along, had been disastrous, Frontier Fleet had been badly enough tainted in the public’s eyes (and its own, if the truth be known) by the way in which it had been sucked into supporting the Office of Frontier Security’s corruption, but at least it had been steadily and fully engaged in doing things. Battle Fleet hadn’t. It had been a black hole down which funding poured every fiscal year, but it hadn’t had anyone to fight, and so it had stagnated. Its capital ships had served no function at all, except to fight battles, and the battles had never come.
<snip>
So what Jennings had proposed was that Battle Fleet simply be abolished and the Navy’s total focus folded over into what had been Frontier Fleet. Frontier Fleet would also be abolished, as a separate organizational niche. Instead, there would simply be the Solarian League Navy, restructured to be what it should have been all along: a single, unified force and command structure serving the League’s actual needs.
The abolition of both the Office of Frontier Security and its system of protectorates—there was a lot of abolishing going on, just at the moment, Gannon reflected—would simplify those needs enormously. It would also allow the Navy to step away from its distasteful role as OFS’s enforcer when it came time to intimidate—or crush—opposition to Frontier Security and its cronies in the Protectorates. What would remain would be the problems OFS had been intended to address when it was first created: peacekeeping on the peripheries, search and rescue, enforcement of interstellar law, and the maintenance of an effective and modern combat capability sufficient to dissuade any realistic external threat to the League.
So every single existing Solarian ship-of-the-wall was destined for the breakers and reclamation. Battle Fleet’s basing infrastructure would be hugely reduced—indeed, virtually eliminated—and what was retained would be repurposed to support a Navy whose largest unit, for the immediate future, would probably be a battlecruiser or a Solarian version of the Grand Alliance’s LAC carriers, given how effective modern light attack craft would prove for most of the new SLN’s probable requirements. Every existing battlecruiser—hell, every existing heavy cruiser—would probably be scrapped as well, really, because they were just as obsolete as the ships-of-the-wall had been in an era of multi-drive missiles and LACs, but that could be deferred, at least for a time. As Gannon had pointed out, obsolete or not, they were quite capable of dealing with anyone short of the Grand Alliance.
None of that could happen overnight, of course.
<snip>
“I’m perfectly well aware of how much you have on your plate, Winston,” Gannon said now. “And, frankly, we’re damned lucky Jennings has the moral integrity and brains—and you have the moral courage—to recognize just how bad the existing system had become and actually do something about it. In fact, that’s the entire point, from the Navy’s perspective, to what I’m suggesting. The need to refocus the Navy on something other than licking its wounds, resentment, and revenge is the whole point of Jennings’s recommendations. Well, Frontier Fleet just lost seventy or eighty percent of its old missions, and the ones it still has are pretty much ‘business as usual.’ Nothing there to inspire men and women to embrace the total reorganization of their professional lives. But…”
He paused, eyebrows arched, and Kingsford nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “I think I see where you’re going with this now. Give the Navy an issue—an assignment that’s an obvious break with that ‘business as usual’ past of yours—right away. One we can use as a focusing device, an illustration of what the Navy we need to build will be doing instead of sitting around thinking long and homicidal thoughts. And an assignment—”
“An assignment they’ll feel proud of, instead of cynical about,” Gannon finished for him. “Yes. Winston, that’s what I’m proposing.
Looks like the SLN's going to be the one building lots of replacement warships. Its budget will no longer pay for Battle Fleet. The leadership has a focus upon strengthening morals, interservice and even international cooperation.
They'll be back sooner rather than later.
