Remaining holes in SLN intel

I thought that the purpose of the Manticore system was to remove from the voting rolls those who refuse to work but want others to pay for them. The 'welfare scroungers'.

quite possibly a cat wrote:Being a beached officer is a "job". But actually its sitting around collecting money for not doing work. Indeed its often a result of being too incompetent to actually serve and it that case it is the same as a government benefit, in all but name.

I don't think we have ever seen a breakdown of officers on the beach for incompetence, politics or due to having served their time and gone into the reserves, but the vast majority are most likely the last case.

Harrington and White Haven both got beached for political reasons, as did Truman.

Quite frankly a lot of your points seem to be based around everyone acting in good faith, not only following the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law. But we see that's NOT the case. Consider when the Opposition took over and then promptly used the "war" to hold off elections. We see Pavel Young getting command of a battlecruiser.

We didn't see Young getting a battlecruiser command - even if Harrington hadn't shot him at the end of FoD, he had been dishonorably discharged in the same book and only just escaped the firing squad for desertion in the face of the enemy whilst only in command of a heavy cruiser.

WLBjork wrote:We didn't see Young getting a battlecruiser command

My mistake. Still he got a Heavy Cruiser.

ldwechsler wrote:More to the point: The battles between Manticore and Haven are not secret. The public knows all about them. It would be very easy to get information...not necessarily all the details but enough that an analyst could learn a lot.

But no one seems to have done that. A single person could have done it had they been on Manticore. Just listening to gossip from ships that have been in Manticore or Haven would have given a lot of info.

Someone was stopping the gathering. That person is a traitor...for whatever reason they did it.

The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

quite possibly a cat wrote:

ldwechsler wrote:More to the point: The battles between Manticore and Haven are not secret. The public knows all about them. It would be very easy to get information...not necessarily all the details but enough that an analyst could learn a lot.

But no one seems to have done that. A single person could have done it had they been on Manticore. Just listening to gossip from ships that have been in Manticore or Haven would have given a lot of info.

Someone was stopping the gathering. That person is a traitor...for whatever reason they did it.

The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

Somewhere in the process, things were blocked. We know from textev that that top people in naval intelligence were blocking things.

It doesn't matter WHY they did it. The job is designed to, in some ways, be a maximizer of threats. If you assume the other guy is an idiot, your surprises will be nasty. If you assume more power to them, at worst your victories could be easy.

The League messed up three different times and even Filareta didn't have great intelligence (and he was the last and best of the commanders). Any kind of a useful intelligence system would have held up when they heard that destroyers took out a battle cruiser from a crazy distance.

Remember the phrase: Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes? That fits. The Manties sent them the chips showing the battles and they refused to believe them.

quite possibly a cat wrote:The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

David has directly said that the MA was preventing the SLN from properly understanding what was going on.

kzt wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

David has directly said that the MA was preventing the SLN from properly understanding what was going on.

And that is my point. It was not hard to gather at least basic information.

MAlign blocked basic analysis.

The real questions are:

Will the people on Earth searching for proof actually find it?

Will they get the information to the mandarins?

Most important, what will the mandarins do? Will they do a cover up or will they start arresting people and cast blame on the navy. That gets tricky because at that point they would have to admit MAlign exists in some form. But it would be a way of survival.

quite possibly a cat wrote:
The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

David has directly said that the MA was preventing the SLN from properly understanding what was going on.

That count for hard military intel, but what is with the news?
Manticore is a whormhole jump away from solarian core worlds and it is a war there. War, blood and sex sells. The most people should have a raw picture about the fight between Manticore and Haven, that they use primary missles to destroy their enemies and the new "pod thing" could be mentioned somewhere , too.

Maldorian wrote:

quite possibly a cat wrote:
The SLN had reasonably accurate reports from the SDF observers. Those reports had even gotten as far as Bygn. No one was stopping the gathering of intel on the Manticore-Haven war. We know this since there was plenty of intel gathered AND delivered.

David has directly said that the MA was preventing the SLN from properly understanding what was going on.

That count for hard military intel, but what is with the news?
Manticore is a whormhole jump away from solarian core worlds and it is a war there. War, blood and sex sells. The most people should have a raw picture about the fight between Manticore and Haven, that they use primary missles to destroy their enemies and the new "pod thing" could be mentioned somewhere , too.

How much news from Canada do you get? Unless, of course, you are Canadian.

It is not the distance. It is the interest. People tend to check their sports teams, the entertainment, and news that directly concerns them.

A lot of unclassified info would be available. But, as RFC noted, it was blocked. And that also meant that analysts who actually did their job knew what would happen to their careers if they pushed.

Note all the fuss going on about Matt Lauer (a key newscaster on NBC for many years). He was misbehaving for many years before anyone really came forward. Even one of the people he pushed out, Ann Curry, kept the secret for years after she was gone.

If I have a nasty boss who would fire me from a job for pushing an analysis, I might well keep my mouth shut.

You guys are overlooking basic arrogance of the SL/N. They suffer from a heavy dose of NIH (Not Invented Here). The SDF's were sending back reports on the Manticore-Haven war but they were (miss)filed and forgotten. Daud and Teague were looking for them. Remember Filaritas best information on Harrington was basically puff piece news stories. How much would the arrogant SLN discount stories like 2nd Yeltsin or 1st Hancock or Hades.

saber964 wrote:You guys are overlooking basic arrogance of the SL/N. They suffer from a heavy dose of NIH (Not Invented Here). The SDF's were sending back reports on the Manticore-Haven war but they were (miss)filed and forgotten. Daud and Teague were looking for them. Remember Filaritas best information on Harrington was basically puff piece news stories. How much would the arrogant SLN discount stories like 2nd Yeltsin or 1st Hancock or Hades.

In contrast, even a Manty Destroyer's database had brief bios on virtually every Solly flag officer, and many captains.... that's millions of entrys.