How to downgrade the fleet without upsetting the public?

Sigs wrote:At the end of the day World War two did not come about because the Germans felt like they were backstabbed during WW1, it came about because of a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with hurt feelings and conspiracies from the Great War.

Among the variety of reasons for WW2, the yearning of the Germanic people for someone to rip apart the shameful Versailles Treaty was rather high on the list of how the National Socialist German Workers' Party and Adolf Hitler came to power. The hurt feelings and conspiracies also directly fed the anti-Semitism that helped fuel that rise.

If you want to point to the Great Depression as a contributor, that is fine; but it helped the process along, rather than starting something new.

tlb wrote:

Sigs wrote:At the end of the day World War two did not come about because the Germans felt like they were backstabbed during WW1, it came about because of a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with hurt feelings and conspiracies from the Great War.

Among the variety of reasons for WW2, the yearning of the Germanic people for someone to rip apart the shameful Versailles Treaty was rather high on the list of how the National Socialist German Workers' Party and Adolf Hitler came to power. The hurt feelings and conspiracies also directly fed the anti-Semitism that helped fuel that rise.

If you want to point to the Great Depression as a contributor, that is fine; but it helped the process along, rather than starting something new.

Sorry, long post in advance, but I couldn't figure out a way to shorten it much and most of this is not taught in any history book that I have ever picked up

Depression helped a bit, but the Nazi's had already conquered Bavaria before then.

Lets look at a map and a little history.

Why did so many Prussians mostly immigrate to the west(USA, Argentina) in the ~19th century? They were starving is the short version and why they had headed EAST by the millions as well. Part of the Nazi platform was to conquer, or in this case, RE-conquer lands lost, the Sudentland is what they called it I believe, because everyone remembered starving. The French taking the Ruhr after Germany did not pay up in 1922??? just added fuel to this fire.

Most of Prussia was what is now Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Chyeck Republic. People forget that post WWI, Millions of Germans were killed in these countries(early 1920's) and then the FINAL ethnic cleansing was done post WWII and now there are NONE. There was PLENTY of angst from this ALONE to demand WWII and the "backstab" as the Germans from these countries were essentially not allowed to come back to German territory and were butchered in place by the Russians etc while they fought for the white side of the Bolshevik red revolution.

Everyone forgets this aspect of post WWI and WWII. Just like most forget the millions of dead/displaced in the Religious cleansing in Greece/Turkey post WWI as well.

The Nazi's while they had a boost from the depression, had already conquered, and conquered is the right term, Bavaria.

PS: People say always look at the Nazi's as the true evil in these wars... They were, but the Russians literally burned and butchered everything and everyone in their retreat East and in their advance west during WWI.

Both Germany and Hungarian empire when they conquered new territory purposefully made examples of the civilian population by the hundred by shooting/hanging HUNDREDS/Thousands of dissenters and then PROUDLY, oh so proudly published the photos etc for all to see.

Both sides thought nothing of doing the exact same stupid brainless "tactics", rushing, or walking massed men with single shot rifles against massed artillery and machine gun fire. This "brilliant tactic" had already proven to kill people by the 100,000 time after time after time gaining at best 100-->200m for roughly 500,000 casualties on both the Eastern, Southern, and Western Fronts.

The Ottoman Young Turks butchered 1.5Million Armenian Christians and another million Greek orthodox Christians, yet today no one even bats an eyelash when a so called "news outlet" here in the USA models themselves on these religious butchers and pretends they were secular... Don't worry, same Orthodox Christian Greeks who had been pissed off by the Ottomans as 2nd class or 3rd class citizens also decided to do their own 500,000-->1,000,000 butchery until the French would not support them and then got butchered in return.

The Brits invented the concentration camp in the Bohr war when they ruthlessly conquered for the JBerg Gold deposits, and the Cape Town Port. Everyone had their own concentration camps by WWI and the millions of prisoners during the war by all sides institutionalized this due to stalemate.

Every side held fast to Darwinian theory that those of African descent were closest to apes and why pretty much every side had a Eugenics program/party.

Don't worry, there was plenty of butchery in China as well.

Ah humanity... anything is a good excuse for POWER

Honestly, what makes anyone think this aspect of humanity will change in the slightest by the Honorverse time? After all RFC already has the SL citizenry not caring at all at the butchery...

Revanchism, "stabbed-in-the-back" will happen 100%. The only question is: How big will the SL be when it happens and how big will the "good guys" be.

Amen!

The butchery committed by humans everywhere and everywhen by almost everyone is undeniable.

Relax wrote:
Sorry, long post in advance, but I couldn't figure out a way to shorten it much and most of this is not taught in any history book that I have ever picked up

Depression helped a bit, but the Nazi's had already conquered Bavaria before then.

Lets look at a map and a little history.

Why did so many Prussians mostly immigrate to the west(USA, Argentina) in the ~19th century? They were starving is the short version and why they had headed EAST by the millions as well. Part of the Nazi platform was to conquer, or in this case, RE-conquer lands lost, the Sudentland is what they called it I believe, because everyone remembered starving. The French taking the Ruhr after Germany did not pay up in 1922??? just added fuel to this fire.

Most of Prussia was what is now Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Chyeck Republic. People forget that post WWI, Millions of Germans were killed in these countries(early 1920's) and then the FINAL ethnic cleansing was done post WWII and now there are NONE. There was PLENTY of angst from this ALONE to demand WWII and the "backstab" as the Germans from these countries were essentially not allowed to come back to German territory and were butchered in place by the Russians etc while they fought for the white side of the Bolshevik red revolution.

Everyone forgets this aspect of post WWI and WWII. Just like most forget the millions of dead/displaced in the Religious cleansing in Greece/Turkey post WWI as well.

The Nazi's while they had a boost from the depression, had already conquered, and conquered is the right term, Bavaria.

PS: People say always look at the Nazi's as the true evil in these wars... They were, but the Russians literally burned and butchered everything and everyone in their retreat East and in their advance west during WWI.

Both Germany and Hungarian empire when they conquered new territory purposefully made examples of the civilian population by the hundred by shooting/hanging HUNDREDS/Thousands of dissenters and then PROUDLY, oh so proudly published the photos etc for all to see.

Both sides thought nothing of doing the exact same stupid brainless "tactics", rushing, or walking massed men with single shot rifles against massed artillery and machine gun fire. This "brilliant tactic" had already proven to kill people by the 100,000 time after time after time gaining at best 100-->200m for roughly 500,000 casualties on both the Eastern, Southern, and Western Fronts.

The Ottoman Young Turks butchered 1.5Million Armenian Christians and another million Greek orthodox Christians, yet today no one even bats an eyelash when a so called "news outlet" here in the USA models themselves on these religious butchers and pretends they were secular... Don't worry, same Orthodox Christian Greeks who had been pissed off by the Ottomans as 2nd class or 3rd class citizens also decided to do their own 500,000-->1,000,000 butchery until the French would not support them and then got butchered in return.

The Brits invented the concentration camp in the Bohr war when they ruthlessly conquered for the JBerg Gold deposits, and the Cape Town Port. Everyone had their own concentration camps by WWI and the millions of prisoners during the war by all sides institutionalized this due to stalemate.

Every side held fast to Darwinian theory that those of African descent were closest to apes and why pretty much every side had a Eugenics program/party.

Don't worry, there was plenty of butchery in China as well.

Ah humanity... anything is a good excuse for POWER

Honestly, what makes anyone think this aspect of humanity will change in the slightest by the Honorverse time? After all RFC already has the SL citizenry not caring at all at the butchery...

Revanchism, "stabbed-in-the-back" will happen 100%. The only question is: How big will the SL be when it happens and how big will the "good guys" be.

You forgot another interwar factor - the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pre- WWI, the Empire had encouraged Germanic speaking populations to move throughout their empire and be the Beaucratic and middle class. This process had been going on for 100s of years, creating a powerful ethnic minority in all the Governed regions. And if you spoke German in Hungary, and better yet, were an ethnic German, you were more likely to get a government post or get in with one of the industrial guilds. As a consequence, Millions of ethnic Germans were spread throughout the empire, all in positions of power or influence pre-WWI.

After WWI, most former imperial countries had a backlash against the ethnic Germans that were their former rulers, bureaucrats, merchants and industrialists, and the German youths in the interwar years found it difficult to get jobs - well paying jobs that previously would have been guaranteed to them, as the regional ethnicities took back their cultures and reverse discrimination took hold.

So when Hitler invaded Romania, Hungry, or any other Eastern European country, hordes of disaffected educated peoples flocked to his side, for they saw their former glory, prosperity and power in him, and he got a ready made local bureaucracy and army (from the disaffected youths) from the entrenched German populations of the former Austrian Empire.

Theemile wrote:
You forgot another interwar factor - the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pre- WWI, the Empire had encouraged Germanic speaking populations to move throughout their empire and be the Beaucratic and middle class. This process had been going on for 100s of years, creating a powerful ethnic minority in all the Governed regions. And if you spoke German in Hungary, and better yet, were an ethnic German, you were more likely to get a government post or get in with one of the industrial guilds. As a consequence, Millions of ethnic Germans were spread throughout the empire, all in positions of power or influence pre-WWI.

After WWI, most former imperial countries had a backlash against the ethnic Germans that were their former rulers, bureaucrats, merchants and industrialists, and the German youths in the interwar years found it difficult to get jobs - well paying jobs that previously would have been guaranteed to them, as the regional ethnicities took back their cultures and reverse discrimination took hold.

So when Hitler invaded Romania, Hungry, or any other Eastern European country, hordes of disaffected educated peoples flocked to his side, for they saw their former glory, prosperity and power in him, and he got a ready made local bureaucracy and army (from the disaffected youths) from the entrenched German populations of the former Austrian Empire.

Pretty hard to forget that which I did not know.

Along the same lines you posted; Germans were also the oligarchy, ruling class of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania... and the USA is roughly ~35% German, Uruguay is much higher and so is Argentina and Chile.

PS: My great grandmother was the youngest of 13 children and 2 stillborn. How they managed to miss the 50% child mortality statistic is a very good question. Now young parents are lucky if they have 2

At the risk of diverting back the RMN’s future - what will be interesting to see is less what shiny new toys they buy or don’t buy, but how they institutionally adjust to the new threat environment. ThebRMN has proven that it’s nigh on miraculous technological advantage has left any potential enemy only two ways to fight:

Asymmetric.

OR

Stupid.

No one is going to sign up to be butchered by whatever the latest and greatest RMN tech is, particularly since Deus Ex Manti seems to dictate that no matter how much you close the gap, a generational breakthrough on the Manty side will beat you just the same. So don’t line up to be butchered in missile walls in space.

Kill them with pocket nukes, with disguised freighters, with insurrections. Kill a manty with a knife and you go to heaven. Butcher them with any means at your disposal, and invite retaliation. Let their expensive battle fleets swing at empty space - your weapons move in cruise liners. Kill planets with frac C launches and don’t claim responsibility. Everything is fair game.

Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. The real question is if the RMN will be able to adapt to it

GloriousRuse wrote:At the risk of diverting back the RMN’s future - what will be interesting to see is less what shiny new toys they buy or don’t buy, but how they institutionally adjust to the new threat environment. ThebRMN has proven that it’s nigh on miraculous technological advantage has left any potential enemy only two ways to fight:

Asymmetric.

OR

Stupid.

No one is going to sign up to be butchered by whatever the latest and greatest RMN tech is, particularly since Deus Ex Manti seems to dictate that no matter how much you close the gap, a generational breakthrough on the Manty side will beat you just the same. So don’t line up to be butchered in missile walls in space.

Kill them with pocket nukes, with disguised freighters, with insurrections. Kill a manty with a knife and you go to heaven. Butcher them with any means at your disposal, and invite retaliation. Let their expensive battle fleets swing at empty space - your weapons move in cruise liners. Kill planets with frac C launches and don’t claim responsibility. Everything is fair game.

Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. The real question is if the RMN will be able to adapt to it

At the moment the RMN is aware of a threat that they do not know how to counter: the silent drive that powered much of the Yawata strike and the destruction of Mycroft at Beowulf. It is not clear to me what a new force structure should be in the light of that uncertainty.

One thing that they probably do not have to worry about is the threat of insurrection, simply because that is ground based and they are not (except at the home planets).

The title of the thread proposes that the fleet should be downgraded; presumably by building more of the latest cruiser classes, rather than building an excess of the newest SD classes. Would that upset the public? Probably not, as long as the public realizes that the Yawata enemy is still around. But is that the right military response?

tlb wrote:Among the variety of reasons for WW2, the yearning of the Germanic people for someone to rip apart the shameful Versailles Treaty was rather high on the list of how the National Socialist German Workers' Party and Adolf Hitler came to power. The hurt feelings and conspiracies also directly fed the anti-Semitism that helped fuel that rise.

If you want to point to the Great Depression as a contributor, that is fine; but it helped the process along, rather than starting something new.

The Versailles Treaty wasn't a stab in the back, the German military knew they were done, extending the war even a few months would have brought the war into Germany and led to further damage. Germany had no choice about it, if they didn't seek peace in late 1918 they would have had to do so in 1919 while the war was fought on German territory.

Ultimately it's not backstabbing by the allies, it was war they knew they were victorious the only question were how long the Germans can survive before their armies collapse and how many people would die before they surrender.


You don't get stabbed in the back by the people you are at war with, they don't owe you anything. Germany went in to WW2 wanting to regain territories they lost in WW1, they wanted to regain their position as a major power and Hitler stirring up anti-Semitic sentiments that had been simmering for centuries, it wasn't a new and novel idea in 1930's to go after Jew's Hitler just needed a scapegoat for why Germany lost the previous war as in see we lost the war because of them not because of our inherently weak position.

Relax wrote:
Honestly, what makes anyone think this aspect of humanity will change in the slightest by the Honorverse time? After all RFC already has the SL citizenry not caring at all at the butchery...

Revanchism, "stabbed-in-the-back" will happen 100%. The only question is: How big will the SL be when it happens and how big will the "good guys" be.

The League members do not care about the butchery because it is happening very far away from them in the verge, protectorates and in the SEM, what they will very much care about is that the butchery almost happened in the League at the hands of the League Military.

It's one thing to watch it from afar knowing it doesn't affect you in any way shape or form, its another to do so when knowing that you were on a list to be attacked, a list made by your national government and a list followed by the National Military.


I don't think the League will seek revenge against the GA simply because they will intentionally limit the SLN's strength while each member would build up their own military power. They have seen what the SLN is prepared to do and how they failed in protecting the nation.

It would have been a different question if the SLN had been crushed but they had not attacked League members and the Neutrals in such a way to underscore their inherent weakness in the situation. But the Mandarins made it so that League members will want a stronger military, just not a stronger military that can threaten them, they will want to know that they are protected rather than know that at anyone time the SLN will leave them defenceless and in fact will attack them exercising their constitutional right. If I remember correctly the Mandarins made comments that were leaked about sending intervention battalions to Hypatia before they decided to attack Hypatia, if anyone believed the Mandarins before hand they sure as hell wouldn't after and few systems will willingly put themselves in a situation to experience the joys of having your home system destroyed.

Sigs wrote:The Versailles Treaty wasn't a stab in the back, the German military knew they were done, extending the war even a few months would have brought the war into Germany and led to further damage. Germany had no choice about it, if they didn't seek peace in late 1918 they would have had to do so in 1919 while the war was fought on German territory.

Ultimately it's not backstabbing by the allies, it was war they knew they were victorious the only question were how long the Germans can survive before their armies collapse and how many people would die before they surrender.

You don't get stabbed in the back by the people you are at war with, they don't owe you anything. Germany went in to WW2 wanting to regain territories they lost in WW1, they wanted to regain their position as a major power and Hitler stirring up anti-Semitic sentiments that had been simmering for centuries, it wasn't a new and novel idea in 1930's to go after Jew's Hitler just needed a scapegoat for why Germany lost the previous war as in see we lost the war because of them not because of our inherently weak position.

The stab in the back conspiracy was never about the Allies nor the Versailles Treaty; the treaty was so punitive that it inspired resentment by itself. The myth of the stab in the back was that Germany still had a chance to win the war, but was sabotaged by communists etc. into accepting the armistice. The army was betrayed by fat cats and war profiteers (and any other group that you might want to demonize). This is "proved" by the war being stopped while the front was still in France.

Hitler included the Jews in the groups that had prevented a victory in WW1. It is true that ant-Semitism existed long before Hitler, but he seized on them as a partial explanation for the defeat.