“Which were his elaborate maneuvers to draw the Manties and Graysons out of position prior to the attack," Tourville said without hesitation. "He got too clever and tried to manipulate them—to suck them out of his way so as to give himself a virtually unopposed shot at his objective. Worse, he seems to have fallen in love with his own plan. When he finally hit Yeltsin, he'd spent so much time convincing himself his preliminary operations had worked perfectly that he came in fat, dumb, and happy. Granted, he was up against an opponent with better electronic warfare capabilities, which contributed materially to his misappreciation of the enemy's forces when he finally saw them, but the mindset to be misled was implicit in his entire approach. So he walked right into the concentrated firepower of six superdreadnoughts at minimum range."
The Citizen Vice Admiral shrugged and moved his hands as if he were tossing something into the air above the briefing room table.
"If he'd come in more cautiously, kept the range open, he still had more than enough missile power to take the system. His battleships were no match for SDs on a one-for-one basis[…]”
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“That was a tactical failure on his part once all the pieces were in play, but, frankly, any strategist who depends on convincing his adversaries to do what he wants has made the kind of mistake even amateurs should know enough to avoid. Oh, it's always worth trying to mislead the other side, convince him you're going to hit him at Point A when you actually intend to blow hell out of Point B, but you should never—ever—set up a strategy under which the enemy has to do what you want if your own operations are going to succeed."
"But wasn't that what Thurston did? You just said he'd brought along enough firepower to win if he'd used it properly even when the enemy didn't do what he wanted."
"He did, but he lacked the will and preparedness to use it properly because his entire strategy had been built towards avoiding the need for a real fight. Frankly, he may have figured he had no option but to set it up that way if he was going to convince his superiors to let him try it. I once met Citizen Secretary Kline on a visit to the[…]”
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“Frankly," he said, "this is something we should have done years ago, Sir. We lost a lot of battleships trying to stop the Manties short of Trevor's Star, but we've still got over two hundred of them, and our superdreadnought strength has been rising again for the last T-year or so. That means we ought to be using the battleships as aggressively as possible. Since they aren't suitable for the wall of battle—and since our growing SD strength means we can finally stop putting them into it anyway—they should be committed to a strategy of deep raids. They've got the accel to run away from SDs and dreadnoughts and the firepower to squash battlecruisers. That makes them pretty damned close to the ideal tool to keep the Manties thinking about the security of their rear areas. And every ship of the wall we can force them to divert to guarding a star twenty or thirty light-years behind the front is just as much out of action as one we've blown apart. That's what Icarus is all about. What we'd prefer to do is to actually gain the initiative for the first time since the war[…]”
Excerpt From
Echoes of Honor
David Weber
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Instead going and repeating the same thing in multiple replies, here are the quotes and my view on the potential use for the BB’s and the capabilities of those ships.
Based on the description in Flag in Exile the BB’s have 30%of the missiles of an SD and 15% of its energy armament so realistically each battleship has at LEAST 12 missile tubes per broadside but could have as much as 30 missile tubes per broadside based on the missiles launched during Fourth Yeltsin when they fired off 700 missiles in reply from 24 battleships. So the 30% could represent per broadside size or magazine capacity which would mean that the battleships could have similar broadside to the SD’s but they don’t have the same missile defence, armour, sidewalls or magazine capacity.
Regardless of the broadside of the battleships the above passages tell us quite a bit about the battleships that we can take away. For example we can infer that the battleships are maintained to the same standard as the SD’s, they weren’t left without upgrades in 70 years while the SD’s and DN’s were upgraded. Another thing is that battleships cannot stand against SD’s and DN’s not because they don’t have the firepower to fight back but because they don’t have the armour, missile defence, sidewalls and magazine to survive long term in the wall. They can be placed in the wall if needed and if they are in overwhelming numbers they can perform well enough even if we can expect some losses they just cannot and should not be placed 1 v 1 against DNs and SD's.
We can also infer from the series that Haven is large but a large portion of their territories are not really net contributors to the national economy as they were stripped of wealth and resources once conquered by the RHN so dispersing their combat resources to guard dozens if not a hundred or more systems of little value to the war effort seems counter productive and more importantly there is no indication that any of the nations they conquered had capital ships escape from destruction and/or capture.
So rear area security would require some capital ships but would and should overwhelmingly be conducted by light units(CA and below) or LAC’s for those systems that contribute nothing to the national economy. So the question that was originally raised is how could the RHN have used the battleships more efficiently at the start of the war or how they could have used them effectively after the committee took over. My belief is that the vast majority of the Republic was of no value and thus could be left lightly defended thus freeing those battleships to contribute to the war effort with other missions.
At the beginning of the war the RHN had the following strength in BB’s, DN’s and SD’s:
-412 SD’s
-48 DN’s
-374 BB’s
Assuming that ~20% of their fleet is in for refit at anyone time to account for less experienced yards, lack of trained personnel etc… this would leave them with approximately(Rounding up or down to nearest full squadron):
-328 SD’s which is 41 squadrons
-40 SN’s which is 5 Squadrons
-304 BB’s which leave us with 38 Squadrons
Now, realistically the republic couldn’t have had more than half a dozen truly critical systems, this would be strategically, politically, economically or industrially critical systems. Then there must have been 1-2 dozen important but not truly critical systems to the war effort and a few dozen system of little importance to the republic’s war effort.
So the first half a dozen systems are tier 1 and tier 2 systems, tier 1 is Haven system and Trevor’s star so they get the biggest naval picket while tier 2 get a smaller but still significant picket. The the 1-2 dozen important but not critical systems are tier 3 systems which get smaller picket of SD’s or BB’s while tier 4 systems get lighter units or LAC’s with nodal forces of BB’s as system defence.
So 128 SD’s are used in the defence of tier 1 systems, 64 SD’s picket the tier 2 systems, all 5 DN squadrons and an twice the number of BB squadrons are used to picket tier three systems and provide nodal forces for tier 4 systems. This leaves the following strength uncommitted:
~136 SD in 17 Squadrons
~224 BB in 28 Squadrons
Concentrating those SD and BB squadrons allows the crews and commanders to prepare their units to fight as one, allows war games and more effective training and less warning for the alliance when the big offensive starts because any picket would be only a few hours ahead of the news that the RHN is moving if that.
Keeping your forces concentrated makes the first offensive a lot more significant than it actually was in the book without relying on overly complicated trickery to force the RMN to maneuver to your design. Also allows for better trained, experienced and organized forces that can respond quickly.
The question becomes where you attack and wether you take out 15% of the RMN’s wall in Hancock or 25% of the RMN’s wall in Grayson in one battle.
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On the other hand after the beginning of the war the battleships still had tremendous potential to affect positive change for the RHN. If the RHN had used only 240 of the BB’s they could have attacked allied convoys, newly conquered systems and allied rear are systems forcing the alliance to divert their waller strength all without diverting their own wallers this would have prevented alliance offensive actions and made the disparity between RHN wallers and RMN wallers more critical. If the alliance is forced to defend their rear and their newly conquered systems and convoys to allied systems to RHN BB attacks they cant concentrate 6th fleet to take Trevor’s star or 8th Fleet for Barnett. Trading BB’s for SD’s and DN’s is also beneficial for the RHN in the long run and forcing the alliance to divert forces to rear areas also makes the frontline systems easier to conquer for RHN wallers.
The BB’s were under utilized throughout the war, the alliance was allowed to dictate the tempo of operations and the BB’s were thrown away in insignificant strength to accomplish nothing in the mean time but weakening the RHN.