HH09: Why did the Queen not...

Theemile wrote:And he gathered like minded individuals around him who threw out data that didn't fit that picture.

So Janacheck wasn't incompetent or inept - he was just a creature from another time with a mindset to match.

That's still incompetence. The buck stops with him and his underlings are throwing out data to support a foregone conclusion, it's his fault for appointing them in the first place. Their misdeed is worse, of course, but he's not blameless.

Theemile wrote:When HoS came out, I posted about Janacheck's (Then a Sr Captain) rebuttal to Roger Winton's paper on what a future navy should look like and what the RMN's future responsibilities should be. I spoke of Janacheck's gall at picking apart what essentially was his future monarch's position paper spelling out what that future monarch wanted HIS future Navy to look like and do.

MWW countered me, saying that Janacheck's response was seem by Janacheck and many of his Sr. contemporaries as guidance given by a wise, influential sr. officer to a young jr. officer (who everyone knew one day will be influential) as to the true nature of the universe and the RMN's place in it. The Rebuttal was education for a sheep who was straying off the true path - a sheep who they wanted to reform into their image.

And more than anything that is the problem with Janacheck - He, and his attitudes, were formed in a different era with different dangers and requirements. Haven was a distant issue, that was always someone else's problem for most of Janacheck's career. In his mind, Roger poked the Bear by building a powerful expeditionary navy and brought that Bear to Manticore's doorstep, not the other way around - and somehow never got past that idea. Janacheck wanted to return to the time of protecting the Wormhole with forts, having a small non-expeditionary wall to protect Manticore, and having thousands of small presence units protecting the merchant marine. And sadly, he never realized that the universe had changed, and the old solutions didn't protect against the dangers in the new realities.

In other words, Janacek was incompetent. So were his fellow senior contemporaries.

Both back when he was trying to "educate" the future King and at the end of his career when his policies and decisions would have clearly cost Manticore not only Trevor's Star in addition to Grendelsbane but Sidemore Station as well.

You should have stuck to your guns. It's not as if MWW hasn't called Janacek stupid in the narrative, as well as by various other characters, lol.

So post war, with the Havenite bear doing it's thing way over there, Janacheck was given his wish by High Ridge to go back to status quo, to trim back Roger's dangerous expensive wall, and return to the old patroling days with units that were not seem as expansionist while further forting up. And he gathered like minded individuals around him who threw out data that didn't fit that picture.

Nothing demonstrates Janacek's inability to learn more than the way he tried to drag the RMN back to the mid-1800s, almost as if he wanted to prove he had been right all along about that silly "don't poke the Havenite bear" theory. Nor did he gain any understanding that a realistic threat to the security of the Manticoran system could appear with very little strategic warning - this is particularly egregious as he was the First Lord of the Admiralty during the Basilisk incident, which specifically exploited Janacek's own Basilisk policies in an attempt to seize Manticoran territory.

munroburton wrote:

Theemile wrote:When HoS came out, I posted about Janacheck's (Then a Sr Captain) rebuttal to Roger Winton's paper on what a future navy should look like and what the RMN's future responsibilities should be. I spoke of Janacheck's gall at picking apart what essentially was his future monarch's position paper spelling out what that future monarch wanted HIS future Navy to look like and do.

MWW countered me, saying that Janacheck's response was seem by Janacheck and many of his Sr. contemporaries as guidance given by a wise, influential sr. officer to a young jr. officer (who everyone knew one day will be influential) as to the true nature of the universe and the RMN's place in it. The Rebuttal was education for a sheep who was straying off the true path - a sheep who they wanted to reform into their image.

And more than anything that is the problem with Janacheck - He, and his attitudes, were formed in a different era with different dangers and requirements. Haven was a distant issue, that was always someone else's problem for most of Janacheck's career. In his mind, Roger poked the Bear by building a powerful expeditionary navy and brought that Bear to Manticore's doorstep, not the other way around - and somehow never got past that idea. Janacheck wanted to return to the time of protecting the Wormhole with forts, having a small non-expeditionary wall to protect Manticore, and having thousands of small presence units protecting the merchant marine. And sadly, he never realized that the universe had changed, and the old solutions didn't protect against the dangers in the new realities.

In other words, Janacek was incompetent. So were his fellow senior contemporaries.

Both back when he was trying to "educate" the future King and at the end of his career when his policies and decisions would have clearly cost Manticore not only Trevor's Star in addition to Grendelsbane but Sidemore Station as well.

You should have stuck to your guns. It's not as if MWW hasn't called Janacek stupid in the narrative, as well as by various other characters, lol.

So post war, with the Havenite bear doing it's thing way over there, Janacheck was given his wish by High Ridge to go back to status quo, to trim back Roger's dangerous expensive wall, and return to the old patroling days with units that were not seem as expansionist while further forting up. And he gathered like minded individuals around him who threw out data that didn't fit that picture.

Nothing demonstrates Janacek's inability to learn more than the way he tried to drag the RMN back to the mid-1800s, almost as if he wanted to prove he had been right all along about that silly "don't poke the Havenite bear" theory. Nor did he gain any understanding that a realistic threat to the security of the Manticoran system could appear with very little strategic warning - this is particularly egregious as he was the First Lord of the Admiralty during the Basilisk incident, which specifically exploited Janacek's own Basilisk policies in an attempt to seize Manticoran territory.

I completely agree - I still would not call him incompetent - He performed the administrative job as 1st Space lord well. Did his blinders cause a massive FUBAR - oh Hell, yes. Unfortunately, every leader eventually becomes entrenched in the ways of the past; their leadership can be competent - but just wrong for the current environment they are in.

Was Janacheck in the wrong place with attitudes of a past reality and refused to see change = yes. Was he a political animal whose politics did not align with his Monarch's - again emphatically yes. Was it because he was stupid or overly malicious - no.

He let his worldview get in the way of reality - the way many older members of societies do.

More important, he was surrounded by powerful people who felt (or claimed to feel) the same way, and was given the job with the expectation that he would drive the RMN back to the old reality, and forget the aberration of Roger's fight with Haven - we won, that period is over, return us back to status quo.

Theemile wrote:More important, he was surrounded by powerful people who felt (or claimed to feel) the same way, and was given the job with the expectation that he would drive the RMN back to the old reality, and forget the aberration of Roger's fight with Haven - we won, that period is over, return us back to status quo.

And he'd be mostly right, if High Ridge had negotiated in good faith with Haven to actually sign the peace treaty. Haven wasn't interested in expansion any more. The fact that he supported the policies of that corrupt government is a big flaw. As First Space Lord, he was a politician in addition to being the empire's main strategian, so he couldn't claim he was only serving the civilian powers. He also let it be known to his people, in particular to Adm. Jurgen, what those policies were.

It would have put Manticore at a much weaker position once the Alignment came calling and the League started making threatening moves, but no one could have seen that coming. Though it's also possible that, if there had been a peace treaty, then the Alignment might have not seen the Talbott Sector expansion as a threatening and turned back to its original plan of pitting Haven against the League. I doubt it, though.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
It would have put Manticore at a much weaker position once the Alignment came calling and the League started making threatening moves, but no one could have seen that coming. Though it's also possible that, if there had been a peace treaty, then the Alignment might have not seen the Talbott Sector expansion as a threatening and turned back to its original plan of pitting Haven against the League. I doubt it, though.

The Detweilers were as prone to latch onto an idee fixé as Janacheck or the League. Especially when the RMN started preventing and even reversing their shenanigans in the outer reaches of the Talbot Cluster and elsewhere in the fringe. Wrecking personal vengeance on Elizabeth, Honor, Hamish and Benjamin seemed to become the principal driver of their actions.

Fox2! wrote:The Detweilers were as prone to latch onto an idee fixé as Janacheck or the League. Especially when the RMN started preventing and even reversing their shenanigans in the outer reaches of the Talbot Cluster and elsewhere in the fringe. Wrecking personal vengeance on Elizabeth, Honor, Hamish and Benjamin seemed to become the principal driver of their actions.

Yes, but some of those wouldn't have happened if...

They have lot of other fish to fry.

Truthfully the story would have been more interesting for the last few books if they had pulled off the attack on the fort under construction.

A thought just occurred to me. We have been privileged to see true genius in consistent serial writing. However in the best tradition of 20/20 rearward vision, I bet that some writer in the coming century will rewrite an optimised Honorverse. Won't be here to see it unfortunately.

kzt wrote:

Fox2! wrote:The Detweilers were as prone to latch onto an idee fixé as Janacheck or the League. Especially when the RMN started preventing and even reversing their shenanigans in the outer reaches of the Talbot Cluster and elsewhere in the fringe. Wrecking personal vengeance on Elizabeth, Honor, Hamish and Benjamin seemed to become the principal driver of their actions.

Yes, but some of those wouldn't have happened if...

They have lot of other fish to fry.

Truthfully the story would have been more interesting for the last few books if they had pulled off the attack on the fort under construction.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:More important, he was surrounded by powerful people who felt (or claimed to feel) the same way, and was given the job with the expectation that he would drive the RMN back to the old reality, and forget the aberration of Roger's fight with Haven - we won, that period is over, return us back to status quo.

And he'd be mostly right, if High Ridge had negotiated in good faith with Haven to actually sign the peace treaty. Haven wasn't interested in expansion any more. The fact that he supported the policies of that corrupt government is a big flaw. As First Space Lord, he was a politician in addition to being the empire's main strategian, so he couldn't claim he was only serving the civilian powers. He also let it be known to his people, in particular to Adm. Jurgen, what those policies were.

It would have put Manticore at a much weaker position once the Alignment came calling and the League started making threatening moves, but no one could have seen that coming. Though it's also possible that, if there had been a peace treaty, then the Alignment might have not seen the Talbott Sector expansion as a threatening and turned back to its original plan of pitting Haven against the League. I doubt it, though.

Eh - even though Haven was perfectly willing to stop being a threat and abide by any reasonable peace treaty Janacek was still in the position of basically deliberately keeping a lot of now clearly obsolete ships in service (all those pre-pod SDs and DNs) - which is unfair to their crews.

Yes, he could have rationalized slowing the conversion to SD(P)s somewhat; rather than continuing at expensive war emergency build rates. And yes some level of defense review could have been done to work out the size of Wall Manticore needed in a post-war environment. But he didn't; he simply froze construction for years as a cost saving measure. Leaving the majority of the navy's personnel on ship no longer capable of facing a peer opponent -- jus because he wish really really hard that no opponent with peer technology would emerge.

Yet he wasn't willing to claim that the SD(P)s that Manticore already had were all the wallers the RMN needed. He'd have been wrong - but it would at least have been a logically consistent course and one that didn't trap a majority of the navy's frontline personnel in ships unable to stand up to a modern fight. But mothballing or scrapping those obsolete wallers would require a major fight in Lord and making the case to the public, over the cries of the Opposition, that the navy no longer needed to be so large -- that it didn't need to cover so many places at once (that it no longer needed to honor it's commitments to Manticore's allies). And he wasn't willing to stand up and make that case.

He took the cowardly route of simply maintaining the status quo -- trying to obfuscate things, depending on the audience he was addressing that day, by claiming Manticore had a large enough navy (while glossing over how much was obsolete) or that Manticore had the most modern navy, with the most powerful ships, (while glossing over how few of those there were) all while leaving much of that navy at risk.

But he wasn't arguing for any particular naval policy. He was, as far as we can tell, interested only in justifying the diversion of as much of the war emergency revenue from the navy to High Ridge's domestic agenda -- not in providing for the good of the navy or its personnel; even as he saw that good.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
It would have put Manticore at a much weaker position once the Alignment came calling and the League started making threatening moves, but no one could have seen that coming. Though it's also possible that, if there had been a peace treaty, then the Alignment might have not seen the Talbott Sector expansion as a threatening and turned back to its original plan of pitting Haven against the League. I doubt it, though.

Let's not forget, No one saw the Alignment coming. It was thoroughly off everyone's radars. So, when designing the "future RMN", the alignment - and the possibility of it's mere existence
- was off the table.

Would they have been prepared? no, but how could they know to be? Governments are always under financial stress, and budget lines need to be drawn somewhere. You can't plan for all possibilities, only the probable ones. If anybody writes a line item of "Preparedness against unknown supermen from the stars bent on enslaving us all" it's going to get nixed.

Jonathan_S wrote:
But he wasn't arguing for any particular naval policy. He was, as far as we can tell, interested only in justifying the diversion of as much of the war emergency revenue from the navy to High Ridge's domestic agenda -- not in providing for the good of the navy or its personnel; even as he saw that good.

Actually, No - in WoH, we saw Janacheck fight to divest the DNs and older SDs from the Fleet, while saying they were deathtraps, and the RMN no longer needed them - and was seen trying to spin off the alliance commitments. (The majority of this was off scene. we learned more from David's info dumps on the forums about how the alliance members were handled, and what we saw in the books was Honor and Hamish's attempts to fight Janacheck's efforts in the Lords to spin the older ships (and alliance commitments) off his shoulders.)

In addition to retiring the DNs and selling the surviving King Rodgers, Victories, and the Andurils, David let us know there was a failed effort to upgrade the Gryphons with MDMs - only to find this was way too expensive and time consuming for the outcome. (giving us an unknown # of MDM Tube SDs for the 2nd war).

In addition, every lighter unit older than ~1885 was retired and new units planned. Expensive, modern forts were built - freeing mobile fleets from protecting termini and defensive locations like Basilisk.

So there was an effort to focus the fleet on survivable units, (come-on - who in PD1917 has a ship that can compete with an MDM armed Gryphon!) and remove fleet tasking as much as possible, while tossing out lighter units that clearly were kept around too long and were no longer survivable, with a plan to start replacing them (slowly) with designs that were cutting edge.