All out Warfare Against the Sollies

The premis here is somewhat like a dog chasing a car. What do you do with it after catching it?
Sure you can use your fleet to smash the space infrastructure, but you can't garrison one planet out of hundreds.
Eventually they will get out from under, and will then have a moral justification to do worse to you.

As stated, the LAST thing the GA wants to do is declare and prosecute the war against the Sollies. The very last thing. Future trade comes to mind, or the future total lack of.

But ... to answer the question, just send the 2500 or so kinetic surface strikes against the 2500 or so likely targets. Destroying planet biospheres has a way of winning wars of the knife.

HB of CJ wrote:As stated, the LAST thing the GA wants to do is declare and prosecute the war against the Sollies. The very last thing. Future trade comes to mind, or the future total lack of.

But ... to answer the question, just send the 2500 or so kinetic surface strikes against the 2500 or so likely targets. Destroying planet biospheres has a way of winning wars of the knife.

Go through and blow away any war ship, support ship, installation or shipyard belonging to the SL navy. start with the core worlds, go next to the shell, with the protectorates last.

I would say never NEVER NEVER attack a ground target.

I would say never NEVER NEVER attack a civilian installation, and that includes civilian shipyards.

darrell wrote:...

Go through and blow away any war ship, support ship, installation or shipyard belonging to the SL navy. start with the core worlds, go next to the shell, with the protectorates last.

...

You probably don't even have to do that.

The SLN obviously needs logistics to operate against the GA. Their logistics are already weak and short-legged.

Pod-based missile combat is going to involve moving a lot of missile pods around, which implies ammunition ships. (And from mentions at the Battle of Spindle and second BoM the League does have ammunition ships). And ammunition ships have military-grade impellers and hyper drives, while commercial freighters (which are in very high demand because the GA has withdrawn their shipping and denied the wormhole network to the League) are much slower.

Even though they are not mentioned in the books, there obviously are tankers in the fleet trains as well. Killing tankers is also worthwhile. Though not as worthwhile as ammunition ships.

So simply killing off ammunition ships when and where you can will greatly reduce the League's ability to take the war to the GA.

And killing off ammunition ships and other parts of the Fleet Train when there are other targets of opportunity also clearly demonstrates that while the GA could trash any League system they wanted to, they clearly do not wish to and are only using the minimum force necessary to accomplish their goals.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:...

And killing off ammunition ships and other parts of the Fleet Train when there are other targets of opportunity also clearly demonstrates that while the GA could trash any League system they wanted to, they clearly do not wish to and are only using the minimum force necessary to accomplish their goals.

That would be contrary to the premise of this thread, though.

IF the GA went for "all out war" they wouldn't be pussyfooting around with raiding supply trains or leaving civilian orbital industry untouched. The fact that conducting an "all out war" is probably a very, very, bad idea, the GA does have the capability to reduce the Solarian League to a band of frightened paupers. They just don't have the capability to prevent revanchists from building a SLN "Bolthole" (or ten) and coming back in ten or twenty years and returning the favor.

Weird Harold wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:...

And killing off ammunition ships and other parts of the Fleet Train when there are other targets of opportunity also clearly demonstrates that while the GA could trash any League system they wanted to, they clearly do not wish to and are only using the minimum force necessary to accomplish their goals.

That would be contrary to the premise of this thread, though.

IF the GA went for "all out war" they wouldn't be pussyfooting around with raiding supply trains or leaving civilian orbital industry untouched. The fact that conducting an "all out war" is probably a very, very, bad idea, the GA does have the capability to reduce the Solarian League to a band of frightened paupers. They just don't have the capability to prevent revanchists from building a SLN "Bolthole" (or ten) and coming back in ten or twenty years and returning the favor.

Even though it may not sound like an "all out war" I think it would attack the League at one of its most vulnerable points. Not just from a Fleet Logistics standpoint either.

It would make the SLN and the League's government look impotent as well. If the GA could operate offensively with impunity, take out a specific set of targets with minimum collateral damage, and also restrict the League's ability to take the war to the GA it would go a long, long way towards breaking up the League. The Mandarin's fear looking ineffective more than nearly anything else. One way of thinking about such an operation as a "demonstration attack" with the added bonus of actually inflicting grievous damage. Without the damage being too grievous, if that makes any sense.

Maybe it is just me, but even if you have crushing strategic superiority, attacking your enemy's weakest spot over and over again seems to be a winning strategy. The proper objective is not systems you cannot hold and do not wish to hold, but the enemy navy. And rendering that navy ineffective by denying their ammunition is just as good (and in some ways better) than destroying that navy's ships.

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Even though it may not sound like an "all out war" I think it would attack the League at one of its most vulnerable points. Not just from a Fleet Logistics standpoint either.

It would make the SLN and the League's government look impotent as well. If the GA could operate offensively with impunity, take out a specific set of targets with minimum collateral damage, and also restrict the League's ability to take the war to the GA it would go a long, long way towards breaking up the League. The Mandarin's fear looking ineffective more than nearly anything else. One way of thinking about such an operation as a "demonstration attack" with the added bonus of actually inflicting grievous damage. Without the damage being too grievous, if that makes any sense.

Maybe it is just me, but even if you have crushing strategic superiority, attacking your enemy's weakest spot over and over again seems to be a winning strategy. The proper objective is not systems you cannot hold and do not wish to hold, but the enemy navy. And rendering that navy ineffective by denying their ammunition is just as good (and in some ways better) than destroying that navy's ships.

It is not wining this war that is the problem. It is making sure they do not have reason too comeback in fifty years and turn GA worlds in to glass. The GA knows it has no long term capability of preventing the SL worlds from building a fleet capable of steamrollering the GA.

pnakasone wrote:

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:Even though it may not sound like an "all out war" I think it would attack the League at one of its most vulnerable points. Not just from a Fleet Logistics standpoint either.

It would make the SLN and the League's government look impotent as well. If the GA could operate offensively with impunity, take out a specific set of targets with minimum collateral damage, and also restrict the League's ability to take the war to the GA it would go a long, long way towards breaking up the League. The Mandarin's fear looking ineffective more than nearly anything else. One way of thinking about such an operation as a "demonstration attack" with the added bonus of actually inflicting grievous damage. Without the damage being too grievous, if that makes any sense.

Maybe it is just me, but even if you have crushing strategic superiority, attacking your enemy's weakest spot over and over again seems to be a winning strategy. The proper objective is not systems you cannot hold and do not wish to hold, but the enemy navy. And rendering that navy ineffective by denying their ammunition is just as good (and in some ways better) than destroying that navy's ships.

It is not wining this war that is the problem. It is making sure they do not have reason too comeback in fifty years and turn GA worlds in to glass. The GA knows it has no long term capability of preventing the SL worlds from building a fleet capable of steamrollering the GA.

That probably isn't technically true.
However, the technicality that prevents that from being a concern requires killing the entire population of the Solarian League, and placing some pickets in each system for a period of time to make sure that they catch anyone in transit.
As that would require killing probably 90%+ of the human race, almost all of them civilians, while it may be technically doable, there's absolutely no way that the GA would do such a thing.
I suppose the difference between "incapable of" and "unwilling to" in this instance is mostly a matter of semantics, though.

The Grand Alliance is incapable of waging a war of annihilation against the League. Their fleets would mutiny. Their officers would reject the orders.

Yes, when you have ships operated by human beings, the behaviors of the human beings are as much a part of their limits as are the power levels of their compensators.

phillies wrote:The Grand Alliance is incapable of waging a war of annihilation against the League. Their fleets would mutiny. Their officers would reject the orders.

Yes, when you have ships operated by human beings, the behaviors of the human beings are as much a part of their limits as are the power levels of their compensators.

No, that's part of "unwilling".
They have the technical capability to do it, but would not be willing to employ that capability towards such an end.

As I said, in this case, the difference between "incapable" and "unwilling" is mostly semantics.
They are sufficiently unwilling that they might as well be incapable, save for the purpose of deterring someone else from acting similarly.