GA Strategy, Tactics and Targets

Crown Loyalist wrote:I'm not convinced that "pushing the advantage" involves deep strikes on the League, though. At this point, winning the war with the League involves diplomatic initiatives - not with the League government, but with all the League systems that are currently contemplating secession.

The GA has to strike the SLN's known production facilities and any shipyards or production facilities that can easily be turned to military production. That doesn't mean they have to be destroyed, but the GA does have to delay any improvements in SLN capability for as long as possible.

As Honor Harrington noted, the League is big enough and generally technically advanced enough that they will eventually set up their own version of Bolthole where the GA can't find it.

All of that will require deep penetration raids on targets like the Yildun system while diplomacy is applied to systems closer to home -- or at least systems more accessible through the Wormhole network.

kzt » 16 May 2014, 09:13 wrote:
Weird Harold wrote:That isn't proof the MAlign doesn't know where Bolthole is, but I can't find ANY textev that they do/


Oh, they didn't back then. That was then, this is now, and they have been working on this project. Unlike the RMN, the MA has at least one very skilled agent on Haven, with serious security clearances and considerable hacking skill.

In addition I understand they intend to ship a whole bunch of new people to Bolthole. Every time you expand the number of people to whom you expose secrets you increase your attack surface by at least that much.

Elizabeth's thought were concurrent with dispatching the joint mission; implying that the SEM knew at that time.

Still, I haven't seen any evidence that Elizabeth was wrong concurrent with those thoughts. I'm sure the Malign has the resources to find Bolthole eventually, but I don't recall seeing any textev that they do know as of the end of CoG.

namelessfly wrote:Amen!


Remember; Detweiller was motivated to order the Oyster Bay attacks to occur ahead of schedule that targeted Manticore and Yelstin but not Haven after he learned of Harrington's first use of the Apollo system. He was able to deduce that the RMN had developed FTL control links.

The implication is that Detweiller was confident that his spider drive SDs could defeat MDM armed SD(P)s that did not have Apollo.

Another implication of the original plan to include Haven in the OB attacks is that Detweiller knows where Bolthole is.

There is explicit textev (a statement by one of the Detweilers) that as of Oyster Bay, the Alignment did not know where Bolthole was.

SWM wrote:[
There is explicit textev (a statement by one of the Detweilers) that as of Oyster Bay, the Alignment did not know where Bolthole was.

SFTS I believe

SWM wrote:There is explicit textev (a statement by one of the Detweilers) that as of Oyster Bay, the Alignment did not know where Bolthole was.

Any idea where to find that textev? I thought I remembered it, too, but have been unable to find it.

Weird Harold wrote:

SWM wrote:There is explicit textev (a statement by one of the Detweilers) that as of Oyster Bay, the Alignment did not know where Bolthole was.

Any idea where to find that textev? I thought I remembered it, too, but have been unable to find it.

Do a FIND word in the electronic books for Detweiler in SFTS and it should get you there.

Sorry, do not know exact passage. I believe it is when talking about initializing Oyster Bay. It could be MoH as well. I am pretty sure it is SFTS.

J6P wrote:Do a FIND word in the electronic books for Detweiler in SFTS and it should get you there.

I'll try that, again. I did the search on all the ebooks at once. I'll try that one book.

J6P wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:******
SWM Wrote:
There is explicit textev (a statement by one of the Detweilers) that as of Oyster Bay, the Alignment did not know where Bolthole was.
******

Any idea where to find that textev? I thought I remembered it, too, but have been unable to find it.

Do a FIND word in the electronic books for Detweiler in SFTS and it should get you there.

Sorry, do not know exact passage. I believe it is when talking about initializing Oyster Bay. It could be MoH as well. I am pretty sure it is SFTS.

I also seem to remember that tidbit, but I've searched through the ebooks which a bunch of plausible keywords (including searching SFTS for every mention of 'Detweiler') without finding it again.

I guess I'll need to reread the whole series against to find it

I am so full of crap theorizing that the Detweilers who manipulated the demise of the RoH into socialism,manipulated the RoH into war with the SEM, then manipulated the diplomatic correspondence to renew hostilities during WoH were not well enough connected to know where Bolthile is.

Furthermore; I can't imagine the Detweilers being willing to cripple the SEM while leaving the PRH intact unless the RMN had an overwhelming technological advantage.

namelessfly wrote:I am so full of crap theorizing that the Detweilers who manipulated the demise of the RoH into socialism,manipulated the RoH into war with the SEM, then manipulated the diplomatic correspondence to renew hostilities during WoH were not well enough connected to know where Bolthile is.

That's because you failed to consider that Bolthole's location is protected from Mesan spies by a Handwavium shield.

Crown Loyalist wrote:

Alizon wrote:
2) What is your goal with the Solarians. Are you seeking utter distruction or would you just prefer that they left you alone, or is it something in between. Do you really want to destabilize the League to the extent it disintegrates or are you looking for some other form of end game.

The goal with the Solarians has to be the death of the Solarian League as a unified polity with a single military and single foreign policy. Full stop.

The Solarian League, if allowed to modernize its military, is at least as big a threat to the Grand Alliance's future independence and survival as Mesa is. The Solarian League is a nation that if it modernizes will without question have the ability to destroy Manticore. It doesn't even need to modernize that much to have that ability with its massive, massive size advantage.

For that reason alone, Manticore cannot now allow it to survive. Manticore survived through the Solarian League's unwillingness to use force to compel it to join before (which was probably a product of the protection it had within the league from Beowulf's ability to veto a declaration of war, its contacts with the Solarian league media through the wormhole, it's control over the financial system, etc).

Now that shots have been fired, Beowulf's withdrawn from the league, and the League's economy is already in shambles, the League has every incentive to crush Manticore to ensure that it cannot use its wormhole to dominate interstellar trade again. If the League manages to recover from this, it must destroy Manticore's independence. And if the League has managed to recover from this, it will have the ability to do so.

Manticore doesn't have a choice. It has a brief window of opportunity here to eliminate an enemy that has the intention to destroy it, and will (if left unchecked) have the capability to destroy it. The League must be smashed and broken and left for dead, Manticore has no other option.

But, that doesn't mean shooting up the League, it means the Harrington plan of breaking the League up into smaller units with their own militaries and foreign policies that individually Manticore can compete with and make deals with. You can't kill the League by blowing it up. That'll just make it more stubborn.

Actually, Manticore has lots of choices. If Oyster Bay hadn't happened they'd have even more, but the options available to them are still staggering especially now that they've been able to draw the Republic into their alliance and probably the Andermani as well.

But you also have some daunting and immediate challenges which are much more pressing that what might happen a decade from now and in order to really make those long range issues relevant, you have to be around in 10 years.

The biggest wrench in everything the Alliance might want to do against the League is the Alignment and a high degree of uncertainty. The Alignment has already shown themselves to be at least as great a threat to the Manticorian Alliance as the Peeps ever were as they did in one blow what decades of planning and fighting by the Star Kingdom's most capable and powerful foe had been unable to achieve.

The uncertainty factor is even greater. Who out there could have done this, where are they, how many are they, what technology are they using? The Alliance really has none of these answers beyond some vague suppositions that may or may not be correct and based on little more than conjecture that happen to fit a certain view of the facts.

You could easily put the entire GA fleet to defense of their most important systems and planets and still not have enough to effectively guard them all against a repeat attack.

You have to take risks, yes. But generally you take those risks in war to defeat your enemy, not to go "push chicks into the pond". If you're going after the League, you are not going after the people who have proven themselves to be the most clear and present danger to your existence.

I think the answer is that you can't. Until you have a much better idea of what you are facing and what it takes to mount an effective defense against it ... or even know what it is you are fighting, you're going to need to dedicate a LOT of resources to defending yourself.

Exactly how many more OB's would it take to completely cripple the entire alliance. How about a successful strike on Haven or the Andermani homeworlds or both. How much industrial capacity can you afford to have obliterated before you're crippled, before you're economy is a shattered ruin. How many millions or billions of your people can you afford to lose in events similar to the Yawata Strike?

Not many.

The Solly's just sent you their best shot and surrendered a massive fleet without scratching the paint on a single Alliance pinnance.

Which of these in your mind represents the real threat.

I see the Alliance response to the League being far more restrained than the avalance of wallers I've heard most talk about. I see then as being strikes designed to keep the League off balance and keep as much pressure as possible on the Permanent Undersecretaries as possible.

The strikes will be designed to further disrupt commercial traffic, to go after key industrial and political targets in limited strikes designed to disrupt the League and keep the League thinking in defensive terms.

While disrupting SLN fleet units, support facilities and shipyards will undoubtedly happen to demonstrate to the League the fact that the SLN can't protect them, I wouldn't list them as primary targets as they simply pose no realistic threat to you for at least several more years. In fact, it's going to take a good amount of time before SLN units will even be able to mount so much as a credible system defense much less engage in offensive operations.

The point that you're making about the League eventually becoming a real threat to the Alliance is well taken and yes, if you do not eventually deal with that threat, it will probably deal with you. However I don't believe the League can be your primary goal right now. At best Oyster Bay has currently regulated it to a secondary theatre of operations and moved in way down the immediate priority list.

The priority for the rest of the fleets is going to be to protect their vital infrastructure from this new enemy and expending all possible efforts to locate them, define the nature of the threat, then eliminate it.