War final objective? Which front is main axis's of advance?

NervousEnergy wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
There is a problem with defining a singular objective because everyone involved has different goals -- especially Merlin, who made it plain very early on that his goals were NOT the same as Charis' goals and he could only be trusted as long as Charis' goals didn't conflict with his own.

I'm not sure I agree with this... sure, Merlin stated as such back in the very first book. But he's also repeatedly done things that have directly jeopardized his entire mission to help his friends. Flying back at high mach numbers to save Sharleyn is the most obvious example given the textev that he was very worried about detection. She may think of her mission as of overriding importance, but regardless of the state of her body she's obviously not a machine, and I doubt the ability of Machiavelli himself to stand by and watch the destruction of all he held dear if it furthered his strategic goals.

Regarding the war final objective: I can't see it as anything other than the capitulation of the Go4, almost certainly from inside. A direct invasion of Zion seems not only militarily near impossible, but a huge risk from the PR front. The Mad Wizard has gone down this literary road already in 'A Rising Thunder'. The Go4.. errr... Mandarins running the SL were glumly certain that Manticore wouldn't come crashing over the hyperwall on a direct course for Earth, as this would hand the SL a huge PR victory. You just can't have a bunch of mortal men shaking swords at the realized temple of God himself... it's GOT to be all about the corrupt leadership, and making them relent by demonstrating that continuing the war is militarily and financially too costly, no matter the ecclesiastical impetus.

It looks to me like we're heading up to a coup d'etat from Duchairn, followed by the official church being forced to state that they were wrong about the CoC being heretics. I'm halfway expecting a scene in a book or two where he takes a page from Commodore Pei and walks into a Go4 meeting in the temple with a pistol under his robes.

The appearance in some fashion of at least some of the command crew in 20 years is too far away. There's no way the war can actively go that long, and at roughly one year passed per book (written at the pace of one a year), there's no way DW could write it. We're either going to have a political collapse and recognized schism (and cold war), followed by a time jump for the next book, or that timetable is going to have to be accelerated by some event. Also nothing in the current books or situations would EVER lead to Merlin pulling out that Assault Shuttle and all his other toys... he could defeat all the armies of Safehold all by himself if he wished. The armory is also useless against the OBS. If it's really a bunch of Chekov's guns, then somehow we've got to get a situation where they're useful.

Perhaps Schuler and Chihiro AI's come back... Chihiro under the temple, and Schuler from the Key. Chihiro arms the temple loyalists with holy weapons, and Schuler (with Merlin's help) does the same for the Empire.

It's fun speculating, though going all the way back to the Old Baen Bar (late 90's), I have a terrible, terrible track record of predicting ANYTHING the mad wizard does.

I do not think the fall of the Temple to the Allies would be a PR disaster. In fact the fall of the Temple would be a sign God had removed his favor from the Temple.

They dont really need to advance much, at minimum resecure the border, possibly expand into silkiah or dohlar. once the navy of god is dealt witth, they could establishe a permanent blocade of zion. the failure of the temple to win, and the strain of the war, will ensure the enemy defeat.

Hi Tim,

Exactly right!

This has been a bone of contention in previous threads.

Breaking the power of the CoGA includes destroying any claim as God's supreme and final authority, regardless of what TL's might wish losing a struggle against the 'heretics' let alone recognizing them, admitting it was wrong, that it committed war crimes or let them be committed in its name without complaint, will all hurt its credibility, and diminish the number that will follow it unquestioningly.

There will still be many that will continue to follow it without question, but many others will begin to ask important questions.

L

Tim wrote:

NervousEnergy wrote:*quote="Weird Harold"*

There is a problem with defining a singular objective because everyone involved has different goals -- especially Merlin, who made it plain very early on that his goals were NOT the same as Charis' goals and he could only be trusted as long as Charis' goals didn't conflict with his own.*quote*
I'm not sure I agree with this... sure, Merlin stated as such back in the very first book. But he's also repeatedly done things that have directly jeopardized his entire mission to help his friends. Flying back at high mach numbers to save Sharleyn is the most obvious example given the textev that he was very worried about detection. She may think of her mission as of overriding importance, but regardless of the state of her body she's obviously not a machine, and I doubt the ability of Machiavelli himself to stand by and watch the destruction of all he held dear if it furthered his strategic goals.

Regarding the war final objective: I can't see it as anything other than the capitulation of the Go4, almost certainly from inside. A direct invasion of Zion seems not only militarily near impossible, but a huge risk from the PR front. The Mad Wizard has gone down this literary road already in 'A Rising Thunder'. The Go4.. errr... Mandarins running the SL were glumly certain that Manticore wouldn't come crashing over the hyperwall on a direct course for Earth, as this would hand the SL a huge PR victory. You just can't have a bunch of mortal men shaking swords at the realized temple of God himself... it's GOT to be all about the corrupt leadership, and making them relent by demonstrating that continuing the war is militarily and financially too costly, no matter the ecclesiastical impetus.

It looks to me like we're heading up to a coup d'etat from Duchairn, followed by the official church being forced to state that they were wrong about the CoC being heretics. I'm halfway expecting a scene in a book or two where he takes a page from Commodore Pei and walks into a Go4 meeting in the temple with a pistol under his robes.

The appearance in some fashion of at least some of the command crew in 20 years is too far away. There's no way the war can actively go that long, and at roughly one year passed per book (written at the pace of one a year), there's no way DW could write it. We're either going to have a political collapse and recognized schism (and cold war), followed by a time jump for the next book, or that timetable is going to have to be accelerated by some event. Also nothing in the current books or situations would EVER lead to Merlin pulling out that Assault Shuttle and all his other toys... he could defeat all the armies of Safehold all by himself if he wished. The armory is also useless against the OBS. If it's really a bunch of Chekov's guns, then somehow we've got to get a situation where they're useful.

Perhaps Schuler and Chihiro AI's come back... Chihiro under the temple, and Schuler from the Key. Chihiro arms the temple loyalists with holy weapons, and Schuler (with Merlin's help) does the same for the Empire.

It's fun speculating, though going all the way back to the Old Baen Bar (late 90's), I have a terrible, terrible track record of predicting ANYTHING the mad wizard does.

I do not think the fall of the Temple to the Allies would be a PR disaster. In fact the fall of the Temple would be a sign God had removed his favor from the Temple.

SAy they do break the main power and hold of the church, later on the republic could take over the border states, dohlar and silkiah just by themselves.
WIthout the backing and support of the church, those regions are not likely able to hold out against a republic out for revenge. Silkiah while belonging to desnair, they have lost most of their army and they have limited funds to create one truly able to fight the better armed units.
Dohlar is the only issue, but it seems likely that they will come through the war in an intact state. CHaris is sure to damage alot of their infrastructure to ensure the navy is properly broken down. The border states are not even a threat, they will have been drained dry by the battle, and unable to put up even minimal resistance.

SYED wrote:SAy they do break the main power and hold of the church, later on the republic could take over the border states, dohlar and silkiah just by themselves.
WIthout the backing and support of the church, those regions are not likely able to hold out against a republic out for revenge. Silkiah while belonging to desnair, they have lost most of their army and they have limited funds to create one truly able to fight the better armed units.
Dohlar is the only issue, but it seems likely that they will come through the war in an intact state. CHaris is sure to damage alot of their infrastructure to ensure the navy is properly broken down. The border states are not even a threat, they will have been drained dry by the battle, and unable to put up even minimal resistance.

I think you have this about right. After seeing to it that the Temple forces are cleared out of the area, there is no immediate need to pay much attention to the border states sinse they are unable to project power beyond their borders.

Silkiah, on the other hand, was one of those arrangements created by the church as a buffer between Siddarmark and Desnair mostly because it was uncomfortable with how successful Siddarmark had been in pushing Desnair back and was concerned about Siddarmarian designs on its own holdings. So Silkiah ended up more or less semi-independent, but still in a vassal relationship to Desnair. IIRC, the duchy was supposed to remain demilitarized. Silkiah's primary asset is its strategic location which makes it a hub of trade, esp. with Charis and the other out islands, and before the war quite wealthy.

I think you are right about Dohlar. It will survive and perhaps even thrive post war under good leadershp. In terms of both its military and its manufactorys Dohlar has been the church's most capable ally. I could see it becoming like a post war Germany.

I don't see Siddarmark becoming expansionist if for no other reason than they will have too much work to do in recovering from the sword of Shueler and the deprivations of the war.

Don

Caleb et al are looking for the survival of their various realms - that has been their goal from the beginning. Merlin's is still that humanity be prepared to met the Gbaba again, and this time win.

The inner circle started with the preservation of the knowledge of the Federation and its own survival.

At this point, I do think that the interested have largely converged, survival of the realms is, at this point, the best way for the inner circle to survive and Merlin to prepare humanity for its return to interstellar space.

I disagree with the idea that a cold war is the best way to invigorate inventiveness at this point. While it certainly worked well on earth, we already have the example of carefully directed invention in the case of Charis, where centuries of development have been lopped off via careful hints. That is, the hold on society that the proscriptions had has largely been broken. However, the final nail needs to be driven, and that is the destruction of the church. Once the church is disposed of, then the population can be brought forward incredibly quickly.

Do not underestimate the speed at which a population can be brought to a modern existence. I am sure that RFC is aware that in Japan the bulk of the population was brought from a sixteenth century existence to the twentieth century in twenty to forty years. That is one generation! This planned change was instigated by only a very small, highly educated group that basically planned and accomplished the importation of foreign learning at an astounding pace. (As an aside, I remember picking up an english text published in the late 1860s on Engineering in a used book store in Tokyo; looking at the publication date and other markings in the book, I realized I held in my hands one of the first books that was imported to Japan to train the very first group of Japanese students on modern engineering.) Many of the people I worked with had grandparents or great grandparents who lived through that transition. In the context of Safehold, I would expect that the transition to Federation levels would take perhaps sixty to one hundred years overall, and perhaps less.

The key, which is why I asked about it in one of my first posts, is the educational system. That is where the future lies, and why in the US you find school boards frequently the target of stealth fundamentalist christian candidates who use the school board and text book selection control to try to force their beliefs on the students in their districts.

Hildum wrote:Caleb et al are looking for the survival of their various realms - that has been their goal from the beginning. Merlin's is still that humanity be prepared to met the Gbaba again, and this time win.

The inner circle started with the preservation of the knowledge of the Federation and its own survival.

At this point, I do think that the interested have largely converged, survival of the realms is, at this point, the best way for the inner circle to survive and Merlin to prepare humanity for its return to interstellar space.

I disagree with the idea that a cold war is the best way to invigorate inventiveness at this point. While it certainly worked well on earth, we already have the example of carefully directed invention in the case of Charis, where centuries of development have been lopped off via careful hints. That is, the hold on society that the proscriptions had has largely been broken. However, the final nail needs to be driven, and that is the destruction of the church. Once the church is disposed of, then the population can be brought forward incredibly quickly.

Do not underestimate the speed at which a population can be brought to a modern existence. I am sure that RFC is aware that in Japan the bulk of the population was brought from a sixteenth century existence to the twentieth century in twenty to forty years. That is one generation! This planned change was instigated by only a very small, highly educated group that basically planned and accomplished the importation of foreign learning at an astounding pace. (As an aside, I remember picking up an english text published in the late 1860s on Engineering in a used book store in Tokyo; looking at the publication date and other markings in the book, I realized I held in my hands one of the first books that was imported to Japan to train the very first group of Japanese students on modern engineering.) Many of the people I worked with had grandparents or great grandparents who lived through that transition. In the context of Safehold, I would expect that the transition to Federation levels would take perhaps sixty to one hundred years overall, and perhaps less.

The key, which is why I asked about it in one of my first posts, is the educational system. That is where the future lies, and why in the US you find school boards frequently the target of stealth fundamentalist christian candidates who use the school board and text book selection control to try to force their beliefs on the students in their districts.

Nice post. Mostly I agree. But Japan is a flawed example. First of all, during the time frame you are talking about, Japan was a comparatively small, homogenous society being led in a specific way by a small elite who selected the priorities society would follow. The result of that was a militarized mindset that eventually led to the disaster of WW2.

The second thing I would point out is that there is far more to modern society than science and engineering. It also includes the shape of society and how it is ordered. While Japan developed the ability to sustain a modern military and sought to imitate the European colonial empires, its collective mindset was largely medieval. It was only in the aftermath of WW2 that modern Japan was born.

Finally in America we have an enormous amount of diversity. We don't always get along with each other very well. But it it is out of the tension of our diversity that American creativeness flows. So it must be eventually for Charis and Safehold if Safehold is to ever outgrow the tech in Owl's database.

Don


PS. I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly than I do with your comment about fundamentalists and school boards.

They might not go for the border states aas they have little value, but dohlar has all that church funded industry and infrastructure, it also offers access to the eastern coast for trading and shiping.
Silkiah i can ssee being shared with charis, due to the canal, the repblic claim the north one in their territpory, while charis get the one in the duchy.

Hildum wrote:The key, which is why I asked about it in one of my first posts, is the educational system. That is where the future lies, and why in the US you find school boards frequently the target of stealth fundamentalist christian candidates who use the school board and text book selection control to try to force their beliefs on the students in their districts.

Why do you worry about the fundamentalist? Is there any area of the U.S. where a significant portion of the population believes what the "fundamentalist" allegedly do? What you should worry about is the fact that 30% of the population can't name the three branches of the federal government. We had 300,000 people demonstrating in NY about the climate. There wasn't a single thing printed about the demonstration that indicated any of the demonstrators knew the empirical evidence that supported AGW and the evidence that opposed it. Today, the Wall Street Journal had a main editorial about the need for a functioning democracy to have a patriotic education. Those are the education issues that will make or break our economy, and our society. Frankly, Charis needs to avoid a great portion of U.S. education practice.

I also disagree with the need for a "cold war state", for another reason: a cold war would create two blocs opposed and divide by questions of Faith and religion. It's the best way two make sure that the population of those two blocs will hate each other for a very very long time, even if this cold war state finally stop.

Just look at Russia now. it has been nearly 25 years since the end of the Soviet union, and they still are not on friendly terms with the western bloc.

Such a situation would not only be a threath for maintaining peaceful relationship, but it would be very painful and difficult to mend when comes the time of the Big Revealation, and, after that, for the fight against the Gbabas...

However, most of the countries that were in the Warsaw pact jumped on the western bloc side as soon as they could. Which is easily explainable: Russia was the real heavy one on this side, and they others were little more than vassals serving their master, which explained why they got away as soon as they could, and why, even now, despise of Russia runs very high in those population even now.

if forced in any sort of statu quo, the inner circle should go for a solution that would deplicate this feeling in the population of the opposing bloc, but turned against the CoGA. And Clynthan, with his "The-sword-first-the whip-next-then-the-fire-and-after-that-maybe-we-can-have-a-chat" approach is going to be very helping.

If they go to a cold war situation, they've got to make all they can to convince the population of the resst of safehold that it's only because of the CoGA, that all their difficulties, suffering and oppression is coming from the CoGA,... They have already started it, but a cold war state would allow them to deploy this kind of propaganda on a totally new scale.

In short, they should avoid this cold war state because of the drift it would create between population. Something that they could mitigate (at least partially) by painting the CoGA as the villains of the story. A strategy that could work, but is not optimal, because you are going against centuries of traditions.

IMHO, a more winning situation would be to have most of Safehold on friendly terms. Indeed, the war pressure for a quick technological development would be gone, but there are ways around that: The inner circle KNOWS it will need this technological development, it has the means and the will to implement it, and access to a data bank and a computer to help them cheat a little bit... No need for war pressure on their side. And if they are on more or less friendly terms with the rest of Safehold, they could export a lot of that technology (not the military oriented, of course) in the rest of the world. In order to protect their market, the rest of the Safeholdians leaders won't have any choice but to try to master and reproduce this technology, and build on it.

And finally, a word on science development in a war situation. Increased research and technology in time of war is in fact something quite new: it started more or less around ACW (with signs of it coming for at least a century and a half), and was really a remarkable fact during WWI and WWII (airplanes, for example, were totally different at the beginning and at the end of those two wars). But this may even now be a thing of the past. Obviously, only a third WW could prove me right or wrong, but we have reach such a point that, while we are producing more innovative stuff at a rythm that may seems to only increase, actual scientif reseaarch to implement a new techniques takes more and more time. Now, when some new stuff comes out, not only is there already people working on the next generation of the item, but they are also people working on the third or fourth generation...

Between WWI and WWII (which is more or less 20 years), airplanes, tanks, communications went through a lot of development, even while there was no war in between. But today, most airforce have aircraft that have been designed thirthy or forthy years ago... For what I know, the airplanes that are actually bombarding Irak and syria now may be olders than the terrorists getting those bomb in the face...

So, while right now Charis is in the ideal development time frame to implement huge advance in technological levels, I'm not sure it could last long without access to OWL...

EDIT: Just got promoted to lieutnant (jg)!! Nice...