Raid on Sol System-Another Option

tonyz wrote:

phillies wrote:However, as explained in ART, in under two decades...or so proposed Captain Gweon...the Grand Alliance will have a larger economic capacity that the Solarian League.

Do recall that Captain Gweon's is an MAlign agent trying to induce the League to embark on a courts of action that will lead to its breakup. I'm sure his tradecraft is good enough not to put outright lies in his analysis, but you may want to consider the possibility that the assumptions, or analysis, are slanted in ways intended to get the Mandarins to act the way the Mesans want, instead of being done with the strict impartiality which would be justified in a loyal servant of the Invincble Solarian League.

However, in ART, Gweon brags to his girl friend/handler that he gave Kolokoltsov good analysis which means he didn't have to lie.

Don

n7axw wrote:

tonyz wrote:
Do recall that Captain Gweon's is an MAlign agent trying to induce the League to embark on a courts of action that will lead to its breakup. I'm sure his tradecraft is good enough not to put outright lies in his analysis, but you may want to consider the possibility that the assumptions, or analysis, are slanted in ways intended to get the Mandarins to act the way the Mesans want, instead of being done with the strict impartiality which would be justified in a loyal servant of the Invincble Solarian League.

However, in ART, Gweon brags to his girl friend/handler that he gave Kolokoltsov good analysis which means he didn't have to lie.

Don

And at this point, he literally cannot outright lie because too many people will be checking, double and triple checking everything to make sure it's accurate. His analysis has to stand up to scrutiny by others outside of the SLN. The best he can do is to shade the military aspect and some of the economics without being overt about it. He has to be very subtle and slow in his work, or his rear will be liquidated.

n7axw wrote:What SLN task forces are you envisioning? What do you think they will be doing? I've wondered about that. The SLN still has abt 1500 SDs out there. They can't really confront the GA. I do remember a discussion amongst the Mandarins about using fleet to supress succession amongst systems that might be so inclined who don't have access to Haven quadrant military tech.

First of all, there's going to be a lot of FF small and medium ships involved in commerce raiding.

Second, the SLN is going to lose a quarter to a third of those SDs trying to stop Beowulf's secession. The GA is going to have to hunt down the rest eventually; Some task forces are going to mutiny and/or turn Warlord as the League crumbles. Some are going to come up against members of the Renaissance Factor or other systems with substantial and more capable SDFs.

There's going to be as much Chaos as anyone except the MAlign could wish for. About the only certainty is that any current SLN ships will lose as soon as they encounter modern GA ships--and there precious few non-modern GA ships left.

drothgery wrote:Haven - ~150
Manticore (including Silesia and Talbott) - ~60
Andermani Empire (including Silesia) - ~60
Maya - ~30
Beowulf, Grayson, Erewhon, Torch, and other single-system powers - ~20

Not to mention
Members of the League that voted against censuring Beowulf - >300
OFS protectorates - 'hundreds'

I'm not necessarily saying occupying the League is a good idea, just that's not impossible for the GA.

The Andermani are deliberately staying out of the GA/SL confrontation to leave themselves free to operate against the Alignment, so their forces can't be counted on. There's no evidence that I can recall that Maya or Erewhon are joining the GA, though they are likely to lean in that direction - however, Maya's military forces are still very much a work in progress. Torch is militarily negligible and I don't recall any other single-system nations joining the GA other than Grayson - remember, the Manticoran Alliance was formed to opposed Haven, not the League.

Weird Harold wrote:
Manticore alone, or the GA CAN win an outright military victory. They have the technology, ships. missiles, LACs, etc, to completely gut the Solarian League.

No, they can't. you're making the same mistake Hannibal did after Cannae. Rome put three armies into the field against him and he destroyed them all. He assumed that meant he had won the war and Rome would have to sue for peace terms. Rome didn't play ball - they avoided engaging his main army, put strong garrisons in strategic points around Italy to keep him occupied and then raised a new field army which they sent to Spain. That army, under Scipio (soon to be Scipio Africanus) conquered the Carthaginian empire there, then invaded north Africa, forcing the Carthaginian government to recall Hannibal to defend the Carthage itself and leading to the Roman victory at Zama and Carthage's defeat.

Hannibal lost the war after spending seventeen years marching around Italy more or less at will, in the course of which he never lost a battle. In spite of this, Rome declined to admit it was beaten and Hannibal wasn't able to take the city itself, which meant he couldn't stop Rome putting more and more men into the field against him.

It's the same case with the League. Hannibal Harrington can smash fleet after fleet, but unless the GA can stop the League building new fleets, establishing new shipyards, conducting new R&D, they're won't win the war. Sooner or later, a thousand SLN SD(P)s with FTL fire control on their MDMs will come across the alpha wall right on Manticore's hyper limit, and it's game over.

Dafmeister wrote:It's the same case with the League. Hannibal Harrington can smash fleet after fleet, but unless the GA can stop the League building new fleets, establishing new shipyards, conducting new R&D, they're won't win the war. Sooner or later, a thousand SLN SD(P)s with FTL fire control on their MDMs will come across the alpha wall right on Manticore's hyper limit, and it's game over.

We're both saying the same thing with different definitions; basically the same thing Adm Capareli explained just before Honor laid out the Harrington Doctrine.

Manticore/GA can win This war, but they can't militarily prevent the next war or win it when it comes. IOW, Manticore can't go for a Treaty of Versailles, they have to go for a Marshal Plan and a lasting peace.

Weird Harold wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:It's the same case with the League. Hannibal Harrington can smash fleet after fleet, but unless the GA can stop the League building new fleets, establishing new shipyards, conducting new R&D, they're won't win the war. Sooner or later, a thousand SLN SD(P)s with FTL fire control on their MDMs will come across the alpha wall right on Manticore's hyper limit, and it's game over.

We're both saying the same thing with different definitions; basically the same thing Adm Capareli explained just before Honor laid out the Harrington Doctrine.

Manticore/GA can win This war, but they can't militarily prevent the next war or win it when it comes. IOW, Manticore can't go for a Treaty of Versailles, they have to go for a Marshal Plan and a lasting peace.

I think you're assuming that the GA will destroy the SLN and there will be a period of peace. That could happen, in fact it could happen without the wholesale destruction of the SLN if the League were to agree peace terms now and spend time rebuilding. I'm suggesting this period of peace might not even happen - there could be continuous low-level warfare, keeping the GA on firefighting duty, while the League's Bolthole analogue gets to work.

Dafmeister wrote:I think you're assuming that the GA will destroy the SLN and there will be a period of peace. That could happen, ...

What I'm assuming is that the GA will implement the Harrington Doctrine (as explaine in SftS, Ch 44) successfully.

Dafmeister wrote:...in fact it could happen without the wholesale destruction of the SLN if the League were to agree peace terms now and spend time rebuilding.

The Harrington Doctrine's express aim is the destruction of the Solarian League both militarily and politically. If they let the League and SLN buy them off with a "negotiated peace," they lose--because the League and SLN will rebuild if they aren't destroyed.

Dafmeister wrote:I'm suggesting this period of peace might not even happen - there could be continuous low-level warfare, keeping the GA on firefighting duty, while the League's Bolthole analogue gets to work.

If you're right, then Manticore and the GA lose. The GA CANNOT survive if the League, or any sizable portion of the League survives.

In order to survive in the long-term, Manticore and the GA must destroy the League. That is NOT the same thing as "pounding league members back to the stone age."

Storm From The Shadows Chapter Forty-four explicates Manticore's strategic option and anticipated results. It is also where Fleet Admiral Honor Alexander-Harrington lays out the option that nobody has considered: Don't defeat and occupy the league, destroy the League by splitting it apart and making separate peace treaties with the successor states.

As Abraham Lincoln said, (and as quoted by Fleet Admiral Hamish Alexander-Harrington,) "I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend."

Manticore has no hope of making the Mandarins or SLN their friends, So they must make friends with the scattered pieces the League will break into after the Mandarins are left with nothing to rule and the SLN has no League to be a Navy for.

Well, that would definitely be the plan... The trick is going to be to use the military side of things in pursuit of the political objective, sustaining the pressure on the fracture points without pushing too hard or in the wrong place, and thereby forcing the pieces of the League together rather than apart.

I suspect that, ultimately, the GA will succeed, but I don't expect it to go completely, or even mostly, to plan, either.

Please remember that the MAlign also wants to break up the SL so that the remnants can coalesce around the Renaisance Factor, leaving Beowulf and the Beowulf Code out of the result.

Talking about whether the so-called "Harrington Plan" (or whatever - I don't remember it ever being given a name in any book) will succeed is beside the point. The MAlign wants it to succeed, and had its own plans in place to make it happen.

The interesting piece is that the GA is still in the dark about the MAlign's actual goals and strategies for achieving them, so the GA leadership (including Honor) is rightly concerned about the results of the SL breakup and how to deal with them.

All that will change once they find out about the actual MAlign goal and the strategies, including the RF.