Discussions on raiding...

kzt wrote:Don't be silly, the legitimate government is the government the SL recognizes. What some band of neo-barbs wants to pretend is going on is of no concern to the SLN. And I have been formally told by the SL Foreign Minister to offer all possible assistance to the legitimate government to aid them in liberating the planet from the rebellious forces.

"This just in: Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken says Canada is now the 51st US state, renamed Upper Canadia. All Upper Canadians must disband its military, rewrite its constitution, and pay taxes to the US federal government."

Yeah...no. If that went out over the airwaves, Canada would laugh, and the rest of the US would facepalm and start impeachment proceedings. The Mandarins can declare whatever they want, but very few people are going to go along with them. As they say, possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the Sollies want to make it stick, they have to own the system beforehand.

Again, you would have to prove that your provisional government somehow has more legitimacy than the one sitting on the throne on Manticore. You know, that Winston family that's been there since literally the beginning? Otherwise the Sollies would look like crazy people saying the sky is green. Many Core and Shell worlds wouldn't buy it for a second. It'd be a different matter if they followed the typical OFS script where they could gradually work up some sort of pretext, but that's not remotely the situation with Manticore.

Star Knight wrote:

Duckk wrote:Not fighting the war? Tenth Fleet would beg to differ. And we have no idea what's happening in other theaters.

Sure, 10th Fleet took out an OFS administered Shell sector of very limited economic or military relevance.

And we pretty much know nothing is being done as of July 1922 or we would have heard something about in ART.

The delay is due to Beowulf's secession plebscite. They can wait two months and then conduct offensive operations via the Beowulf Terminus or they can send the ships onto a three months long voyage the long way.

Another reason for further delay may be to allow the SLN just enough time to absorb and accept their helplessness, so they will finally give up without a fight, like obsolete RHN ships did when Admiral Harrington showed up.

Duckk wrote:Again, you would have to prove that your provisional government somehow has more legitimacy than the one sitting on the throne on Manticore. You know, that Winston family that's been there since literally the beginning? Otherwise the Sollies would look like crazy people saying the sky is green. Many Core and Shell worlds wouldn't buy it for a second. It'd be a different matter if they followed the typical OFS script where they could gradually work up some sort of pretext, but that's not remotely the situation with Manticore.

No, you don't understand. I just need to minimally justify to the crew and the SL why I killed 97.5% of the population during my "liberation" of the planet. I don't expect to make anyone who isn't already conditioned by the ministry of education to believe me believe this.

Which begs the question, do the Beowulfans know what they are signing up for?
Throwing in their lot with Manticore to face the Mandarins is one thing, destroying the core worlds is another matter entirely.
But whatever, wont happen anyway. I very much doubt that we'll see any significant offensive operations against the core worlds.
They'll mopp up the Verge and Shell and everything will fall magically into place. The Mandarins will be gone and noone ever will think about taking revenge.

Duckk wrote:"This just in: Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken says Canada is now the 51st US state, renamed Upper Canadia. All Upper Canadians must disband its military, rewrite its constitution, and pay taxes to the US federal government."

The entire premise is just ridiculous.
In this analogy, Canada and the US would be at war and Canada would have just destroyed two USN Carrier Strike Groups.
Do you really think anyone in the US would care about such legal technicalities? And do you really think the US wouldnt find any pilots willing to carpet bombing Ottawa in return?

kzt wrote:No, you don't understand. I just need to minimally justify to the crew and the SL why I killed 97.5% of the population during my "liberation" of the planet. I don't expect to make anyone who isn't already conditioned by the ministry of education to believe me believe this.

My point is that even the people who are conditioned to believe the Department of Education aren't going to buy it when faced with an atrocity of that scale. They're not going to believe it any more than declaring Upper Canadia a weapons test zone and nuking (literally and/or figuratively) Toronto.

Star Knight wrote:The entire premise is just ridiculous.
In this analogy, Canada and the US would be at war and Canada would have just destroyed two USN Carrier Strike Groups.
Do you really think anyone in the US would care about such legal technicalities? And do you really think the US wouldnt find any pilots willing to carpet bombing Ottawa in return?

Do you really think the US military would go along with a saturation nuclear bombardment of Canada in retaliation for said CSGs? Because that is what is effectively being argued.

Duckk wrote:Do you really think the US military would go along with a saturation nuclear bombardment of Canada in retaliation for said CSGs? Because that is what is effectively being argued.

I'd say a nuclear escalation would definitely be a real possibility in this scenario. Obviously Canada from throw in the towel long before it would come to unlimited countervalue strikes.
Or if they had nuclear weapons of their own, they'd respond in kind, which would probably escalate the exchange to mad levels in a very short time.

We actually would have had a very similar situation if the Cold War would have turned hot.
As we know today, both sides expected it to go nuclear, either right from the start or within a couple of days.
Both sides even planned for it and would have blown each other to kingdom come if the order had came down.

Obviously we dont have this kind of confrontation in the Honorverse. The Edict is kinda like an american nuclear umbrella, promising to blow anyone up who tries to use nukes on someone else.
Nevertheless, while the doctrine to use them doesnt exist, the weapons do. And for the first time ever, the power which has uphold the Edict for centuries faces an existential threat.
How bad must things get before someone whereever in the chain of command decides, to hell with it?

Duckk wrote:

npadln wrote:I don't know... It seems like a pretty good and workable plan despite the immorality of it all; desperate men making desperate choices and all. Doesn't seem like it would be such a huge leap for the Mandarins to make and the REAL stumbling block for THEM might only be how they sell it to the Navy or more specifically its commanders and thereby make the the rest of the League unknowingly de-facto collaborators. As far as the long term repercussions within the League itself? "We'll deal with that when the dust settles..." History is ripe with nations committing war crimes and then assuming their prerogative as victors to write the history as THEY see fit.

As we see in SoF and SoV, SLN officers charged with relatively restricted planetary bombardments hated their orders. They don't give a damn about what some bureaucrat hundreds of light years away wants; they know they will be the ones left holding the bag. They will not just stick their necks out obligingly for a clearly illegal order. Again, there is literally no ambiguity in the Eridani Edict. Indiscriminate planetary bombardments launched without calling on the planet to surrender or even controlling the orbitals is 100% against the provisions of the Edict. David has written extensively about the Edict and how it is thoroughly internalized by the League. This is not something the SLN is going to dick around with. They will mutiny, period.

What kind of crew does a ballistic missile the size of a battle cruiser need? If they really want to I am sure they could put their collective heads together and come up with a scenario that addresses your points and in a ruthless way no doubt. It has been said that civilization is only three meals away from total anarchy; correct me if I am wrong but isn't the SL going to be in a place they have never been before? New territory and a new set of pressures the Mandarins specifically have never experienced before? I get the subtext of your message, Duckk; it ain't going to happen. But that doesn't mean it's because the scenario is illogical. Irrational perhaps, immoral most definitely, but even the insane work from a place of logic.

I wonder if the SLN raiding strategy wont focus more on preventing the expansion of the GA economic power into independent, verge, and shell systems rather than the far more expensive proposition of trying to raid GA systems themselves.

If one of the major objectives it to prevent or hamper the economic expansion into SL territories, you could do that by pressuring those systems considering moving into the GA sphere. There probably isn't a great deal you can do about the internal trade in GA systems as they are likely to be prohibitively expensive to hit. Until such a time as the GA can extend protection to new trading partners, they would be far easier targets for the SLN.

BTW, that little tidbit in SoV about using task forces to prevent the secession movements in member systems could also be a nice way for the GA to catch SLN forces in isolation and scoop them up. You scrupulously avoid damage to the host system, apologize for fighting on their front lawn, and take or destroy the SLN detachment who happens to be suppressing the secession vote.

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You can call it “author’s fiat” if you wish, but I don’t understand what the fascination with greater and greater atrocities really is. For some reason, some readers want to posit ever greater monstrosities and then argue that “it only makes sense” for them to happen.

I suppose I could treat it as an indication that people are sufficiently invested in my fictional universe to feel deeply and strongly and to explore all the options. In fact, however, it reminds me of a debate my friend Richard Earnshaw had with people who were so upset with Bernardus Van Dort for feeling horrified by the death inflicted on the terrorists attacked by Aivars Terekhov’s Marines in Shadow of Saganami. I’m not asserting that the cases are identical, but rather that they demonstrate a . . . detachment, perhaps, from the moral, philosophical, and empathic “realities” underlying my literary universe as they tend to underlie the world in which we live, as well.

Are there lunatics who would be so incredibly stupid and so horrendously lacking in both rationality and empathy as to embrace the sort of strategy being recommended here? There probably are. They aren’t the people running the Mesan Alignment, however. The empathy argument might not carry a lot of weight with them, but the rationality one certainly would, as I pointed out in my previous post. You may reject my reasoning, but that’s where that “authorial fiat” comes in. I know what the underlying political factors and public opinion factors are in the Honorverse. I know how long and how thoroughly the Eridani Edict has been internalized by the Solarian League and everyone else living in it. And I know how the polities of the Honorverse will react to an open and intentional Eridani Edict violation.

I don't see how David could be any clearer in his opinion about people's ideas for Edict violations.