OFS vs SLN

tlb wrote:What Armed Neo-Bob reported is RFC saying that Manticore was NOT ignored before the Havenite war. Further that the SLN assisted the RHN in preparing for the war. Essentially that resentment of Manticore resulted in secret assistance to eliminate Manticore. Finally that it was only after the war started that the SLN became blind to what was going on in that quadrant.

Castenea wrote:It was not once the first war started that the League was blinded but the end of the first war that blinded them to events in Manticore. I believe there is text ev that much of the intel relationship between the SL and Haven was transactional, basically SL goodies in return for intel on Manticores latest equip. With the end of the first war there were no new goodies for Haven to sell, less demand for the latest SL tech, and at least some of the people who were part of the link between the SL and Haven were purged by the Prichart Government. By the start of the Second War Haven is building its own better than SL goodies, thus is not interested in sending intel findings to a third party.

Whatever the time table for going blind, the reported facts say that there were SLN officers interested both in information on Manticore and seeing that Haven defeated them.

If the interest lasted until the armistice, then there should have been reports on LACs, improved pods and pod laying warships. Any of those reports would have pointed to deficiencies in the SLN.

I once again point out that every single European country that unexpectedly found itself in conducting essentially siege warfare with barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and horrific casualties had had observers in the Russo-Japanese war where they saw the war unexpectedly degenerate into siege warfare characterized by barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and horrific casualties. And in most cases these observers were actually running the armies that found themselves so unexpectedly engaged in siege warfare.

kzt wrote:I once again point out that every single European country that unexpectedly found itself in conducting essentially siege warfare with barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and horrific casualties had had observers in the Russo-Japanese war where they saw the war unexpectedly degenerate into siege warfare characterized by barbed wire, trenches, machine guns and horrific casualties. And in most cases these observers were actually running the armies that found themselves so unexpectedly engaged in siege warfare.

Your point is very well taken; some of these problems were even seen in the American Civil War, which also had military observers.

I am not trying to say that I expected the SLN to act on the reports. What fascinates me is that we are being told that the willfully ignorant SLN was to some extent interested in intelligence on Manticore at a recent time. Part of that interest is that the SLN is filled with officers that do not rotate positions and are all prolong recipients. So when did that quest for knowledge start and why did it disappear?

[quote="tlb]I am not trying to say that I expected the SLN to act on the reports. What fascinates me is that we are being told that the willfully ignorant SLN was to some extent interested in intelligence on Manticore at a recent time. Part of that interest is that the SLN is filled with officers that do not rotate positions and are all prolong recipients. So when did that quest for knowledge start and why did it disappear?[/quote]As a few have pointed out, most of those with interest in what was going on were not in a position to act on their interest, being some combination of low ranked and assigned to other duties. The officer in charge of the office that was supposed to report on foreign weapons developments was both not looking to see if anything new was being developed and actively suppressing any report of new developments (look at Captain Daud's lack of career advancement).

I also suspect that the lines of communication between SLN Intelligence and Haven were already atrophying well before the events that led to the armistice (AoV).

There are many people in the Solarian League who were interested in Haven Sector tech reports: some of them were companies like Technodyne; some were governments; some were Mesan Alignment operatives; some were even SLN officers and official observers. The problem was that a lot of the information that _was_ received got filtered out before it got to places that could make decisions, partly because of the NIH Syndrome, partly because of Mesan interference, and partly because very few people in the League really believed that anyone _could_ be superior to them technically.

But there is a lot of available information that can gradually be put together, and is, when certain viewpoint characters start getting a clue and looking for clues.

tlb wrote:I am not trying to say that I expected the SLN to act on the reports. What fascinates me is that we are being told that the willfully ignorant SLN was to some extent interested in intelligence on Manticore at a recent time. Part of that interest is that the SLN is filled with officers that do not rotate positions and are all prolong recipients. So when did that quest for knowledge start and why did it disappear?

Castenea wrote:As a few have pointed out, most of those with interest in what was going on were not in a position to act on their interest, being some combination of low ranked and assigned to other duties. The officer in charge of the office that was supposed to report on foreign weapons developments was both not looking to see if anything new was being developed and actively suppressing any report of new developments (look at Captain Daud's lack of career advancement).

I also suspect that the lines of communication between SLN Intelligence and Haven were already atrophying well before the events that led to the armistice (AoV).

But if, as stated, Haven was giving active assistance in the design of ships to fight Manticore, then there had to be some fairly high level approval and interest in the events. That interest should have continued for awhile to see how those ships performed.

Certainly by the time we read of SLN departments, all of that approval has dried up and that interest has gone. But there is a story in those changes that I would like to learn.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:I am not trying to say that I expected the SLN to act on the reports. What fascinates me is that we are being told that the willfully ignorant SLN was to some extent interested in intelligence on Manticore at a recent time. Part of that interest is that the SLN is filled with officers that do not rotate positions and are all prolong recipients. So when did that quest for knowledge start and why did it disappear?

Castenea wrote:As a few have pointed out, most of those with interest in what was going on were not in a position to act on their interest, being some combination of low ranked and assigned to other duties. The officer in charge of the office that was supposed to report on foreign weapons developments was both not looking to see if anything new was being developed and actively suppressing any report of new developments (look at Captain Daud's lack of career advancement).

I also suspect that the lines of communication between SLN Intelligence and Haven were already atrophying well before the events that led to the armistice (AoV).

But if, as stated, Haven was giving active assistance in the design of ships to fight Manticore, then there had to be some fairly high level approval and interest in the events. That interest should have continued for awhile to see how those ships performed.

Certainly by the time we read of SLN departments, all of that approval has dried up and that interest has gone. But there is a story in those changes that I would like to learn.

I don't believe I ever stated that the SLN was helping design ships for the PRN. They were selling tech to the PRH which it was then using to create domestic designs, often using Solly ship classes (many of which had been purchased, at least in export form, expressly to serve as models). By the time of OBS and HotQ, virtually all Havenite designs were homegrown, and the export tech Solly corporations were allowed to sell to Haven was second tier (at best) by Solly standards.

So you have here a situation in which the Sollies are selling second- or even tertiary-level tech to the Peeps, who are desperate to get their hands on it. This suggests to any properly chauvinistic Solly that PRN ships must really, really suck compared to current generation SLN ships. And if the PRN, with sucky ships, can face the RMN as a peer competitor, then Manty ships can't be all that wonderful, either. This reinforces an (ill-deserved) sense of superiority.

In addition, the guys doing the selling are not the SLN. They are private arms companies selling the tech the SLN has cleared for export because it doesn't hand over the SLN's latest and nastiest goodies for reverse engineering. The private corporations --- think Vickers-Armstrong or Litton Industries --- aren't even building ships for Haven, anymore; they're providing ship systems (and tech support to get those systems operational when first delivered) and then going home and counting their money.

During the Arab-Israeli wars, when the Arab states were getting their clocks cleaned by the Israelies despite having been equipped with last-generation combat equipment (like the T-72 while the Israelies were still armed with 105s), the argument was frequently made that the problem was operator error. That the same equipment in the hands of Soviet troops, with superior training and leadership, would have been far more successful. The historical record suggests this view was inaccurate, and certainly what happened in Desert Storm would seem to support that probability.

Solly naval officers are in much the same place, psychologically. Of course the stupid neobarbs got beaten! What else can you expect? They would have gotten beaten a lot worse without those infusions of our superior technology! And if we'd been in command, the outcome would have been totally different. Because, after all, we are the SLN and they aren't. And neither are those crappy Manties!


Further, the Peeps didn't like being dependent on the Sollies any more than they had to, both because they resented Solly attitudes and because it's dangerous to rely on foreign vendors for critical weapon systems. They had to crawl to the Sollies initially, but one of the points upon which Rob Pierre was most adamant was the need to repair and mobilize the Havenite tech industries and shipyards. By the time the paradigm shift began to set in in earnest, the Sollies --- even the private corporations, not just the SLN --- had been pretty much cut off from any reverse flow of superior Havenite tech. That made it even easier for the ONI drones to assume that nothing significant had changed.

The SLN was supporting Haven because private industry could make a lot of cash off the deal (not because the SL government was deeply and directly involved in the transactions) and because it resented hell out of Manticore's use/weaponization of the Junction as a means to shape Solarian foreign policy. The SLN, however, was never an active partner in operations against the SKM until after the Battle of Monica. That doesn't mean that some of those private corporations didn't have a better notion of what was happening than ONI did. Look at how quickly the cataphract came along, for example. Not even they had any realistic notion of how far behind the curve the SLN was falling, and they believed the sheer size of the SLN would give the League time to recover from any initial missteps, but they had a better idea of what was happening than the professional officers did. And they expected to make even bigger buckets of money selling the SLN the new systems it was going to need to defeat the Manties.

Thank you for the clarification; we did not have your original words, only a report of what they might have been. This does make more sense than a vague notion that the SLN might have been actively supporting Haven in its attempted conquest of Manticore.