Remaining holes in SLN intel

George J. Smith wrote:

Hegemon wrote:
Sir, thank you, that is exactly my point !
Let's imagine a 'soft coup': if Battle Fleet can get the SL Defence Minister (and say SL Prime Minister) to tell the Mandarins to pound sand, what can the Mandarins do ? They cannot very well go public and accuse them of insubordonation !

ISTR rfc mentioning Honor being in face to face talks with Kingsford, could a coup against the Mandarins have taken place for her to be talking to Kingsford and not Kolokoltsov?

cthia wrote:

Theemile wrote:According to their intel, Manticore's defenses were "hammered" by Oyster Bay and (earlier) Beatrice.

... At any rate, SL intel in that respect was either inadequate, nonexistent or pulled out of their ONIANUM.

Weird Harold wrote:In that particular case, there was a MAlign influence buggering up SLN thinking:

Mission of Honor
Chapter Thirty-one wrote:"Assuming he manages to meet the specified movement schedule," he went on after a moment, "he should reach Manticore almost exactly three T-weeks from today. Although he's probably clever enough to have at least a few suspicions about how Crandall came to be placed where she was, which means he's probably cherishing a few second thoughts about his own relationship with Manpower, there's not much wiggle room in the orders Rajampet and the Security Board have cut for him. And it's clear from those orders that they've bought into the theory that Manticore's 'mysterious attackers' must have pretty thoroughly gutted the home system's defenses."

Profound satisfaction glittered in his eyes with the last sentence. Getting that particular "conclusion" into the SLN's thought processes had been simpler than he'd expected, although the latest reports from both Collin and Franklin indicated that was going to get harder in the next few months. Well, it wasn't as if that hadn't been anticipated all along. As the catastrophic scope of ONI's threat appreciation failures was driven home in gutted starships and dead spacers, even Solly admirals were bound to realize a thorough housecleaning of their intelligence services was in order. It would be interesting to see if the present senior officers at ONI and OpAn were publicly scapegoated or simply shuffled out to pasture, but it was inevitable that more competent successors (after all, there couldn't be any less competent successors) would replace them.

cthia wrote:

Mission of Honor
Chapter Thirty-one wrote:"Assuming he manages to meet the specified movement schedule," he went on after a moment, "he should reach Manticore almost exactly three T-weeks from today. Although he's probably clever enough to have at least a few suspicions about how Crandall came to be placed where she was, which means he's probably cherishing a few second thoughts about his own relationship with Manpower, there's not much wiggle room in the orders Rajampet and the Security Board have cut for him. And it's clear from those orders that they've bought into the theory that Manticore's 'mysterious attackers' must have pretty thoroughly gutted the home system's defenses."

Profound satisfaction glittered in his eyes with the last sentence. Getting that particular "conclusion" into the SLN's thought processes had been simpler than he'd expected, although the latest reports from both Collin and Franklin indicated that was going to get harder in the next few months. Well, it wasn't as if that hadn't been anticipated all along. As the catastrophic scope of ONI's threat appreciation failures was driven home in gutted starships and dead spacers, even Solly admirals were bound to realize a thorough housecleaning of their intelligence services was in order. It would be interesting to see if the present senior officers at ONI and OpAn were publicly scapegoated or simply shuffled out to pasture, but it was inevitable that more competent successors (after all, there couldn't be any less competent successors) would replace them.
More impetus behind my thinking...

The Malign had Rajani's testy testicles in its hands. Why set him up for the kill? Why not keep him around as long as possible? Why eliminate not just your most powerful "contact" but the most powerful man in the League, who you already have by the balls? Making further encroachment into SL sensibilities a bit more complicated and difficult.


An amusing aside: A Mandarin is a small orange. The SLN is run by small group of naval oranges. Born and cut from the same naval. Greed.

tonyz wrote:A couple of things to note: yes, the SLN had half a million Marines with them for the assault on Manticore. That would let them occupy the planet after defeating the RMN, which of course didn't happen. OK, so maybe that is enough manpower (or is thought to be enough manpower) to occupy a conquered planet. But notice how fast the news of Operation Raging Justice leaked -- someone trying to get together a coup against the League would probably have to expect that more Marines would be needed (lots more worlds) and that leaks would happen faster and sooner. Which defeats the whole purpose of a coup.

Also, the Grand Alliance is not going to let even a substantially shrunken core of the League stay in place. They can't; it would doom them in the long run. 900 worlds in the Core are nearly two hundred times the size of the Old Star Kingdom, thirty times the size of Haven. Let them go, let them build a navy after catching up to the tech, and in a few decades Manticore or Haven or the whole Grand Alliance would be toast.

Which is why Honor's grand strategy involves completely shattering the League, breaking it up into small pieces none of which is big enough to go after Manticore by itself. (I am not sure she has gone into the third- and fourth-order consequences of this yet...)

Theemile wrote:

Keith_w wrote: quote="drinksmuchcoffee" The real question to me is why did Kingsford take the job?

He has to know after Filareta that the war he has inherited is going to be far and away the ugliest war the League has ever fought. He has to know that as CNO that even if he manages to win that war he is going to be blamed for how ugly it is likely to be. For that matter the whole top tier of Battle Fleet is likely to be replaced, one way or the other, before the war is over.

And that is ignoring that unless he is completely brain dead, he has to at least suspect that there is another player on the board that he hasn't identified yet.

So the smart thing to do would be to take early retirement and either have a comfortable sinecure on a beach somewhere or be a consultant for a defense contractor. /quote

I don't have the text in front of me but I am pretty sure that Kingsford is a deep MA agent, and what better place for a deep MA agent than in charge of the navy of the people you want to destroy?

Textev? Gweon is the deep cover pulling his strings. Rampajet was in the Malign's pocket, until he sucked on a pulser.

tonyz wrote:A couple of things to note: yes, the SLN had half a million Marines with them for the assault on Manticore. That would let them occupy the planet after defeating the RMN, which of course didn't happen. OK, so maybe that is enough manpower (or is thought to be enough manpower) to occupy a conquered planet. But notice how fast the news of Operation Raging Justice leaked -- someone trying to get together a coup against the League would probably have to expect that more Marines would be needed (lots more worlds) and that leaks would happen faster and sooner. Which defeats the whole purpose of a coup.

Also, the Grand Alliance is not going to let even a substantially shrunken core of the League stay in place. They can't; it would doom them in the long run. 900 worlds in the Core are nearly two hundred times the size of the Old Star Kingdom, thirty times the size of Haven. Let them go, let them build a navy after catching up to the tech, and in a few decades Manticore or Haven or the whole Grand Alliance would be toast.

Which is why Honor's grand strategy involves completely shattering the League, breaking it up into small pieces none of which is big enough to go after Manticore by itself. (I am not sure she has gone into the third- and fourth-order consequences of this yet...)

cthia wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:They don't really care. The more immediate problem is to restore the impression of invincibility of battle fleet so the verge doesn't up and leave. Once that is done then they'll worry about who the hidden player is.

Indeed.

Yet, IMHO, the idiocy in that is unless they are certain this third player won't be headed for Solarian space to do the same thing...

And the reason they should be wary of the possibility is because the Manties flat out told them that they are puppets at the end of a string dancing to a pied piper. And the neobarbs are so vested in the belief that they ended their very brutal very long war, and Beth removed her hate that was stuffed and mounted on the wall for decades and buried it in a pine box.

I wonder if Solarian intel even know the measure of the Star Kingdom and Beth's hate? Scratch that. She had never told anyone. But then it shouldn't be necessarily excluded as knowledge from SL ONI because of Beth holding it near her breast.