Manning the SLN Reserve

I think the main function of the reserve fleet is not that it can be mobilised in the event of a war, but to provide pre-built replacement ships if large sections of the active fleet are put out of action: "We don't care that you destroyed x% of Battle Fleet, we have enough surviving crew to replace almost everything we lost, and they are coming straight back to your home system as soon as the replacement ship is provisioned before you can rearm your ships and replace your losses, by this time next year new recruitment will have replaced our crew losses. WE WILL WIN IN THE END".

The problem SLN now has is that against the Grand Alliance they will lose both ships and crews and not get enough back to make their attritional strategy viable (especially once the reserve fleet and all their shipyards get destroyed in the first six months of the war)

nrellis wrote:I think the main function of the reserve fleet is not that it can be mobilised in the event of a war, but to provide pre-built replacement ships if large sections of the active fleet are put out of action: "We don't care that you destroyed x% of Battle Fleet, we have enough surviving crew to replace almost everything we lost, and they are coming straight back to your home system as soon as the replacement ship is provisioned before you can rearm your ships and replace your losses, by this time next year new recruitment will have replaced our crew losses. WE WILL WIN IN THE END".

The problem SLN now has is that against the Grand Alliance they will lose both ships and crews and not get enough back to make their attritional strategy viable (especially once the reserve fleet and all their shipyards get destroyed in the first six months of the war)

If the Reserve is intended as a replacement for losses in a given war, crewing it becomes a livelier issue than it would be if it were meant to shorten expansion time over the course of several years in case of an emerging threat. They couldn't expect to recover the crews from the lost ships, not consistently and during that conflict.

I wonder - Are SLN ships excessively crewed, so that fighting the ship effectively could be done with a considerably reduced crew? The officer ranks are terribly inflated, which would possibly hint at that, though the explanation there is probably more a matter of blowing up status on the cheap. But if the SLN does, in effect, carry its Reserve crew inside its operational ships, it'd only have to transfer that (theoretical) excess to Reserve units to get at least some of them crewed in a hurry. The personnel losses with lost ships would hurt even more in absolute terms, granted, but all the surviving ships would still have their excess crew to peel off and reassign.

I can just picture SLN crews having, say, one four hour shift each 24 hour day and spending the rest eating, sleeping, fornicating, and complaining about the rigors of navy life. And then see how they would react when most of their comrades suddenly get shipped out and they're doing twelve hour shifts.

I'm suddenly imagining a slight variation on the the recruitment scene from Independence Day occurring on planets across the League in the near future.

"Military training is preferable but anyone who can man a ship will be useful."

Given what we are told and shown about Battle Fleet, I doubt that the SLN expects to need to replace a significant number of ships to combat prior to running into the RMN and the GA. Keeping the large Reserve Fleet appears more to be a psy ploy to further inflate it's invincible image (all those ships just waiting to crush you) and a very profitable pork barrel with continually refitting and upgrading what were already obsoleat ships. Inflating crew numbers adds a lot of expense but not much in the way of efficiency. It does give you a reason to have more officers but that, in it self, is also not productive.


If the SLN ships (probably BF only) are over crewed to provide a pool of personal to activate reserve ships in a crisis, there are a couple of flaws in that thinking. One would be that if they suddenly lost several (or dozens) of SDs and other ships in combat against "somebody" they would have just lost a fair number of those extra tarined people on those ships and the very people -the ones with most current training and experience.

If you train with what you know is an very over strength crew and have to keep them occupied (and actually doing something) much of the time, what happens if you have to strip away at least the known overstrenght and suddenly you are going be operatighting short vs you training. That's against you really long term training and crewing expectations. That is going to effect your performance.

Brigade XO wrote:First you have to find either retired or discharged (preferabley honorab) personal with at least some experience and either reactivate or convince them to come back into the service. Then you have to bring them up to speed on what they are supposed to be doing in their respective areas of expertise.

I doubt the SLN has ever seriously planned for how they'd man the entire reserve at once, certainly not in any kind of meaningful timeframe. Mostly I think the reserve exists as the ultimate backup (for all it's basically a meaningless one) to the rest of the SLN. Sure, you can destroy that FF light cruiser ... Can you deal with the battle cruiser squadron they'll send to "investigate" what happened? Oh you can, can you deal with the three squadrons of the wall that Battle Fleet will send to deal with you? Repeat until the hammer is big enough and the nail ceases to be a problem!

Of course, what the reserve really is is a great source of graft and corruption. All those hulls, with all that equipment that no-one's ever going to miss. All those personnel who should be doing the on-going maintenance, except they don't exist just like the hulls they're supposed to be maintaining.

I'd go so far as to suggest that actually part of the reason the reserve is so huge is to ensure that at least some of it can be reactivated - if nothing else than by cannibalising existing ships to produce one working one! Equally it might be like the "scrap lines" you can find at various points of the UK railway network, where it's entirely possibly that locomotives will get removed from the scrap line and returned to service to replace an existing locomotive. Why? Because the loco on the scrap line was stopped because it needed a given exam or maintenance of a given expense, and the loco it's now replacing now needs a more expensive exam or maintenance.

As for the manning question, well I imagine just like any other peace time military force the SLN not only has reserves but also has a pipeline supplying new spacers & officers at regular intervals and equally has people living the service every year. "I'm sorry, the needs of the service mean that your retirement has been postponed" and equally "this class will be graduating early and your training will finish in the fleet".

The author knows the truth.

However, I suggest based on what we know the SLN does have the reservists to man the entire fleet, and the fully detailed plans for deploying them.

It's a lot of people. 10,000 SDs need 60 million crew, plus another 30 million for the screening units, plus at a guess 30 million for the FF reserve units, because FF surely has its own reserve elements, not to mention a whole pile for the Marine and Gendarmie reserves. That's 150 million people. Furthermore, all those ships have base elements and support units, the tail surely being at least three times as big as the fleet itself. That's a half billion people, before we get to the special reserves, the grade C cadre units,...and of course the people who administer the reserves. Surely that's a billion people all told?

In addition it is far harder to audit reserve training than to audit ships. You can easily go out and count hulls, and look to see if they are armed with LPDCs or still using gatling guns. Training is much easier to fake.

The net result is that the opportunities for graft are totally enormous "We don't know if every reservist will be in good health when needed, so we added a few extra...say 50%.. to every ship contingent...just as described here in this Russian training manual by Nicolai Gogol*." Did I mention many of these people are full-time cadre, meaning they are housed in the party headquarters of the locally dominant political party doing civic relations work?

Givne these obvious financial issues, I can't imagine that the SLN does not have all the reservists it needs, and plans for deploying them.

*Dead Souls

Also, how many uniformed services does the SL have? Canada and China have one, some places have three, but America has iirc seven. And counting. Surely the SL through rational progress has even more different groups?

Oh, if you mobilize there will be issues. "Is fear of heights a problem in the SLN?" "You mean I should have read the manuals?" "Our mobilization plans mostly ship people from point to point via wormhole links, the fastest, safest method of travel...oh, right."

There is an important

kzt wrote:

Castenea wrote:I doubt you could get a response from any naval veteran that did not include profanity if you suggest the serve on a ship where less than 50% of the crew had more than 1 year in service.

You should look at USN in WW2. Explosive growth.

90% of the ship's company of the USS Enterprise was on thier 1st deployment for the 82-83 cruise. CVW11 was more experienced having deployed on the USS America while the "E" did its "YardPac 79-82" period.

My first deployment was VF213/CVW11/CVN65 1982-83...

...90% of the ship's company of the USS Enterprise was on ther 1st deployment for the 82-83 cruise. CVW11 was more experienced having deployed on the USS America while the "E" did its "YardPac 79-82" period.

My first deployment was VF213/CVW11/CVN65 1982-83...

Big difference: in both of these cases. For the most part the USN has not been riddled by graft and corruption. In the Honorverse, they've been corrupt for years. The SD's in the reserve could be 150 or more years old, or 50 years old. They're mothballed. Go out to Arizona and look at the status of the mothballed elements of the USAF. Either way, it doesn't matter. The "admiral" in Filerata's fleet who handled the fleet navigation was less competent than the average mid-level astrogator in the RMN or RHN. A better example would be "activate all of the naval ships up to 1950 in the entire world, and throw them into action against the current USN carrier, submarine, and cruiser force, maybe even just a single carrier, with reservists manning the pre-1950 fleet, officer'd by folks whose ships all run on diesel. First set of Tomahawks takes out the fuel ships, 2nd set of jet fighters with wing tanks and radar takes out the carriers, and the SSN's take out the rest of the cruisers, and no modern ship has even come within range of the others.

Whether or not they could mobilize the reserve is irrelevant.

SharkHunter wrote:

...90% of the ship's company of the USS Enterprise was on ther 1st deployment for the 82-83 cruise. CVW11 was more experienced having deployed on the USS America while the "E" did its "YardPac 79-82" period.

My first deployment was VF213/CVW11/CVN65 1982-83...

Big difference: in both of these cases. For the most part the USN has not been riddled by graft and corruption. In the Honorverse, they've been corrupt for years. The SD's in the reserve could be 150 or more years old, or 50 years old. They're mothballed. Go out to Arizona and look at the status of the mothballed elements of the USAF. Either way, it doesn't matter. The "admiral" in Filerata's fleet who handled the fleet navigation was less competent than the average mid-level astrogator in the RMN or RHN. A better example would be "activate all of the naval ships up to 1950 in the entire world, and throw them into action against the current USN carrier, submarine, and cruiser force, maybe even just a single carrier, with reservists manning the pre-1950 fleet, officer'd by folks whose ships all run on diesel. First set of Tomahawks takes out the fuel ships, 2nd set of jet fighters with wing tanks and radar takes out the carriers, and the SSN's take out the rest of the cruisers, and no modern ship has even come within range of the others.

Whether or not they could mobilize the reserve is irrelevant.

Whether or not they could mobilize the reserve is irrelevant at the current time in the Honorverse.

For an excellent analysis of Battle Fleet versus the RMN, see An apologia for Battle Fleet (Potential HoS Spoilers). I suggest reading the entire thread as there are some really good points made throughout the thread.

Vince wrote:

Sharkhunter wrote:--snipping--
They're mothballed... A better example would be "activate all of the naval ships up to 1950 in the entire world, and throw them into action against the current USN carrier, submarine, and cruiser force, maybe even just a single carrier, with reservists manning the pre-1950 fleet, officer'd by folks whose ships all run on diesel. First set of Tomahawks takes out the fuel ships, 2nd set of jet fighters with wing tanks and radar takes out the carriers, and the SSN's take out the rest of the cruisers, and no modern ship has even come within range of the others.

Whether or not they could mobilize the reserve is irrelevant.

Whether or not they could mobilize the reserve is irrelevant at the current time in the Honorverse.

For an excellent analysis of Battle Fleet versus the RMN, see An apologia for Battle Fleet (Potential HoS Spoilers). I suggest reading the entire thread as there are some really good points made throughout the thread.

That is stand up and applaud, or a sweep off the hat and bow great post. If y'all haven't read it, it's brilliant!