The Complacency of the White Haven Admiralty (Spoilers)

Slneezy wrote:

Star Knight wrote:
This is why they came to power. I dont see it falling apart acting as a mechanism for them to lose power.

Long term maybe, but we are talking 5 to 10 tyears of open warfare against the GA. I dont see them changing horses while thats going on.

Losing all the reasons why you're in power is a pretty good way to lose power.

The Mandarins wouldn't have anything going for them in a smaller League. The financial elites would be pissed off that they've lost the Protectorates most of the Shell, the planetary governments would want to have a greater hand in governance and would be pissed off at the bad decisions the Mandarins have been making, and they're not exactly popular amongst the average Joes.

Who exactly was going to support them?

Star Knight wrote:
I think - as is pretty much hinted at in UC - that the Mandarins had a very good chance of getting the train back on the rails again and successfully fight the GA without Honor invading Sol due to plot.
As said, i think that without the power plot the Alliance would have just sat around, waiting for Lacoon magic to work somehow, only to disover one day that the window of opportunity has closed on them.

The League was in a constant meltdown during UC. An extremely rapid meltdown considering the time it takes for information to even get around.

Like Beowulf had barely said they wanted out and several other systems instantly wanted out too - and that's before any serious economic or political impact could be truly felt.

We already know the Mandarins are under arrest. It is likely the league will continue in some form. Some places will not be part of it probably. Certainly the protectorates. And quite a few others. But the majority will stay with the League because it's simpler and some reform will go a long way.

SPOILER ALERT !!!!!!!!! From the very end of chapter 6

UH Chapter 6 wrote:Whether or not anyone in Old Chicago wanted to admit it, Daud al-Fanudahi knew that so far, the Alliance had exercised enormous restraint. It hadn’t wanted this war and it didn’t want to fight this war, and he’d come to admire its chosen strategy. The tactician in him might be critical of the way their defensive stance left the initiative in the League’s hands, but the strategist in him understood. Their defensive advantage was so great they could afford to let the Solarians come to them, at least where their critical core systems were concerned. They didn’t have to seek opportunities to chew up the SLN, and they’d actually done their best to minimize Solarian casualties, instead. They’d relied on the “soft power” of economic warfare, done everything they could to encourage the collapse of the political clique driving the confrontation, without killing anyone they could avoid killing. Their immediate strategic objective was clearly to strangle the Federal government fiscally while simultaneously peeling away Protectorsate systems and Solarian trading partners unil the Mandarins—or their successors—were forced to accept a negotiated peace. That much was obvious. But he suspected their ultimate objective was to encourage nothing less than the dissolution of the entire League into smaller, less juggernaut-sized successor states, like the Mayan Autonomous Regional Sector and this new Renaissance Factor coalescing around Mannerheim.

Both of those were waiting strategies, though. They were the tactics chosen by the side with minimal ambitions for territory…and sufficient confidence in its own military capabilities to be patient. To let time work for it.

So what happened if there was another “Mesa Atrocity”—this one in one of the Grand Alliance’s systems? One coupled with a sudden improvement in the Mandarins’ fiscal situation and the simultaneous use of some new weapon which let the SLN get inside their defenses and kill still more of their civilians? What happened if all of that flowed together and convinced the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies to start taking the war—genuinely taking the war—to the Solarian League for the very first time?

And what happened if they concluded that the League had decided the Eridani Edict no longer applied? If they decided the only way to prevent more of mass casualties was to adopt a policy of ruthless reprisal? Prove they would, indeed, exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, however many millions of Solarians that killed, if that was what it took for the Mandarins to recognize sanity when they saw it?

If the gloves really come off, who knows where the killing will stop…if it stops?

Also see UH Spoilers likes and dislikes, RFC himself posted.

I can't help but wonder how well you actually read the ARC.
It was a good strategy The text ev said the government was broke, they had 3 months left then they had to shut down. At that point, before the enfd of SoV when Albrecht Detweiler fired off his final fusillade setting ub the GA with an EEE violation, the Harrington pklan was on track to defeat the league having never fired an offensive missile.

The Mesa Final Flourish changed everything. It galvanized the core worlds as much as adirect attack on Earth would have. It gave the Mandarins a winning strategy in the Chamber of Stars for a fast track amendment for direct taxation and virtually bottomless funding for everything military.

That was the bitter end. At the bitter end, the defensive strategy became untenable. At the bitter end, the tactical and strategic assumptions no longer applied. After the bitter end, The Salamander rode again.

Now the Solaran League doesn't have to come apart, it gets fundamentally changed (that is the legal and governmental effect of a new constitution.) Any worlds that choose to secede may do so as much in sorrow as in anger. There is no revanchism to deal with.

Now the Renaissance Factor has been thwarted, there is no hysteric reaction to chaos reigning. The core and shell may or may not survive intact. There should be some way to fund the government without reliance on the Protectorates and the Verge.

Now the RF has to compete with The SL, The GA, MARS, The AE for verge worlds. The Detweiler plan is pretty much shot for the m=next generation. It is patient, it will survive, it will bide its time,

@ kzt

Not so sure. It's probable that core worlds who thought there was a threat could harden their defenses such that it would take major effort and time to hold the orbits. However major effort means a BatRon or two with CLACs in support, not a major fleet.

It also requires significant improvements in sensors and sensor platforms, but this all seems doable.
Being able to hold out against say 48SD(P) plus support or larger really requires the ability to conduct hyper capable mobile operations that can threaten SD(P)s at like 30 million KM.

I’m not so sure. In UC the Sollies displayed a very worrying capabilities of mass producing missile pods. At some point quantity has a quality of its own. No matter how effective Manticoran missile defenses are, 48 SD(P)s – or whatever fleet really – only have a finite number of counter missiles. They will comfortably defend against the first one, two, three, five whatever million missiles but eventually some will get through. No matter how big your fleet is. Even Grand Fleet couldn’t stop all of Eleventh Fleets missiles at Manticore and the SLN has improved rapidly since then.



@Slneezy

Losing all the reasons why you're in power is a pretty good way to lose power.

The reasons why you came to power are not necessarily the reason why you are in power.

The Mandarins wouldn't have anything going for them in a smaller League. The financial elites would be pissed off that they've lost the Protectorates most of the Shell, the planetary governments would want to have a greater hand in governance and would be pissed off at the bad decisions the Mandarins have been making, and they're not exactly popular amongst the average Joes.
Who exactly was going to support them?

And the Mandarins will blame all of that on the Alliance and the Core will willingly follow them into war. War galvanizes people. That’s literally the (masterfully crafted) Haven plot during the first war.
And the governments or people of the Core Worlds don’t care about the protectorates or the shell anyway. The Transtellars do, but why would they throw the Mandarins under the bus? Elected governments wont do them any good.

The League was in a constant meltdown during UC. An extremely rapid meltdown considering the time it takes for information to even get around.

Like Beowulf had barely said they wanted out and several other systems instantly wanted out too - and that's before any serious economic or political impact could be truly felt.

There was no “meltdown”. Sure the League was hemorrhaging members, even Core Worlds, but so what? You underestimate the size of the League. There are close to 2000 League member planets and 200 Core Worlds. Most, if not all more populous and as rich as Manticore.
Think about how much the Mandarins could lose. They could lose 50, 70, 90% of the League and still be powerful enough to stand up the GA. Not short term, but after a couple of tyears, no problem. Their main problem was revenue, as the federal authority coudlnt tax the member planets. Essentially they were fighting the GA with pocket change the Alliance was actively targeting with Case Lacoon.
The incalculable wealth and industrial power of the League wasn’t tapped into yet at all. But this was changing, the Mandarins were well in the process of getting an constitutional amendment through the Assembly. Do you think this points to the League falling apart? I don’t, in fact I think it points to the League rallying behind the Mandarins to face the Alliance.


@ pappilon

I can't help but wonder how well you actually read the ARC.
It was a good strategy The text ev said the government was broke, they had 3 months left then they had to shut down. At that point, before the enfd of SoV when Albrecht Detweiler fired off his final fusillade setting ub the GA with an EEE violation, the Harrington pklan was on track to defeat the league having never fired an offensive missile.

I read it quite well, thank you very much. But did you?
Yes, the federal government was going broke. Why? Because they aren’t allowed to tax member systems and finance themselves on interstellar trade and protectorates alone. And trade was actively targeted by the Alliance and Case Lacoon.
To get around that, the Mandarins were about to push a constitutional amendment through the assembly, enabling them to tax the Leagues system directly. And those economies are perfectly fine, close to a trillion humans in the core alone generate enough economic power without interstellar trade.
This amendment would have gone through and the federal government would not have collapsed. It says so right in the text:

The public boards were full of stories— some from accredited newsies; most anonymously sourced— about a new amendment to the Constitution, one designed to solve the League’s current fiscal crisis.
Given the atmosphere here in the Sol System, the amendment— if it existed, and he thought it probably did— would sail through the rumored truncated ratification process in a heartbeat, despite any legal flaws in the procedure. And if the Mandarins were able to tap however deeply they needed to into the enormous economic power of the League, the situation would change radically. The probability of the League’s collapse— or, at least, the collapse of its Federal government, which might possibly have restored sanity to its foreign policy— would decrease significantly, and the Grand Alliance would know it was looking at a much longer, much more dangerous conflict.

The Manticoran leadership and the Grand Alliance in general failed to anticipate this development. Case Lacoon was not going to magically solve the conflict. In fact, it only enabled the Mandarins to tap into the incalculable economic power of the League member systems.
If that had gone through and if the Mandarins would have been able to prvent a general GA attack on the Core for another two, three tyears through political means, it would have been enough to fortify the League against attacks, tech inbalance or not. Long term the Alliance would have lost the war because they didn’t act on the very brief window of opportunity which was already closing fast during UC.

The only reason why this didn’t happen was plot. The Alignments action pushed Honor into action and Operation Nemesis happened.
But without those plot developments there is nothing at all hinting at an imminent execution of Nemesis. They were still hoping against hope that the League would collapse and the Mandarins with it, while in reality the Mandarins were well on the way of getting their house in order. They were hemorrhaging systems, yes, but even if they lost half the Core it would have been enough to stomp the Alliance long term.

The Mesa Final Flourish changed everything. It galvanized the core worlds as much as adirect attack on Earth would have. It gave the Mandarins a winning strategy in the Chamber of Stars for a fast track amendment for direct taxation and virtually bottomless funding for everything military.
The Mesa Final Flourish changed everything. It galvanized the core worlds as much as adirect attack on Earth would have. It gave the Mandarins a winning strategy in the Chamber of Stars for a fast track amendment for direct taxation and virtually bottomless funding for everything military.

The Mandarins were quite positive the amendment would pass before the Alignment nuked Mesa. And Honor was pushed into action because of the Alignments actions at Beowulf, not because of the amendment process. Without the massacre at Bewoulf Operation Nemesis would not have been execute, at least not immediately.

Imagine this scenario: The Mandarins get their amendment and reach out to the Alliance for settlement talks. Only to buy time of course, but do you really think the GA would not jump at the chance? The talks would collaps some time later and the GA would discover that eben 500 SD(P)s are not enough to invade Sol defended by one billion missile pods.

But as you explained, they were saved by plot. Great irony of history really. Without the Alignment “helping” thinks along, the Grand Alliance would have very likely lost the war. And only because the White Haven Admiralty talked itself out of implementing Operation Nemesis immediately after Second Manticore.

Now the Solaran League doesn't have to come apart, it gets fundamentally changed (that is the legal and governmental effect of a new constitution.) Any worlds that choose to secede may do so as much in sorrow as in anger. There is no revanchism to deal with.

Or it might end up like something treaty of Versailles with very similar consequences…
“This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years".
French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in 1919…

Ah, yes. The power of plot. A dickens of a note that it gives RFC the way to decide which way the story goes...

Does anybody believe that the Mandarins could have succeeded in convincing the core worlds to tax themselves when there was a painless way out...especially when it only takes one member's veto to trash the whole thing?

I don't.

Don


-

n7axw wrote:Does anybody believe that the Mandarins could have succeeded in convincing the core worlds to tax themselves when there was a painless way out...especially when it only takes one member's veto to trash the whole thing?

You mean like freezing the basic living standard in the Peoples Republic? War is such a beautiful tool for political reform...

Everything in UC points to the amendment getting through.
If it had, the Mandarins would have won the war in they could have bought enough time to rearm. Manticoran complacency as described makes the later very likley.

Star Knight wrote:

n7axw wrote:Does anybody believe that the Mandarins could have succeeded in convincing the core worlds to tax themselves when there was a painless way out...especially when it only takes one member's veto to trash the whole thing?

You mean like freezing the basic living standard in the Peoples Republic? War is such a beautiful tool for political reform...

Everything in UC points to the amendment getting through.
If it had, the Mandarins would have won the war in they could have bought enough time to rearm. Manticoran complacency as described makes the later very likley.

It only takes one member to veto. I guess we'll never know. But the odds of against making a tax proposal unanimous are astronomical.

That particular fly swirling around the olive in the martini has been the problem all along.

Don

-

Don

-

Star Knight wrote:

n7axw wrote:Does anybody believe that the Mandarins could have succeeded in convincing the core worlds to tax themselves when there was a painless way out...especially when it only takes one member's veto to trash the whole thing?

You mean like freezing the basic living standard in the Peoples Republic? War is such a beautiful tool for political reform...

Everything in UC points to the amendment getting through.
If it had, the Mandarins would have won the war in they could have bought enough time to rearm. Manticoran complacency as described makes the later very likley.

You are misreading the situation in several regards, but the most important of them, in so far as the long-term sustainability of the war is concerned, is that there is no way the amendment would have gone through without the supposed Eridani violation at Mesa.

The Alignment did not calculate that Houdini would provoke a constitutional amendment. It was their "great vanishing act" plan for a long time, but the way in which it was executed had the side effect of giving the Mandarins fodder to risk calling a convention to amend the constitution. A convention, which means special delegates have to assemble and the whole damned constitution is eligible for amendment. They really, really didn't want to do that until the "Mesa Atrocity" gave them a great big stick because --- as they observed more than once in the course of the book --- most of the core worlds were not existentially involved in the war prior to Mesa. In so far as there is a convoluted plot device at play, it was my decision (implicit from the very start of Houdini) to give the Mandarins something they could use to overcome the "The Solarian League Navy is at war; the Solarian League is at the mall" syndrome which the Harrington Doctrine was masterfully (if I do say so myself) sustaining through its deliberate restraint.

Where did I ever show you a single mass rally against Manticore? A bond rally? A "support our troops" rally? Abruzzi keeps talking about opinion polls. Where does he ever say "the voters are really out for blood now!" He's talking like a politician prepping for a floor fight in the legislature, not someone talking about public opinion that has any significant popular support for the war. That's why they keep trying to brand Beowulfers as traitors for general consumption. Aside from the pinch on their economies — which, admittedly, would have become acutely painful in the long term — the Grand Alliance had been careful to do nothing to awaken the sleeping eight million kilo gorilla of Solarian public opinion and turn it against the Alliance.

This war was being fought from "inside the Kuiper," and Manticore and the GA understood that perfectly. They also understood that if they turned it into a war that aroused genuine general public support, they lost even if they won. But the citizens of the Core Worlds — outside those business interests which were getting crushed in shipping and the transtellars — didn't really have a dog in the fight. As long as that was true, you can be absolutely damned sure that the amendment to let the central government (which most of the Core Worlds already knew was hugely corrupt; they just didn't care enough to clean out the stables to fix it) levy direct taxes on them could never have been passed.

The GA was aware that the Mesa Atrocity had changed that. They did not yet know how badly, prior to the Beowulf attack, but the amendment process is a process, and they would have learned about it well before the amendment could be enacted.

Their calculation was that (a) the strategy they had was demonstrably working pre-Mesa; (b) they remained well tapped-in on what was happening politically inside the League (I didn't think we needed a whole 'nother story thread showing that, since their strategy discussions indicated that they had a damned good idea of what was going on internally); (c) they calculated that if the wheels came off, then it was time to roll the dice and pursue an offensive solution which might not end up in a second and disastrous war 15 or 20 years down the road.

It was Buccaneer, coupled with the Detweiler miscalculation at Beowulf, which gave them the strategic option of a bullet to the brain which, in the eyes of Core World public opinion was both completely justifiable, in light of the huge Beowulfan casualty total, and would (a) demonstrate the complete (current) impotence of the SLN; (b) drive home the reality of what Buccaneer had meant to the other star systems upon which the Mandarins had inflicted it; (c) kick the hog on its snout to get its attention and point out what could already have happened to the Core Worlds (who, as I pointed out above, didn't have a dog in the fight) if the Grand Alliance had chosen to go on the offensive; (d) seize the moral high ground in unmistakable terms by not killing a single civilian, or even their pet hamsters (all right, they probably got a few hamsters; where would Science Fiction be without Space Hamsters? ) despite all the millions of civilian casualties the Grand Alliance had suffered.

Yes, I'm aware that the Mandarins could have continued to point at Mesa, and say "Yes, but —" The problem is that no one would have been listening once it percolated how carefully Honor avoided killing any civilians in the Sol System. And then, at the end of the day, all the Grand Alliance demanded was that the unelected bureaucrats responsible for enabling all this carnage be surrendered for trial and that the Solarian League's central government, which all the Core Worlds already knew was hopelessly corrupt, be fixed by a Constitution written internally by the League's member systems. And, allow me to point out, that however the bombs got aboard the Beowulf habitats, those millions of deaths were suffered in an attack ordered by the Mandarins and constituted an Eridani Edict violation against the founding member of the Solarian League . . . who had been supported by a sizable minority of its fellow Core Worlds in the Assembly prior to its withdrawal from the League. In other words, the complete and total moral bankruptcy of the bureaucrats which the League's current constitution had permitted to kill millions upon millions of civilians in the League's name had been abundantly demonstrated by Operation Fabius.

Aside from the destruction of all infrastructure in the Sol System — which, for all of its spectacular nature, can be rebuilt at least as quickly and at far lower relative cost as Manticore's, given the sheer size of the League and its economy — this was about the softest landing that could possibly be contrived, and there are enough sane heads in the League to recognize it. It wasn't, however, a strategy which could be pursued without some truly spectacular justification, which the SLN's attacks on Spindle and Manticore would not have provided in Solarian eyes. After all, those attacks had been defeated quite handily. Surely that couldn't justify a devastating onslaught on the economy of an entire star system! There speaketh Solarian complacency.

Again, there was no winning strategy based on offensive fleet operations for the Grand Alliance short of something like Honor's attack on the Sol System, and that, too, would have been a losing strategy without the justification of Hypatia, Buccaneer, and the Beowulf Atrocity as a backdrop. Absent that sort of justification, the "soft" strategy the Alliance had chosen to pursue was the best available. (I might note in passing that very few people go to war if they think there is a good available alternative. Sometimes you've got to settle for the least bad alternative.) And, again, I think you are seriously underestimating the fact that the Grand Alliance always recognized that they might have to change strategy. The only winning strategy, pre-Mesa and pre-Beowulf, was to drive the Mandarins (who were really the only ones fighting the damned war from the Solarian side, even if other people were doing all the dying) into an internal collapse which permitted a diplomatic resolution with whoever/whatever succeeded them in Old Chicago, and if there were six or seven billion dead Solarians in the background when it came time to negotiate, they could be absolutely certain of getting another Rob S. Pierre, and they'd already tried that once, thank you.

runsforcelery wrote:
You are misreading the situation in several regards, but the most important of them, in so far as the long-term sustainability of the war is concerned, is that there is no way the amendment would have gone through without the supposed Eridani violation at Mesa. [...]

Wow thank you for the response.

To elaborate, the main reason why I came up with this interpretation of events is the lack of “strategy discussions” in the book. As a reader I don’t know how well tapped in they are or if they had any red lines, that if crossed would facilitate a change in strategy. The impression I got from it was basically something like - everything is fine, amendment or not, we continue with doing nothing until the League collapses.

And if I’m not mistaken its not like they had amble time to at least start panicking about the amendment. The amendment talk began in November 1922 and the Mandarins talked about the possibility of it getting past within days of a proposal. The attack on Beowulf didn’t happen until February 1923 (?), while rumors about the amendment started to circles in the League (I wholeheartedly agree that Manticore would know about those rumors fairly quickly) in December 1922.

And yet there is no talk about it on the Manti side. Not before Beowulf, not after. There is the entire post attack Mount Royal Palace conference for example. No mention about the criticality of the amendment about to being passed. In fact, there was still great reluctance to do anything, including the Empress no less!

I never at any point got the impression that the Alliance leaderhsip cared about the amendment. Or about the – in my view – pretty worrying industrial potential of the League already being displayed at the frontlines. The technology and production gaps were shrinking faster than anticipated. Even that one Manti Admiral recognized that.
Anyway, as a reader I can only conclude that none of this was relevant to the decision making process. If you are saying that the amendment would have been a red line for the GA and very likely pushed them into action that’s fine, but I fail to see how I can conclude that from the book.

I’m not saying that this is a huge oversight or anything, its just that to me too much on the GAs strategy was left in limbo at any given time and gives me room for interpretations. And interpretations are fun and I enjoy arriving at different conclusion than you want to portray as far as the … competence of Manticoran leadership goes. That is not a bad thing IMO, only speaks to the richness of the world you created.

As for whether or not the entire angle *we didn’t kill any civilian, we are the good guys, please don’t walk over us twenty years from know* angle post OP Nemesis works or not – I have no strong opinion about it either way. Might work, might not. There would probably resentment no matter what you do – just the audacity of attacking the cradle of humankind itself, outrageous! – if that’s enough to push some Core Worlds into action down the line – who knows.

I do think though, that the entire Hypatia, Buccaneer, Beowulf situation doesn’t really provide a sufficiently “spectacular justification” for attacking SOL and getting away with it. Or to put it another way, I would say that long term there would be little to no difference if Operation Nemesis had happened immediately after Second Manticore instead off after Beowulf. And sometimes its better to just rip the bandaid off, instead of waiting for the power of plot to breed a better circumstance. Could have gone wrong too after all.

The way I see it, you had to very carefully … plot a sequence of event to plausible arrive at the finish line you set along time ago. And while I think you pretty much managed to do that, it comes across a little too contrived at times for my personal taste.

Looking at the entirety of the story I think much of this … maneuvering would have been avoided by just making the SLN just a bit stronger. I would need to look it up but I think it wasn’t until the second shadow book when we got an impression of how weak the SLN actually is.
Anyway, thank you again for the book and series. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Star Knight wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
You are misreading the situation in several regards, but the most important of them, in so far as the long-term sustainability of the war is concerned, is that there is no way the amendment would have gone through without the supposed Eridani violation at Mesa. [...]

Wow thank you for the response.

To elaborate, the main reason why I came up with this interpretation of events is the lack of “strategy discussions” in the book. As a reader I don’t know how well tapped in they are or if they had any red lines, that if crossed would facilitate a change in strategy. The impression I got from it was basically something like - everything is fine, amendment or not, we continue with doing nothing until the League collapses.

And if I’m not mistaken its not like they had amble time to at least start panicking about the amendment. The amendment talk began in November 1922 and the Mandarins talked about the possibility of it getting past within days of a proposal. The attack on Beowulf didn’t happen until February 1923 (?), while rumors about the amendment started to circles in the League (I wholeheartedly agree that Manticore would know about those rumors fairly quickly) in December 1922.

And yet there is no talk about it on the Manti side. Not before Beowulf, not after. There is the entire post attack Mount Royal Palace conference for example. No mention about the criticality of the amendment about to being passed. In fact, there was still great reluctance to do anything, including the Empress no less!

I never at any point got the impression that the Alliance leaderhsip cared about the amendment. Or about the – in my view – pretty worrying industrial potential of the League already being displayed at the frontlines. The technology and production gaps were shrinking faster than anticipated. Even that one Manti Admiral recognized that.
Anyway, as a reader I can only conclude that none of this was relevant to the decision making process. If you are saying that the amendment would have been a red line for the GA and very likely pushed them into action that’s fine, but I fail to see how I can conclude that from the book.

I’m not saying that this is a huge oversight or anything, its just that to me too much on the GAs strategy was left in limbo at any given time and gives me room for interpretations. And interpretations are fun and I enjoy arriving at different conclusion than you want to portray as far as the … competence of Manticoran leadership goes. That is not a bad thing IMO, only speaks to the richness of the world you created.

As for whether or not the entire angle *we didn’t kill any civilian, we are the good guys, please don’t walk over us twenty years from know* angle post OP Nemesis works or not – I have no strong opinion about it either way. Might work, might not. There would probably resentment no matter what you do – just the audacity of attacking the cradle of humankind itself, outrageous! – if that’s enough to push some Core Worlds into action down the line – who knows.

I do think though, that the entire Hypatia, Buccaneer, Beowulf situation doesn’t really provide a sufficiently “spectacular justification” for attacking SOL and getting away with it. Or to put it another way, I would say that long term there would be little to no difference if Operation Nemesis had happened immediately after Second Manticore instead off after Beowulf. And sometimes its better to just rip the bandaid off, instead of waiting for the power of plot to breed a better circumstance. Could have gone wrong too after all.

The way I see it, you had to very carefully … plot a sequence of event to plausible arrive at the finish line you set along time ago. And while I think you pretty much managed to do that, it comes across a little too contrived at times for my personal taste.

Looking at the entirety of the story I think much of this … maneuvering would have been avoided by just making the SLN just a bit stronger. I would need to look it up but I think it wasn’t until the second shadow book when we got an impression of how weak the SLN actually is.
Anyway, thank you again for the book and series. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

There's a meta reason as well: RFC has been quite clear in a number of places that one of the objectives for UH was to get the main scenario back to where it would have been at the end of AAC if he'd killed Honor and the timeline hadn't collapsed.

At the end of AAC, the Solarian League was still the Solarian League, not a gaggle of rump states that is what the Harrington Plan and the MAlign's plan both envisioned as the proximate end game.

Now it's back, with the new, improved SL as the 800-pound gorilla and the RF out in the open because they pulled the trigger too soon, while they still thought there would have doom, death, destruction, chaos, panic and consternation.

Star Knight wrote:


@ pappilon

I can't help but wonder how well you actually read the ARC.
It was a good strategy The text ev said the government was broke, they had 3 months left then they had to shut down. At that point, before the enfd of SoV when Albrecht Detweiler fired off his final fusillade setting ub the GA with an EEE violation, the Harrington pklan was on track to defeat the league having never fired an offensive missile.

I read it quite well, thank you very much. But did you?
Yes, the federal government was going broke. Why? Because they aren’t allowed to tax member systems and finance themselves on interstellar trade and protectorates alone. And trade was actively targeted by the Alliance and Case Lacoon.
To get around that, the Mandarins were about to push a constitutional amendment through the assembly, enabling them to tax the Leagues system directly. And those economies are perfectly fine, close to a trillion humans in the core alone generate enough economic power without interstellar trade.
This amendment would have gone through and the federal government would not have collapsed. It says so right in the text:

The public boards were full of stories— some from accredited newsies; most anonymously sourced— about a new amendment to the Constitution, one designed to solve the League’s current fiscal crisis.
Given the atmosphere here in the Sol System, the amendment— if it existed, and he thought it probably did— would sail through the rumored truncated ratification process in a heartbeat, despite any legal flaws in the procedure. And if the Mandarins were able to tap however deeply they needed to into the enormous economic power of the League, the situation would change radically. The probability of the League’s collapse— or, at least, the collapse of its Federal government, which might possibly have restored sanity to its foreign policy— would decrease significantly, and the Grand Alliance would know it was looking at a much longer, much more dangerous conflict.

The Manticoran leadership and the Grand Alliance in general failed to anticipate this development. Case Lacoon was not going to magically solve the conflict. In fact, it only enabled the Mandarins to tap into the incalculable economic power of the League member systems.
If that had gone through and if the Mandarins would have been able to prvent a general GA attack on the Core for another two, three tyears through political means, it would have been enough to fortify the League against attacks, tech inbalance or not. Long term the Alliance would have lost the war because they didn’t act on the very brief window of opportunity which was already closing fast during UC.

The only reason why this didn’t happen was plot. The Alignments action pushed Honor into action and Operation Nemesis happened.
But without those plot developments there is nothing at all hinting at an imminent execution of Nemesis. They were still hoping against hope that the League would collapse and the Mandarins with it, while in reality the Mandarins were well on the way of getting their house in order. They were hemorrhaging systems, yes, but even if they lost half the Core it would have been enough to stomp the Alliance long term.

At this point we are saying exactly the same thing. The argument is BEFORE Mesa there was every indicator that there was no need for offensive action since everything was going to plan. After mesa there was no complacency. within days or a week there was direct military action against Sol.

You seem to think everything could have gone sideways and nobody was watching. Space is large ships are slow against the volume of space, Information travels slowly. Does NOT mean every one is nodding off at the switch.