Reserve Fleet

In the honorverse how would one go about building a Reserve Fleet for say the SEM post war with the MA and the SLN. The League is still a potential threat so dismantling the RMN's wallers would be ill advised but after decades of Cold War, two very hot wars and a war with he League and the MA the SEM would be financially exhausted especially accounting for the damage to the Home System and Grayson. You need significant # of SD(P)'s to be able to protect the SEM but they are not necessarily required all the time.

How would you organize the reserve and necessary support for the reserve to allow for situation that require short term surge and situation that might require long term building up. Basically the goal would be to build a reserve system that can and will support the regular fleet rather than building a "reserve fleet" that does not have actual crews thereby making it useless like the SLN's reserve.


What I envision would be to design a reserve that would allow a portion of the SD(P)'s and support ships to be able to be mobilized and deploy within a month, another portion being able to deploy within 3 months of mobilization, 6 months from mobilization and a year from mobilization.

That’s doable.

A month isn’t that big a deal. I’d expect you could get a week, but you’d have to be maintaining it like an active ship and have a core full-time crew, with the rest either regularly training (like ‘training’ for a few days a month - vs showing up fill out paperwork and get classes on ‘diversity’) and operation as part of a squadron for a few weeks one or more times a year.

A month allows a little less upkeep (if you have the ability to perform that in a month in across. Will you?) and allow for more train up which means a smaller full-to e crew.

When you get to multiple months you can fill out the crew from people completing training, but you need to have the e4+ and the 02+ on the crew. As you get more time you can go to e5+ and O3+.

This means you are paying enough to keep expensive officers and NCOs available and spend time with you. And these people have to not be in your merchant fleet or in critical war industries.

You could do a significant number from half pay navy people and the merchant fleet.
Half pay though would require them to remain on half pay, not get a long term job elsewhere. Rotate them thru so say six months on active duty and a year of planned half pay.
Merchant spacers could be called up from the ones on vacation. Unless they spend a lot of time drilling in navy reserve, you get engineers and navigation officers, not tactical officers.

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In general, half-pay officers are not the people you want to have running a ship. They are on half-pay because they have done something that makes them unwanted by any CO.

They also get promoted without any actual experience, so you'd have an O6 commanding a SD whose last actual navy experience was the tactical officer on a DD 15 years ago. A job he performed in such an incompetent fashion that no further need existed for his service.

There is very little point in building up a physical reserve fleet until the pace of technology change slows down. Otherwise you end up like the Royal Navy at the end of the 19th Century. An impressive roster of ships but they are a hodgepodge of different generations that don't mesh well together to form a usable fleet.

Also reserve ships are realistically mothballed and will not be deployable in a month. Think 6 months to 1 year. This is a number that has been consistent since the change from Galleys to sailing ships of the line through to the Iowa class BBs that were reactivated for Vietnam and the 80s.

A Reserve fleet is literally just that, a reserve.

The risk of a large reserve fleet is what happend to the SLN where the ships were unmanable and would be useless even if you could find the crews.

Finally on Manning as they are being un-mothballed and upgraded for 6+ months you worry about crews as they get close to completion.

About officers on half pay, do not condemn them universally to be piece of garbage that no CO wanted. Honor was on half pay, as was Hamish and any number of very qualified officers. Being on half pay can be caused by any number of reasons. Yes, incompetence may be one of them but it can be your politics or there genuinely might not be a need for an officer.

On the reserve fleet front, as has been brought up, it's not a one month turn around. That's an active ship. Reserve fleet are ships in lay up, systems in a safe condition with very minimal levels of maintenance going on. They require time to re-activate, repair systems that break down from lack of use and constant attention. 6 months is much more reasonable.

At this time, and the immediate future, I do not imagine that the SEM is going to worry about having a reserve. Not until they sort out manning and force levels through out the SEM.

I expect that the existing SDs will be deployed in some sort of nodal organization. Talbot, Manticore and Silesia space. With the majority of the SDs not doing a whole lot. They may mothball some of them, but not too many. The SEM covers a lot of space and may need those ships. They will definitely need to bring up the smaller ships and deployed them in a widespread manner.

kzt wrote:They also get promoted without any actual experience, so you'd have an O6 commanding a SD whose last actual navy experience was the tactical officer on a DD 15 years ago. A job he performed in such an incompetent fashion that no further need existed for his service.

Nope. That only applies to officers who reach Captain of the List, anyone lower is stuck in their rank.

It does mean the RMN could eventually end up with hundreds more half-pay admirals than they have ships(or fleets). But that's not really an issue in a navy with millions of personnel.

What we have seen a couple of times in the Manticore-Haven War time frame is ships which have been essentialy been decommissioned or retired from service have been either turned over to allies to provide them with vessels or brought back into RMN service (like the Star Knights) to provide ships for Silesia rather than the new production Apollo timeframe ships required or fighting Haven & the SL.

If you want to create a reserve fleet you have to decide if it is going to be your older ships which are mothballed or you don't keed all of your current newest tech ships and put them in storage with some level of active maintenance to keep them ready for use.

The discussion that we have already had about Manticore not needing to fully rebuild after the looes of Battle of Manticore (with Haven) and the terms it dictated to the League are somewhat off in that now Manticore (and Haven) with the rest of the GA is now going to have to at least keep on top of what goes on withing what happens to the former SL. There is also the problem of the Alignment and some level of current leading tech vs what is likely to come out of the R&D/what the Alignment next deploys etc. Manticore also has Silesia (and the essentialy shared or at least very active cooperation with the IAE there. Then there is treaty commitments to Maya -forgot about that did you, including Torch- all that area with Talbott Quadrant and it's other allied systems.

The Manticore Merchant Marine is presently in a state of esentilay chaos. It needs to get back to transporting cargo across just about everywhere but there is all the problems- not recently addressed in the series- from where they were pulled home from the League space. They have also been picked over by BuPer to -again- pull reserve &/or former RMN spacers to replace the people lost at BoM and Oyster Bay. Some ships were lost (being operated remotely) at Beowulf as part of the system defense/anti-missil screen. We suspect that the majority of ships/shipping companies are going to be dealing with problems from the WarPowersAct recall and the Lagoons for a while if they survive.

At this point, Manticore has a lot of older or effectively obsolete warships which it has kept or put back into service to cover primarily Silesia and as anti-piracy patrols in Talbott. The problem is that, while even an older Destroyer can handle your garden variety pirate, they are going to have a problem with even an older SL type Crusier that is now an outright pirate or commerce raiding for some system with intentions of expanding though conquest.

We also have the problem already addressed in the books of so many of the newer ship classes below the wall of being almost pure warfighter in configuration which includes the lower crew needs. That is acknowleged as a problem when you try to do commerce protection/anti-piracey due to lack of both naval crew to handle other ships and/or Marines to provide boarding parties etc.

It is possible that some of the not-so-old ships might be tasked as training ships and used in places like Talbott and Silesia with perhaps a higher than normal component of people who are expected to come out of the programs (at least in Talbott) to bring people up to educational and training standards to work in the RMN. This could be with ships requireing a higher crew size and not yet state of the art weapon but effective against what is expected to be encountered in the form of present generation SLN ships. Not SDs but more practicly things below Battle Crusiers.
It serves a couple of functions. One is that it -once what would be considered remedial training was sucessfully completed-the new personal could be placed in useful positions to continue learning and grow. The other is that while you are not setting up a reserve fleet in the classic sense, you are extending the life and usefullness of existing platforms while not having to replace them in a time of expected rapid changes in what you will be building for new warships. SEM recognizes that it has to being in a significant percentage of it's newest citizens to the RMN while not creating a situation where these people are somehow considered 2nd class citizens or spacers. You can't lower your standards but you can provide the extra training and specialzied concentration to integrate them into the service.

Fireflair wrote:
On the reserve fleet front, as has been brought up, it's not a one month turn around. That's an active ship. Reserve fleet are ships in lay up, systems in a safe condition with very minimal levels of maintenance going on. They require time to re-activate, repair systems that break down from lack of use and constant attention. 6 months is much more reasonable.

.

Minimal manned manned ships have repeatedly successfully gone from reserve layup to fully operational status in 5 days. I did it for Katrina and Haiti.
Dead layup to active is dicier. 30 days to a year during Vietnam era of ships put in layup at end of WW2 or end of the Korean Conflict.

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Yeah, if the plan is "We'll take it into a yard and do all that deferred maintenance that we haven't done for the last 5 years and get it running in a month" then you need a yard with capacity to work on dozens of ships, the parts to fix them on hand and the trained people to do the work. While also dealing the fact that you have a war going on and you probably have damaged vessels to repair.

Then it's a stupid plan and it will never work. You saved money by not ordering the parts, you saved money by not keeping the yards capable of doing more than routine work on your limited active fleet and you saved money by not having the yard staff, so it's impossible to bring the vessels to full readiness.