Manning the SLN Reserve

The other to take into account was when the reserve policy was put into place;
what where the drivers?,
what was the rationale?,
how big was the League?,
was it just after the 'last war' and therefore they were demobilising?,

If the policy was introduced just after the Leagues last 'true war' and the where demobilising it actually makes a lot of senses. After all the crews where being returned to civilian life but where still up to date on military realities and therefore it wouldn't take a lot of time to undertake refresher courses.
The problem of course is/was time, inertia and no true threats to keep Battle Fleet 'fit for purposes'.

Garth 2 wrote:The other to take into account was when the reserve policy was put into place;
what where the drivers?,
what was the rationale?,
how big was the League?,
was it just after the 'last war' and therefore they were demobilising?,

If the policy was introduced just after the Leagues last 'true war' and the where demobilising it actually makes a lot of senses. After all the crews where being returned to civilian life but where still up to date on military realities and therefore it wouldn't take a lot of time to undertake refresher courses.
The problem of course is/was time, inertia and no true threats to keep Battle Fleet 'fit for purposes'.

I think we can be pretty sure this is not the case. To the best of my knowledge, the Solarian League has never been in a war that needed such a significant fleet.

Garth 2 wrote:The other to take into account was when the reserve policy was put into place;
what where the drivers?,
what was the rationale?,
how big was the League?,
was it just after the 'last war' and therefore they were demobilising?,

If the policy was introduced just after the Leagues last 'true war' and the where demobilising it actually makes a lot of senses. After all the crews where being returned to civilian life but where still up to date on military realities and therefore it wouldn't take a lot of time to undertake refresher courses.
The problem of course is/was time, inertia and no true threats to keep Battle Fleet 'fit for purposes'.

Agreed with later post - it wasn't after some large war with a large number of reservists available. From the tone of the pearl discussing it, it was a very long-term plan to maintain a huge amount of Battle Fleet shipping in excess of what they had any reason to maintain actively.

Just what they had in mind for crewing it is the initial thrust of this thread; just what they had in mind to do with it remains a bit obscure too. And how both that plan and that intention have changed over the centuries are up for grabs too.

Apparently, the idea - initially, and with the recognition that the idea for public consumption may have diverged already from cynical plotting - was to keep a reserve of ships without the expenses of maintaining them operationally, in case of a need for a much larger Battle Fleet and/or replacement of unusually large losses. There's no mention of an occasion on which the Reserve has actually been needed. The Reserve is kept within (Solarian notions of) shouting-distance of modernity with refits to those ships least recently refitted or built, and a tiny trickle of new builds. (That latter is essentially to keep the skills of warship building alive in the SL, rather than for expansion or modernization as such.)

From the sounds of it, the League was already huge, was already the only serious game in town, and had no threats on the horizon or in living memory. It was (at least billed as) a response to unthinkable possibilities: doing what the SL would need in some far distant, unimaginable future, when it could actually somehow need a Battle Fleet at all, much less a much larger one, but presumably with enough warning so that the Reserve was useful in response. And the modernization program and maintenance of shipbuilding institutions, along with the stalwart efforts of ONI, should have meant plenty of warning to keep up with changes.

Unfortunately, the SLN and the senior civilian bureaucracy became institutionally incapable of performing the frank evaluation of things happening outside the League that the plans all relied on them being able and willing to do. So things "snuck" right past the 100 Year Rule mentality.

JeffEngel wrote:I wonder if the idea behind the Reserve was to provide a fast buildup only by comparison with building a fleet some five times the size of the operational one. In that case, aiming for, say, 50% of the Reserve combat-ready in twelve years would be going nicely on schedule, even delightfully ahead of it.

So they might have viewed it as some vague equivalent of Britains 10 year rule - except that they assumed that they could see real trouble coming (say) 15 years out, but building the fleet hardware would take at least (say) 50. So build it early (and keep the naval shipyards in business) and train the crews later?


You might be partly right, but I'd bet that at least some of this is that the Reserve originally was designed to be a smaller formation - with obsolete ships scrapped sooner to keep the numbers reasonable. Amd at that time they probably did have a fairly rational analysis on how to crew their targeted reserve size.

But warfighting tech plateaued for centuries, so it was probably a hard sell to scrap barely used ships that looked to be some minor upgrades away from being fully capable front line combatants. And, after all, it didn't cost much to keep them... So instead the size of the reserve kept ballooning, and they probably drew up increasingly irrational analysis on how they'd man them all in case of emergency. Throw in a couple centuries of this and you get to the insanity that is the current state of the reserve.


I'm thinking it's primarily a disposal problem, because the build rate for new SDs would be set to keep the naval shipyards sufficiently employed to retain their skillsets. So no matter how small your reserve you need to build new ships at roughly the same rates to maintain proficiency. (Well, or you could reduce the number of yards, but then you worry about lose of redundancy)

Dca wrote:I'll quibble, but only so far as having a plan. I'm confident the SLN pays people to maintain staffing plans in case the reserve is needed, and I'm confident those people have produced artifacts labeled as plans. There may even be people paid to be labeled as reservists.

See? All it takes is sufficient cynicism. Practical? Um, no.

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With the record of the SLN, I would be "shocked, shocked I tell you" if any of the "paid reservists" had been near any active (or inactive) SLN ship in 10 years or were even familiar with their designated tasks.

-- Stewart

stewart wrote:

Dca wrote:I'll quibble, but only so far as having a plan. I'm confident the SLN pays people to maintain staffing plans in case the reserve is needed, and I'm confident those people have produced artifacts labeled as plans. There may even be people paid to be labeled as reservists.

See? All it takes is sufficient cynicism. Practical? Um, no.

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With the record of the SLN, I would be "shocked, shocked I tell you" if any of the "paid reservists" had been near any active (or inactive) SLN ship in 10 years or were even familiar with their designated tasks.

-- Stewart

Actually, with the record of the SLN, I would be "shocked, shocked I tell you" if any of the "paid reservists" had actually drawn a breath in the last 10 years - or ever.

Given what we have been told about how hard it is to modify the weapons and other systems in things like SDs (all that really tough armor getting in the way) I have to wonder about the rational of keeping and upgrading really old ships.
Granted that the SL has not seen a lot of actual change in military tactics and weapons in perhaps 150 years, but if you can't modify the old warships to take larger weapons or squeeze new systems into old hulls, then you have more than a few problems.

Do you have to freeze the size of your missiles because you can't increase the size of the thru-hull portion of the launches or configuration of both handling/feeding gear Magazines?

At what point do you take a ship (other than something you want to hold as museum or monument) and just recycle it to make room in both the budget and the fleet for a new ship that incorporates your newest tec? And, at what point do you stop training people specificaly to use the old systems. If you have too much legacy hardware (and software) you end up with multiple training and supply chains that don't give you anything except the opportinity for graft? Or is that the point in the SL.

I agree that someone should be able to look at the thousands of ships in the Reserve Fleet and ask the question: If somebody were able to defeat two or three fleets of our 1st line/in commission ships, what good is several fleets of ships that can't even stand up to our own in-commisson new ships?

Brigade XO wrote:Given what we have been told about how hard it is to modify the weapons and other systems in things like SDs (all that really tough armor getting in the way) I have to wonder about the rational of keeping and upgrading really old ships.
Granted that the SL has not seen a lot of actual change in military tactics and weapons in perhaps 150 years, but if you can't modify the old warships to take larger weapons or squeeze new systems into old hulls, then you have more than a few problems.

Do you have to freeze the size of your missiles because you can't increase the size of the thru-hull portion of the launches or configuration of both handling/feeding gear Magazines?

At what point do you take a ship (other than something you want to hold as museum or monument) and just recycle it to make room in both the budget and the fleet for a new ship that incorporates your newest tec? And, at what point do you stop training people specificaly to use the old systems. If you have too much legacy hardware (and software) you end up with multiple training and supply chains that don't give you anything except the opportinity for graft? Or is that the point in the SL.

I agree that someone should be able to look at the thousands of ships in the Reserve Fleet and ask the question: If somebody were able to defeat two or three fleets of our 1st line/in commission ships, what good is several fleets of ships that can't even stand up to our own in-commisson new ships?

I think your next to last paragraph ends with the real reason. What a great opportunity for graft.

Brigade XO wrote:Given what we have been told about how hard it is to modify the weapons and other systems in things like SDs (all that really tough armor getting in the way) I have to wonder about the rational of keeping and upgrading really old ships.
Granted that the SL has not seen a lot of actual change in military tactics and weapons in perhaps 150 years, but if you can't modify the old warships to take larger weapons or squeeze new systems into old hulls, then you have more than a few problems.

I'm willing to suppose that the SLN planners felt that, given that plateau, refits could keep things up economically. And they were wrong, and I'm sure many of them have realized it since then. In the meantime though, (1) no superiors would want to hear that, and (2) letting it be known would undercut the psychological advantage that the Reserve provided the SLN to friend and possible foe.

So the refits are maintained, and maybe some effort is made to harmonize developing capabilities with the limits imposed by the existing units of the Reserve - heck, any good navy will do that, it's just that any other navy can frankly admit when it's no longer possible and the old ships are better scrapped.

If the SLN were lucky and smart, some of that "refitting" funding went covertly into building new ships and preserving the hull number and name of some old ship that was quietly scrapped. (Take the TFN from the years before the Theban War as an example.)

If the SLN is, well, the SLN, chances are the refits are going through the motions while combat capability enjoys little to no improvement and someone pockets a lot of cash.

It occurs to me that the chief differences between the League and the Silesian Confederacy are (1) size, (2) system wealth and good government, and (3) being able to conceal what a mess it is. And it's lost (3).

JeffEngel wrote:snip

It occurs to me that the chief differences between the League and the Silesian Confederacy are (1) size, (2) system wealth and good government, and (3) being able to conceal what a mess it is. And it's lost (3).

I'm not sure I understand (2). There is very little evidence of "good" government in either the SL or Silesia. How is that a difference?