runsforcelery wrote:I think people are vastly overrating what "special forces" could do for Safehold.
If you have a mission suitable to be carried out by "fast-moving cavalry," you don't need "special forces," you need cavalry. And from a reconnaissance perspective, you can't embed "special forces" in distant locations and have reliable transmission of information in anything remotely like real-time terms. You can send out patrols with messenger wyverns — except, of course, that the messenger wyverns will return to their "home" roost which may not be where you need the information — but you don't need some sort of super elite special forces for that; you simply need reasonably well-trained cavalry. Nor is there a crying need for forces trained to conduct "irregular warfare." This isn't the American frontier in 1776, and for the most part units like Roger’s Rangers aren't what you're going to need in a war fought across it. In a lot of ways, the terrain constraints are more like Europe in the late nineteenth century, and unless you want to inspire a full-fledged guerrilla warfare model behind the lines, using organized, openly operating military units to accomplish your goals is going to be much more economical in terms of training, manpower, and consequences to the civilian population.
The sort of information that "special forces" could provide to a commander in the field is exactly the sort of information that he ought to be able to gather with the scouting forces already assigned to him. That's one of the things the "scout-snipers" were organized to provide in the first place, hence the "scout" in their title. With the creation of the Imperial Charisian Army, the "scout-snipers" concept has evolved/been modified somewhat, although they remain recon specialists whose function is to very quietly slip behind, through, or around enemy lines in order to gather tactical information. The primary reconnaissance function, however, is now provided by mounted reconnaissance troops, and the "reach" of recon is — and will remain in a pre-radio world — very limited. The sorts of tactical data that SNARCs make available to a field commander are generally (not always, but generally) going to be the same sorts of tactical information those trained scouts and their mounted counterparts can provide. In those instances where more "mundane" means cannot duplicate the tactical information gathering capability, there's probably no way that someone could plausibly claim that the information had been gathered by those merely mortal scouts. In those instances, the commander who has access to the SNARCs — like Green Valley — simply has to "operate on a hunch" or rely on "instinct," exactly like Cayleb did when he and Merlin led the Navy around Crag Hook in the middle of a storm to attack Thirsk's ships. Or, for that matter, like Green Valley did in the Sylmahn Gap. There is no way that any plausible non-SNARC source of information could have openly provided to him the grasp of the enemy's deployments that he used to plan that attack . . . or time the orders that he gave during the actual engagement. At best, his initial understanding of the enemy's deployment's could have been based on "patrols moving along the lizard paths" in the cliffs above the gap floor, but there were no Charisian "special forces" in position — and couldn't have been — to provide it for him. And there is no way in the world that anyone could have plausibly provided him with an ongoing wyvern's-eye view of how the engagement was developing.
The 21st-century military is in love with the concept of "special forces," and they have pulled off some truly spectacular successes. They are not, however, the end-all and be-all of reconnaissance and scouting operations — or even sabotage operations — as some people appear to believe. Our present-day concept of special forces has a lot to do with the nature of the conflicts we face — low intensity warfare, antiterrorist operations, what we used to call "hearts and minds" operations, provision of training cadres, deniability, etc. — than with an inherent superiority of special forces warfare over conventional forces in an all out war for survival. The undeniable tendency for special forces organizations to siphon off noncoms and officers — and, of course, enlisted personnel — of superior quality always has a negative effect on the availability of those same officers, noncoms, and enlisted to the regular forces. In some circumstances, that siphoning effect is fully justified because the special forces give you capabilities the regular forces simply don't have. In the case of Safehold, however, where the "regulars" can do just about anything you need done, it's much harder to justify making that trade-off.
As far as making use of what we might call "strategic" information gathered by the SNARCs and passing it off as having been gathered by long-range, deep penetration special forces teams, why bother? You're already passing it off as information that was gathered by your spy network, so why introduce an unnecessary complication to your military forces to explain what you've already explained?
And, finally, from the perspective of infrastructure raids, Merlin, Cayleb, and Sharleyan are going to be far more comfortable with carrying them out using "conventional" cavalry forces whose path in and out to the attack infrastructure can be clearly traced and demonstrated (thus demonstrating that the attackers had to come from the outside) rather than special forces which infiltrate to their objective, attack, and then disappear again. The reason for this (as I've stated before) is that they have no desire to provoke Clyntahn into retaliatory raids against the local civilian population which "obviously" collaborated with the attackers or — almost equally culpable — didn't prevent the attack by spotting and reporting the attackers. It could be argued that from a suitably cold-blooded and calculating perspective provoking Clyntahn into additional atrocities can only undermine the authority of the Church of God Awaiting and the Inquisition, on the one hand, and provide recruits for an ever-intensifying guerrilla war in the Church's rear areas. The inner circle has considered that possibility . . . and rejected it.
From a moral perspective, they refuse to become Clyntahn, regarding anyone in the area of operations as expendable as long as it promotes and supports their tactical and operational objectives. They are fighting this war in no small part because of their belief in human dignity and freedom and the sanctity of human life. They refuse to compromise those objectives in any way they can possibly avoid, and they believe that adopting such morally abhorrent policies would ultimately undercut that overriding strategic goal. And from a pragmatic perspective, they don't need to provoke Clyntahn into committing additional atrocities to create all of the disgust, hatred, and passive and/or active resistance they could possibly desire because he's going to do it anyway. That much is already abundantly clear to them.
From a tactical perspective, they don't feel that they need the "assistance" of a lot of organized guerrilla groups, given the capabilities they already have, when those guerrillas' operations are only going to deepen and harden the fracture lines already splitting Safehold and leave a legacy not simply of mutual hatred but also a legacy of armed, embittered men prepared to resort to violence again. I would imagine that our own experiences in places like Sarajevo, the Middle East, and a dozen other spots around the globe could probably suggest at least part of their reason for their not wanting to create that sort of legacy unless there is an overwhelming tactical need for them to do so despite the downsides they are trying to avoid.
From a strategic perspective, they clearly don't need a "special forces" deep reconnaissance capability for military, industrial, and economic planning purposes. They've already established the existence of their spy networks, and even if you're going to operate on the assumption that creating a "special forces" organization would provide them with a more broad-based tool with which to legitimize SNARC-gathered information, it doesn't provide the interface to get that information into the hands of the commanders/planners who need it. Any information your "special forces" guys could gather and get to the rear through "mundane" channels would probably broaden an army commander's or an area commander's "reach," but it wouldn't help one bit with SNARC reconnaissance, because you'd still have to use someone or something – like Ahbraim Zhevons or Owl's letter-writing remotes — to insert the information into the chain at some point.
Please do note that I am most emphatically not saying that field commanders aren't going to need the very best intelligence they can get and that specially trained scouting and reconnaissance outfits aren't going to be a vital part of that intelligence gathering. Also note that I am most emphatically not ruling out behind-the-front attacks on infrastructure or other critical objectives. I'm simply saying that "special forces" in the 21st-century sense of the term are not going to be the best, most economical way to acquire those capabilities on Safehold. And that "special forces" in the Safeholdian sense of the term already exist within the Imperial Charisian Army. You may not have seen them in operation yet, but then, you've only seen the Imperial Charisian Army fight a single battle under extraordinarily constricted conditions of terrain where Safeholdian "special forces" would have been of extremely limited utility.
Thank you for this RFC. it has cleared up a point or two of confusion for me, and opened up a whole lot of ideas as to whats coming next. =D
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its not paranoia if its justified....
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