When you're a hammer: MAlign blind spots

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The espionage service of the People's Republic of Haven (InSec) was extremely biased to their own ways of thinking. The people running the PRH were political animals, buying votes from the Dolist Managers to keep up the appearance of a democratic system electing them. They were concerned with keeping up their own political privileges, which was what gave them their other advantages through corruption and control of the state. As a result, InSec focused on political espionage and attacks. Prior to the annexation of San Martin, the PRH absorbed other systems by political subterfuge too: they forced the leaders of those systems to request annexation, or they engineered civil troubles that they later would come in to solve, like they tried to do at Basilisk (and also what the OFS was doing).

In Manticore, they spied in the political system and fed money to some parties in an attempt to subvert the system without fighting. We know they also engineered the assassination of King Roger III, hoping that they would be able to control Queen Elizabeth III and minimise any fighting. It wasn't a complete misuse of resources, since the Cromarty Government was busy creating the Manticore Alliance and got the League to embargo exports to Haven in that period.

But crucially, they focused too much on political aspects and too little on military matters. InSec missed the forest for the trees and allowed the RMN to get the edge in technology. They failed to infiltrate any of the higher level weapons development; they had no idea on the research on MDMs before the first ones struck at the outset of Operation Buttercup.

What does this have to do with the Alignment?

The Alignment focuses on subterfuge and behind-the-scenes manipulation. They also think in the very long term. Everything they've done so far has been one or the other, or both. All their actions in manipulating first the Talbott Sector's population and Monica, then New Tuscany, then the League, were subterfuge: getting others to do their dirty work. Before that, using Manpower was also subterfuge, like hiding the genetic uplift in the form of genetic slavery, hiding the Twins wormhole by occupying the Congo System with no profit. The Renaissance Factor is another example: a set of families in a dozen systems, seizing power slowly for generations.

When they were forced to act directly and in the short term, things have unravelled so far. They were forced to expose far more of Manpower's cover in Talbott. They tried to act in the very short term to retake the Congo System by using the People's Navy in Exile, thus allowing MAN personnel to be identified (though they were wearing Mesan Space Navy uniforms). They exposed the stealth technology of the spider drive early, by rushing Oyster Bay, and that in turn had the worst possible unintended effect: the formation of the Grand Alliance. They rushed the evacuation of the Onion members from Mesa with Houdini and we're going to see how well that stuck in the next book, but also possibly causing some evacuees to rethink their allegiances.

And the Leonard Detweiler class still makes no sense to me. It's an eggshell once detected and it has very limited tactical manoeuvrability.

Are stealth and long-term thinking Onion blind spots? What other blind spots do they have?

Once the GA upped the tempo against the Alignment, they seem to make a lot of mistakes. And the MAlign is playing in the GA's field: military. This could be their undoing.

They have big cultural blind spots, as demonstrated by the whole slavery thing in general, but what happened with Herlander Simoes - an Alpha star line scientist - and his daughter is even worse in a way.

Consider how they treat members of their own elite; despite Simoes' value, his appeals and his willingness to care for the kid, some Board decided it was better to kill her so he could continue to focus on his research.

Remember they had about two slaves per citizen on Mesa - this Board valued keeping some slave working wherever it was more than giving the Simoes family a live-in carer paid for out of Simoes' income.

(Meanwhile, Albrecht Detweiler swans around in a battlecruiser-sized streak-spider yacht instead of a more discreet streak-impeller boat. Mmm.)

And when they were surprised by his work quality deteriorating anyway, plus his loyalty wavering, what did they do? They assigned a security chief to sit on him, someone who was also smart enough to realise that despite his own privileged status, his society valued him as cheaply as it did Simoes.

Inspired by:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Relax wrote:You could be the smartest in the universe, it doesn't matter in a dictatorship(MALAIGN) as no one is allowed to do Shit until head honcho political operative who doesn't know shit about Engineering, warfare etc, tells you to jump.

And we do know that the Onion lives in an echo chamber, an expression that David himself has said. By that he means that everyone they talk to think the same thing, along the same patterns, with a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. There's no one challenging.

Herlander's wife was totally captured by this way of thinking. Any challengers, like Herlander himself or McBryde, are extremely constrained in what they can do - it's either shut up and soldier on or escape. Nothing in-between is possible or permitted in this society.

And the slave society on Darius may have been described as nicer than Mesa(for now - they just imported the cultural elite of the elite from Mesa and they're heavy on top-down influence), but it's impossible to leave. Mesans who wanted out could theoretically buy, borrow or steal passage aboard freighters and vanish. This possibility is closed off to Darians.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And the Leonard Detweiler class still makes no sense to me. It's an eggshell once detected and it has very limited tactical manoeuvrability.

It makes no sense as a tactical unit because it's not one. It seems to be a strategic weapons platform designed to do to a star system's orbital infrastructure what a ballistic nuclear missile submarine is designed to do to a nation's infrastructure. Like the SSBN, it is not supposed to directly battle enemy assets even though it might be armed in case it cannot avoid an encounter.

I believe they only need two, maybe three, LDs to duplicate what Oyster Bay needed twenty-eight Sharks to do. If they do roll out a hundred completed LDs, they can potentially assert a near-monopoly over access to space in a grand sweeping campaign.

Then the Alignment's psychopaths get two to four thousand planets-as-petri dishes to play with.

Their problem is that the latest 2 generations of Detweilers have gotten impatient.

As you pointed out, their operational preference is to use subterfuge and work behind the scenes pulling strings. That's why they developed the network of long term, generational operatives scattered all over human space (like the rulers of the RF) in the first place. That's why they infiltrated the Solly hierarchy and the upper echelons of their military. When they couldn't place their own- or those owned by them- into decision and policy making positions, they put their own people into positions to control either the raw information or its' presentation to the policy makers.

Detweilers A through G have thrown that away by becoming impatient and becoming too overtly active. Things happen and bad things happen to good people. The problem is when bad things happen too often to be random chance. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. Anything more than than and somebody's out to get you. By pushing the tempo, it raised the suspicions of some very suspicious, intelligent and capable people.

Their downfall didn't start with Monica. It started with the nano controlled assassations.

The attack on the Andy prince was just unexplained. By itself, it's a curiosity. Throw in 4 or 5 similar attacks in the span of a few years and you have a pattern showing malicious intent. By looking at the target selection, it gives you a vector towards the origin just as surely as tracing a bullet path does.

That gave the rest of the galaxy a head's up that there's an unknown threat.

If you're in the woods and hear a rustling in the bushes right after you see signs of bears in the area, you tend to pay a lot of attention to it.

If, after Monica, they had just pulled back into their shell a little and scaled back operations for a few years, it wouldn't have been the beginnings of a trail that leads to their doorstep.

Folks were paying too much attention to anomalies because there have been too many anomalies too close together.

If you don't move, then you don't make tracks.

When combined with putting forth the effort to leave as little trace as possible, what few indications you do leave have a chance to fade into the background.

Instead, they doubled down and repeated the whole Monica debacle on a massive scale right down to using the same personnel- and with the same result.

That moved the suspicions of a LOT of very smart and capable people from, "There's someone else out there," to "Somebody means me ill."

Why exactly did they attempt the Andermani assassination? How was the Anderman Empire a detriment to their long range plans?

cthia wrote:Why exactly did they attempt the Andermani assassination? How was the Anderman Empire a detriment to their long range plans?

something I've often wondered myself.

My only answers are they were more Manty then Solly or Havenite (peeps not republicans) and so would have become trouble at some point and the assassination attempt was a way to try either eliminate the risk or at the very least reduce it.

If there are other reasons i'd like to know them.

munroburton wrote:They have big cultural blind spots, as demonstrated by the whole slavery thing in general, but what happened with Herlander Simoes - an Alpha star line scientist - and his daughter is even worse in a way.

Consider how they treat members of their own elite; despite Simoes' value, his appeals and his willingness to care for the kid, some Board decided it was better to kill her so he could continue to focus on his research.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't the culling that was the problem or trigger. It was actually "compassionate" in a sense, that the LRPB wanted to remove Francesca from their care before she deteriorated and spare her adopted parents the heartache of seeing her like that. So allowing her to remain with the Simões made him even more bitter.

But she was going to die any way. The culling they wanted to do would only have advanced the time line of her demise. So the problem wasn't her death, it was her birth. That she existed at all and was placed in the care of compassionate people. If she had been kept in a lab and treated like a lab animal, Herlander would never have defected, though a lab technician instead might.

Remember they had about two slaves per citizen on Mesa - this Board valued keeping some slave working wherever it was more than giving the Simoes family a live-in carer paid for out of Simoes' income.

The slave and seccy population on Mesa was both historical as well as a front needed for Manpower's existence. At this point in time, the Onion couldn't have changed that if they wished.

And the slave society on Darius may have been described as nicer than Mesa(for now - they just imported the cultural elite of the elite from Mesa and they're heavy on top-down influence), but it's impossible to leave. Mesans who wanted out could theoretically buy, borrow or steal passage aboard freighters and vanish. This possibility is closed off to Darians.

The preexisting population of Darius may not have known that there was an elsewhere they could leave to. They got no news from the outside galaxy anyway. However, the Houdini arrivals do and now there are a hundred thousand new people who used to live on Mesa and knew about the outside Galaxy. A great portion of them also witnessed the Houdini's antics, though they didn't know (at the time) the terrorist attacks and their own relocation were related.

(The Leonard Detweiler class) makes no sense as a tactical unit because it's not one. It seems to be a strategic weapons platform designed to do to a star system's orbital infrastructure what a ballistic nuclear missile submarine is designed to do to a nation's infrastructure. Like the SSBN, it is not supposed to directly battle enemy assets even though it might be armed in case it cannot avoid an encounter.

I believe they only need two, maybe three, LDs to duplicate what Oyster Bay needed twenty-eight Sharks to do. If they do roll out a hundred completed LDs, they can potentially assert a near-monopoly over access to space in a grand sweeping campaign.

Unlike a nuclear deterrent in our days, the LDs can't respond in tactical time. They need months to be inserted at premier target system and in that period they're mostly incommunicado. That means any mission they embark on may become OOBE before they finish it. That also means it's tying up assets for months on end. They can't be used as a denial weapon over a sweeping campaign.

The strategy I take from what you're describing is to insert 2 or 3 of them into key systems, at least 6 months ahead of time of any operational need. Then they approach the inner system, without crossing into the hyper limit, and loiter somewhere within a light-hour (that's Saturn's orbit for us). Then they wait for a trigger command to be sent, probably as an innocuous broadcast. With their size, they may be able to remain on-station for years, which sounds like the minimum needed if it takes 3-6 months to insert.

Then the Alignment's psychopaths get two to four thousand planets-as-petri dishes to play with.

No. Two thousand planets means at a minimum 2000 ships, probably 4000, and no one except the SLN has managed to produce and man that many capital ships.

jtg452 wrote:Detweilers A through G have thrown that away by becoming impatient and becoming too overtly active. Things happen and bad things happen to good people. The problem is when bad things happen too often to be random chance. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. Anything more than than and somebody's out to get you. By pushing the tempo, it raised the suspicions of some very suspicious, intelligent and capable people.

Very much agreed, though I don't know that the Detweilers' impatiance is the cause or whether it's a side-effect. I mean to say that they may have become impatient because the endgame started and they've begun seeing the end in sight, as opposed to their impatience triggering the missteps.

Another thing to point out is that with a low operational tempo, one has time to get data back from all operations and correct them. One has time to simulate different possibilities and analyse the possible outcomes. Any mistakes in one operation can be fixed. And, like you said, people have short memory, so Manpower trying to acquire treecats in the 16th century is not something that informs decision makes in the 20th century.

The attack on the Andy prince was just unexplained. By itself, it's a curiosity. Throw in 4 or 5 similar attacks in the span of a few years and you have a pattern showing malicious intent. By looking at the target selection, it gives you a vector towards the origin just as surely as tracing a bullet path does.

And interestingly, the Detweilers and Bardasano did raise this possibility, that overusing the technique would make it notable. It did.

If, after Monica, they had just pulled back into their shell a little and scaled back operations for a few years, it wouldn't have been the beginnings of a trail that leads to their doorstep.

Folks were paying too much attention to anomalies because there have been too many anomalies too close together.

Maybe.

By the end of Shadow of Saganami (SI1), we didn't know about the Onion or Alignment yet. Even we readers didn't understand that Albrecht Detweiler was any more important than an executive somewhere on Mesa and that his existence was a well-known if not publicised fact. I had the impression when reading the books that the meetings took place in tall skyscrapers, not buried deep underground like the Gamma Center.

All anyone knew at that time was that Manpower felt threatened by the existence of the Lynx Terminus and had moved to attempt to deny it to Manticore, one of the enforcers of the Cherwell Convention.

But it was already too late. Because the Kingdom of Torch already existed at this time and they had begun looking at the operation that existed on the planet before they took over, they already had reason to doubt the Manpower front. The Monica Incident only added to that seed of doubt.

Instead, they doubled down and repeated the whole Monica debacle on a massive scale right down to using the same personnel- and with the same result.

That moved the suspicions of a LOT of very smart and capable people from, "There's someone else out there," to "Somebody means me ill."

Right, completely agreed.

cthia wrote:Why exactly did they attempt the Andermani assassination? How was the Anderman Empire a detriment to their long range plans?

I don't think it's been explained yet. I don't even know if it was an Alignment action or whether the nanites were provided to some Andermani player in exchange for their long-term services, the same way that they were to their Haven agent (blanking on his name and on whether the nanites were used to kill Secretary Giancola).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Unlike a nuclear deterrent in our days, the LDs can't respond in tactical time. They need months to be inserted at premier target system and in that period they're mostly incommunicado. That means any mission they embark on may become OOBE before they finish it. That also means it's tying up assets for months on end. They can't be used as a denial weapon over a sweeping campaign.

The strategy I take from what you're describing is to insert 2 or 3 of them into key systems, at least 6 months ahead of time of any operational need. Then they approach the inner system, without crossing into the hyper limit, and loiter somewhere within a light-hour (that's Saturn's orbit for us). Then they wait for a trigger command to be sent, probably as an innocuous broadcast. With their size, they may be able to remain on-station for years, which sounds like the minimum needed if it takes 3-6 months to insert.

Although they act like them in a lot of ways, LDs don't provide the second-strike deterrence capability of SSBNs and are first-strike weapons. The Alignment believes mutual destruction does not apply to them and have already pulled the trigger - a blind spot?

One per system. I said two or three because Oyster Bay took place in two and a half star systems(Manticore A, B and Yeltsin's Star). It's not inconceivable that a single LD could perform both parts of the Manticore strikes. That might be pushing it, admittedly and playing safe would require at least two, with the third at Yeltsin.

They only need to take months infiltrating those systems with big hyper-wall sensor arrays. How many of those exist? I imagine the MAlign is building one LD for each of those. When the set day arrives, they blow everything there away.

No. Two thousand planets means at a minimum 2000 ships, probably 4000, and no one except the SLN has managed to produce and man that many capital ships.

Of those 4,000 systems, how many command a real navy? Fewer than a hundred even have wallers and half of those bought theirs, meaning they don't have adequate support infrastructure to begin with. So many more are practically naked, like Nuncio, Monica or pre-Alliance Grayson. Some are naked when they shouldn't be, like Hypatia.

The SLN is part of the problem; they have helpfully consolidated the military infrastructure of almost two thousand systems into a few dozen locations.

After hitting the first-rank systems in the first wave, they can assault other systems much more rapidly. Hyper in, roll these missile pods and torpedoes, make a single firing pass and hyper out. A squadron of battlecruisers in the way? No sweat.

With streak drives, they might even manage to outrace the dispatch boats leaving these attacked systems. It's all over before anyone figures out what's happening on an interstellar scale.

The many freighters in transit and warships they didn't catch during the first attack wave are of no concern in the longer term, as they will only last a few years and they will be unable to rebuild as Manticore did due to a lack of intact allies.

I'm not saying it would be easy to enforce their reign. They're going to miss a lot going on that they wouldn't approve of. But at that point, they have merely become a nastier version of OFS and that had centuries of unrivalled hegemony with light cruisers and destroyers.

The future Alignment could stay on top by not permitting any interstellar alliances or nations to form or exist other than their empire. Instead of parking ten thousand superdreadnoughts in whatever their version of the Core is, they actively mount expeditions to squash anyone with the temerity to build an orbital shipyard.

The only potential flies in the ointment are other people's Dariuses(or Boltholes) becoming capable of overwhelming the Alignment's more conventional forces.

The Alignment being too clever for itself does seem to be an endemic problem. However, the Dettweilers, in their few and far between reflective moments, do appear to have realised the possibility; but its probably only them. The rest of the Onion may have a bit more trouble.

Afterall, they have grasped that some of their plans have become a little too complicated and have a bit too much built in possibility of failure. The irony that the Harringtons were supposed to be Mesan Sleeper Agents, and they just left them in sleep mode a bit too long, has been noticed.

Although, they may still be lacking in enough self-awareness to grasp all of the implications.