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Vince
Vice Admiral
Posts: 1574
Joined: Fri Apr 09, 2010 11:43 pm
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Some review as to where the Harrington Doctrine is originally grounded might be helpful. I've highlighted the critical sections, but the entire quotes are worth reading to get an idea of how Honor views the universe. En route to Yeltsin's Star: The Honor of the Queen, Chapter 3 wrote:“You know,” Courvosier murmured in Honor’s ear, “I still remember the first time it was my turn to do that. Odd how terrifying it can be, isn’t it?”
“All things are relative, Sir,” Honor replied with a smile, “and I suppose it does us good. Weren’t you the one who was telling me a Queen’s officer has to understand diplomacy as well as tactics?”
“Now that, Captain, is a very true statement,” another voice said, and Honor suppressed a grimace. “In fact, I only wish more Navy officers could realize that diplomacy is even more important than tactics and strategy,” the Honorable Reginald Houseman continued in his deep, cultured baritone.
“I don’t believe I can quite agree with that, Sir,” Honor said quietly, hoping her irritation at his intrusion into a private conversation didn’t show. “At least, not from the Navy’s viewpoint. Important, yes, but it’s our job to step in after diplomacy breaks down.”
“Indeed?” Houseman smiled the superior smile Honor loathed. “I realize military people often lack the time for the study of history, but an ancient Old Earth soldier got it exactly right when he said war was simply the continuation of diplomacy by non-diplomatic means.”
“That’s something of a paraphrase, and that ‘simply’ understates the case a bit, but I’ll grant that it sums up the sense of General Clausewitz’s remark.” Houseman’s eyes narrowed as Honor supplied Clausewitz’s name and rank, and other conversations flagged as eyes turned toward them. “Of course, Clausewitz came out of the Napoleonic Era on Old Earth, heading into the Final Age of Western Imperialism, and On War isn’t really about politics or diplomacy, except inasmuch as they and warfare are all instruments of state policy. Actually, Sun Tzu made the same point over two thousand T-years earlier.” A hint of red tinged Houseman’s jowls, and Honor smiled pleasantly. “Still, neither of them had a monopoly on the concept, did they? Tanakov said much the same thing in his Tenets of War just after the Warshawski sail made interstellar warfare possible, and Gustav Anderman certainly demonstrated the way in which diplomatic and military means can be used to reinforce one another when he took over New Berlin and built it into the Anderman Empire in the sixteenth century. Have you read his Sternenkrieg, Mr. Houseman? It’s an interesting distillation of most of the earlier theorists with a few genuine twists of his own, probably from his personal background as a mercenary. I think Admiral White Haven’s translation is probably the best available.”
“Ah, no, I’m afraid I haven’t,” Houseman said, and Courvosier blotted his lips with his napkin to hide a grin. “My point, however,” the diplomat continued doggedly, “is that properly conducted diplomacy renders military strategy irrelevant by precluding the need for war.” He sniffed and swirled his wine gently, and his superior smile reasserted itself.
“Reasonable people negotiating in good faith can always reach reasonable compromises, Captain. Take our situation here, for example. Neither Yeltsin’s Star nor the Endicott System have any real resources to attract interstellar commerce, but they each have an inhabited world, with almost nine billion people between them, and they lie less than two days apart for a hyper freighter. That gives them ample opportunity to create local prosperity, yet both economies are at best borderline . . . which is why it’s so absurd that they’ve been at one another’s throats for so long over some silly religious difference! They should be trading with one another, building a mutually supported, secure economic future, not wasting resources on an arms race.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Once they discover the advantages of peaceful trade—once they each realize their prosperity depends on the other’s—the situation will defuse itself without all this saber rattling.”
Honor managed not to stare at him in disbelief, but if she hadn’t known the admiral so well, she would have assumed someone had failed to brief Houseman. It would certainly be nice to make peace between Masada and Grayson, but her own reading of the download accompanying her orders had confirmed everything the admiral had said about their long-term hostility. And nice as it would be to put that enmity to rest, Manticore’s fundamental purpose was to secure an ally against Haven, not engage in a peacemaking effort that was almost certainly doomed to failure.
“I’m sure that would be a desirable outcome, Mr. Houseman,” she said after a moment, “but I don’t know how realistic it is.”
“Indeed?” Houseman bristled.
“They’ve been enemies for more than six hundred T-years,” she pointed out as gently as she could, “and religious hatreds are among the most virulent known to man.”
“That’s why they need a fresh viewpoint, a third party from outside the basic equation who can bring them together.”
“Excuse me, Sir, but I was under the impression our primary goals are to secure an ally and Fleet base rights and to prevent Haven from penetrating the region instead of us.”
“Well, of course they are, Captain.” Houseman’s tone was just short of impatient. “But the best way to do that is to settle the locals’ differences. The potential for instability and Havenite interference will remain as long as their hostility does, whatever else we may accomplish. Once we bring them together, however, we’ll have two friends in the region, and there won’t be any temptation for either of them to invite Haven in for military advantage. The best diplomatic glue is common interest, not simply a common enemy. Indeed,” Houseman sipped his wine, “our entire involvement in this region stems from our own failure to find a common interest with the People’s Republic, and it is a failure. There’s always some way to avoid confrontation if one only looks deep enough and remembers that, in the long run, violence never solves anything. That’s why we have diplomats, Captain Harrington—and why a resort to brute force is an indication of failed diplomacy, nothing more and nothing less.”
Major Tomas Ramirez, commander of Fearless’s Marine detachment, stared at Houseman in disbelief from further down the table. The heavyset, almost squat Marine had been twelve years old when Haven conquered his native Trevor’s Star. He, his mother, and his sister had escaped to Manticore in the last refugee convoy through the Manticore Wormhole Junction; his father had stayed behind, on one of the warships that died to cover the retreat. Now his jaw tightened ominously as Houseman smiled at Honor, but Lieutenant Commander Higgins, Fearless’s chief engineer, touched his forearm and jerked a tiny headshake. The little scene wasn’t lost on Honor, and she sipped her own wine deliberately, then lowered her glass.
“I see,” she said, and wondered how the admiral tolerated such a nincompoop as his second in command. Houseman had a reputation as a brilliant economist and, given Grayson’s backward economy, sending him made sense, but he was also an ivory-tower intellectual who’d been plucked from a tenured position in Mannheim University’s College of Economics for government service. Mannheim wasn’t called “Socialist U” for nothing, and Houseman’s prominent family was a vocal supporter of the Liberal Party. Neither of those facts were calculated to endear him to Captain Honor Harrington, and his simplistic notion of how to approach the Grayson-Masada hostility was downright frightening.
“I’m afraid I can’t quite agree with you, Sir,” she said at last, setting her glass down precisely and keeping her voice as pleasant as humanly possible. “Your argument assumes all negotiators are reasonable, first, and second, that they can always agree on what represents a ‘reasonable compromise,’ but if history demonstrates one thing quite clearly, it’s that they aren’t and they can’t. If you can see the advantage of peaceful trade between these people, then surely it ought to be evident to them, but the record indicates no one on either side has ever even discussed the possibility. That suggests a degree of hostility that makes economic self-interest immaterial, which, in turn, suggests that what we consider rationalism may not play a particularly prominent part in their thinking. Even if it did, mistakes happen, Mr. Houseman, and that’s where the people in uniform come in.”
“ ‘Mistakes,’ as you put it,” Houseman said more coolly, “often happen because ‘the people in uniform’ act hastily or ill-advisedly.”
“Of course they do,” Honor agreed, and he blinked at her in surprise. “In fact, the final mistake is almost always made by someone in uniform—either because she gave the wrong advice to her own superiors when they were the aggressors or because she squeezed the trigger too quickly when an enemy made an unexpected move. Sometimes we even make the mistake of projecting threats and responses in too much detail and lock ourselves into war plans we can’t break free of, just as Clausewitz’s own disciples did. But, Mr. Houseman,” her dark eyes met his suddenly across the snowy tablecloth, “the situations which make military mistakes critical, even possible, grow out of political and diplomatic maneuvers which preceded them.”
“Indeed?” Houseman regarded her with grudging respect and marked distaste. “Then wars are primarily the fault of the civilians, Captain, and not the pure-hearted military protectors of the realm?”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” Honor said, and a grin lit her face briefly. “I’ve known quite a few ‘military protectors,’ and I’m sorry to say all too few of them were ‘pure-hearted’!” Her grin vanished. “On the other hand, I’d have to point out that in any society in which the military is controlled by duly constituted civilian authorities—like ours—the ultimate responsibility has to lie with the civilians who make policy between the wars. I don’t mean to suggest that those civilians are stupid or incompetent—" after all, she thought, one must be polite “—or that the military gives them unfailingly good advice, but mutually contradictory national goals can present insoluble dilemmas, however much good faith there may be on both sides. And when one side doesn’t negotiate in good faith—" She shrugged.
“It was also Clausewitz who said ‘Politics is the womb in which war is developed,’ Mr. Houseman. My own view is a bit simpler than that. War may represent the failure of diplomacy, but even the best diplomats operate on credit. Sooner or later someone who’s less reasonable than you are is going to call you, and if your military can’t cover your I.O.U.s, you lose.”
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis. And Honor was thinking about the military and diplomacy, although not quite as explicitly in The Honor of the Queen, as far back as: Changer of Worlds, Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington wrote:"I still say there has to be a better way to do this." Midshipman Makira sounded unusually grumpy, and Honor glanced across the table and shook her head at him.
"You have got to be one of the most contrary people that I've ever met, Nassios," she told him severely.
"And just what do you mean by that?" Makira demanded.
"I mean that I don't think there's anything the Captain could do that you couldn't decide was the wrong way to go about it. Not to say that you're a nit-picker—although, now that I think about it, someone whose disposition was less naturally sunny and equable than my own probably would—but you do have an absolute gift for picking up on the potential weaknesses of an idea without paying any attention to its advantages."
"Actually," Makira said in an unusually serious tone, "I think you might have a point there. I really do have a tendency to look for problems first. Maybe that's because I've discovered that that way any of my surprises are pleasant ones. Remember, Captain Courvoisier always said that no plan survives contact with the enemy anyway. The way I see it, that makes a pessimist the ideal commander in a lot of ways."
"Maybe—as long as your pessimism doesn't prevent you from having enough confidence to take the initiative away from the bad guys and hang on to it for yourself," Honor countered. Nimitz looked up from his perch on the end of the Snotty Row table and cocked his head in truly magisterial style as he listened to his person's discussion, and Makira chuckled.
"Not fair," he protested, reaching out to stroke the 'cat's ears. "You and Nimitz are ganging up on me again!"
"Only because you're wrong," Honor informed him with a certain smugness.
"Oh, no, I'm not! Look, all I'm saying is that the way we're going about it now, this is the only star system in our entire patrol area that we're giving any cover at all to. Now," he leaned back and folded his arms, "explain to me where that statement is in error."
"It's not in error at all," she conceded. "The problem is that there isn't an ideal solution to the problem of too many star systems and not enough cruisers. We can only be in one place at a time whatever we do, and if we try to spread ourselves between too many systems, we'll just spend all of our time running around between them in hyper and never accomplish anything at all in n-space." She shrugged. "Under the circumstances, and given the fact that the Star Kingdom's presence here in Melchor is pretty much nailed down, I think it makes a lot of sense to troll for pirates right here."
"And while we're doing that," Makira pointed out, "we can be pretty sure that somewhere else in our patrol area a merchantship we ought to be protecting is about to get its ass into a world of hurt with no one there to look out for her."
"You're probably right. But without detailed advance knowledge of the schedules and orders of every merchie in the entire Saginaw Sector, it's simply impossible for anyone to predict where our shipping is going to be at any given moment, anyway. For that matter, even if we'd had detailed schedules on every civilian ship planning on moving in our area at the time we left Manticore, they'd be hopelessly out of date by now, and you know it. And there aren't any such detailed schedules in the first place, which means every single Manticoran ship in Silesia is basically its own needle inside one huge haystack. So even if we were cruising around from system to system, the odds are that we'd almost certainly be out of position to help out the merchantship you're talking about. If we were in position to help, it could only be a case of sheer dumb luck, and you know that as well as I do."
"But at least we'd have a chance for dumb luck to put us there!" he shot back stubbornly. "As it is, we don't even have that!"
"No, we don't—we've got something much better than that: bait. We know that every pirate in the sector knows about the Dillingham Cartel's installations here in Melchor. They can be pretty much certain that there are going to be Manticoran ships in and out of this system on a semi-regular basis, not to mention the possibility that they might get lucky and actually manage to pull off a successful raid on the installations themselves, despite their defenses. That's the whole point of the Captain's strategy! Instead of chasing off from star system to star system with no assurance that he'll catch up with any pirates, much less pirates in the act of raiding our shipping, he's opted to sit here and set an ambush for anybody who's tempted to hit Dillingham's people. I'd say the odds are much better that we'll actually manage to pick off a few pirates by lying in wait for them than there'd be any other way."
"But we're not even showing the flag in any other system," Makira complained. "There's no sense of presence to deter operations anywhere else in the sector."
"That's probably the single most valid criticism of our approach," Honor agreed. "Unfortunately, the Captain only has one ship and there's no way in the world to cover enough space with a single ship to actually deter anyone who can do simple math. What are the odds that War Maiden is going to turn up to intercept any given pirate at any given moment?" She shook her head. "No, unless the Admiralty is prepared to give the Captain at least a complete cruiser division to work with, I don't see how he can possibly be expected to create a broad enough sense of presence to actually deter anybody who's inclined to turn pirate in the first place."
"Then why bother to send us at all?" For the first time, there was a note of true bitterness in Makira's voice. "If all we're doing is trying to hold air in the lock with a screen door, then what's the damned point?"
"The same as it's always been, I suppose," Honor said. "One ship can't deter piracy throughout an entire patrol area the size of the Saginaw Sector—not in any specific sense, at least. But if we can pick off two or three of the scum, then the word will get around among the ones we don't get a shot at. At least we can make a few people who are considering the 'great adventure' as a career choice think about whether or not they really want to run the risk of being one of the unlucky ones. More to the point, the word will also get around that we're paying particular attention to Melchor, which may just remind them that the Star Kingdom takes a dim view of attacks on our nationals. I hate to say it, but in a lot of ways what we're really doing out here is encouraging the local vermin to go pick on someone else's shipping and leave ours alone."
"That's not what they told us back at the Academy," Makira said. "They told us our job was to suppress piracy, not just encourage it to go after merchies unlucky enough to belong to some poor sucker of a star nation that doesn't have a decent navy of its own!"
"Of course that's what they told us, and in an absolute sense they were right. But we live in an imperfect galaxy, Nassios, and it's been getting steadily less perfect for years now. Look," she leaned forward across the table, propping her elbows on it while her expression turned very serious, "the Navy only has so many ships and so many people, and important as Silesia is—and as important as the lives of Manticoran spacers are—we can only put so many ships in so many places. Back before the Peeps started conquering everything in sight, we could actually send a big enough chunk of the Navy off to Silesia every year to make a real hole in pirate operations here. But with so much of our available strength diverted to keeping an eye on the Peeps at places like Trevor's Star and Basilisk, we can't do that any more. We simply don't have enough hulls for that kind of deployment. So I'm sure that everyone at the Admiralty understands perfectly well that there's no way we can possibly 'suppress' piracy in our patrol areas. For that matter, I'd bet that any pirate who's not a complete imbecile knows that just as well as we do, and you can be absolutely sure that the Andies do!"
Nassios Makira tipped back in his chair, and his expression had gone from one that showed more than a little outrage to one of surprise. He knew that he and the other middies in War Maiden's company all had exactly the same access to information, but it was suddenly apparent to him that Honor had put that information together into a far more complete and coherent picture than he ever had.
"Then why bother to send us?" he repeated, but his tone had gone from one of challenge to one that verged on the plaintive. "If we can't do any good, and everyone knows it, then why are we here?"
"I didn't say we couldn't do any good," Honor told him almost gently. "I said that we couldn't realistically expect to suppress piracy. The fact that we can't stamp it out or even drive a significant number of the raiders out of any given area doesn't relieve us of a moral responsibility to do whatever we can do. And one of the responsibilities that we have is to protect our own nationals to the greatest possible extent, however limited that extent may be compared to what we'd like to do. We can't afford for the pirates—or the Andies—to decide that we'll simply write off our commitments in Silesia, however strapped for ships we may be. And when I said that what we're really trying to do is to convince pirates to go pick on someone else's merchant shipping, I didn't mean that we had any specific victims in mind. I just meant that our objective is to convince the locals that it's more unsafe to attack our shipping than it is to attack anyone else's. I know there are some people back home who would argue that it's in our true strategic interest to point the pirates here at anybody who competes with our own merchant marine, but they're idiots. Oh, I'm sure we could show some short-term gain if the pirate threat scared everybody looking for freight carriers in Silesia into using our merchies, but the long-term price would be stiff. Besides, once everybody was using Manticoran bottoms, the pirates would have no choice but to come after us again because there wouldn't be any other targets for them!
"Actually," she said after a moment, her tone and expression thoughtful, "there may be an additional advantage in pointing pirates at someone else. Everyone has relied on us to play police out here for the better part of a century and a half, but we're scarcely the only ones with an interest in what happens in Silesia. I'm sure that there have been times when the government and the Admiralty both did their very best to make sure that everyone else regarded us as the logical police force for Silesia, if only to depress Andy pretentions in the area. But now that we're having to concentrate on our own forces on the Peeps' frontiers, we need someone else to take up the slack out here. And I'm afraid the only people available are the Andies. The Confeds certainly aren't going to be able to do anything about it! So maybe there's an advantage I hadn't considered in persuading pirates to pick on Andy merchies instead of ours, if that's going to get the Andy navy involved in going after them more aggressively while we're busy somewhere else."
"Um." Makira rubbed his eyebrow while he pondered everything she'd just said. It made sense. In fact, it made a lot of sense, and now that she'd laid it all out, he couldn't quite understand why the same conclusions hadn't suggested themselves to him long since. But still . . .
"All right," he said. "I can see your point, and I don't guess I can really argue with it. But I still think that we could do more to convince pirates to go after someone else's shipping if we put in an appearance in more than one star system. I mean, if Melchor is the only place we ever pop a single pirate—not that we've managed to do even that much so far—then our impact is going to be very limited and localized."
"It's going to be 'limited' whatever we do. That's the inevitable consequence of only having one ship," Honor pointed out with a glimmer of amusement. "But like I said, I'm sure the word will get around. One thing that's always been true is that the 'pirate community,' for lack of a better term, has a very efficient grapevine. Captain Courvoisier says that the word always gets around when someplace turns out to be particularly hazardous to their health, so we can at least push them temporarily out of Melchor. On the other hand, what makes you think that Melchor is going to be the only place the Captain stakes out during our deployment? It's the place he's staking out at the moment, but there's no reason not to move his operations elsewhere after he feels reasonably confident that he's made an impression on the local lowlife's minds. I think the presence of the Dillingham operation here makes this the best hunting grounds we're likely to find, and it looks to me like the Captain thinks the same. But the same tactics will work just as well anyplace else there are actually pirates operating, and I'd be very surprised if we don't spend some time trolling in other systems, as well."
"Then why didn't you say so in the first place?" Makira demanded with the heat of exasperation. "You've been letting me bitch and carry on about the Captain's obsession with this system for days! Now you're going to sit there and tell me that the whole time you've actually been expecting him to eventually do what I wanted?"
"Well," Honor chuckled, "it's not my fault if what you've been letting yourself hear wasn't exactly what I've been saying, now is it? Besides, you shouldn't criticize the Captain quite so energetically unless you've really thought through what you're talking about!"
"You," Makira said darkly, "are an evil person who will undoubtedly come to an unhappy end, and if there is any justice in the universe, I'll be there to see it happen."
Honor grinned, and Nimitz bleeked a lazy laugh from the table between them.
"You may laugh . . . for now," he told them both ominously, "but There Will Come a Day when you will remember this conversation and regret it bitterly." He raised his nose with an audible sniff, and Nimitz turned his head to look up at his person. Their eyes met in complete agreement, and then Nassios Makira's arms windmilled wildly as a gray blur of treecat bounded off the table and wrapped itself firmly around his neck. The midshipman began a muffled protest that turned suddenly into a most unmilitary—and high-pitched—sound as Nimitz's long, agile fingers found his armpits and tickled unmercifully. Chair and midshipman alike went over backwards with a high, wailing laugh, and Honor leaned back in her own chair and watched with folded arms as the appropriate penalty for his ominous threat was rigorously applied.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis. -------------------------------------------------------------
History does not repeat itself so much as it echoes.
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