http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/70/1I can tell you right now that the RMN is already thinking in terms of extending its nodal defensive posture and relying on relatively cheap weapons to deal with relatively minor threats. A mix of LACs, missile pods, light combatants, and quick-response nodal forces is going to be far more cost-effective for them than trying to station sufficient combat power to stand off task force-level attacks in every critical system. They cannot be strong everywhere, so they will opt for overwhelming strength in the areas where they must be strong and a flexible, counter-attack-based posture in other areas.
This sums up the very basic, fundamental concept of DW’s trade protection system. It is, of course, derivative. It’s the same as the Second British Empire’s trade protection concept 1862-1914. That’s not a bad thing, BTW, as it gives a solid and known basis to the concept. Note that the previous concept of picket forces is also derivative. It is analogous to the French ‘maritime garrison’ concept. Which they still use, BTW, if on reduced scale these days.
Now let’s drill down a little, and recall my previous comments about ‘relativity of threat perceptions’
Note this sentence:
the RMN is already thinking in terms of extending its nodal defensive posture and relying on relatively cheap weapons to deal with relatively minor threats.Notice, please, that the relatively minor threat is assessed as such ‘ to the RMN’. What is a minor threat in the eyes of the RMN
WILL NOT be so perceived in the eyes of the system involved. In their eyes it may range from serious to existential. An example: in the eyes of the Admiralty 1850-1870, the effect of a raid on the Colony of Victoria was a ‘relatively minor threat’. In the eyes of the Colony of Victoria, such a raid posed a serious to severe threat (remembering that their gold exports were enormous). The Admiralty response was that DW notes – they had a powerful fleet and in 1870 they sent a strong Flying Squadron to the Australasian Colonies. Which was welcomed by a strong, small local defence fleet built around a steam ship-of-the-line after passing through massive defences at the entrance to Port Phillip Bay.
Where did
that come from? Well, the British strategy was most certainly not enough for the Victorians as they assessed their threat differently and were willing to pony up a hell of a lot of money to back up their views, and between 1950 and 1870 they fortified Port Melbourne to first-class status, built a small local-defence Navy (including the steam ship-of-the-line HMVS
Nelson), and when the Flying Squadron arrived were in the process of accepting into service the most powerful ironclad coastal defence battleship in the world, HMVS
Cerberus.
The point of saying this is that irrespective of what the RMN and SEM might think, local governments will maintain their own SDF to meet THEIR assessments of threat. While this caused headaches for the RMN Admiralty and SEM government, it is also exactly what they want to happen -
these people are making a contribution to Imperial defence off their own bat. This is actually highly complementary to what DW says above in every sense. It allows for all sorts of experimentation in tech, ship types, SDF make-ups etc, and the plot device possibilities are endless.
In trade protection terms, it relieves a sizeable chunk of the fiscal burden on the Imperial government. In
Imperial terms it’s all upside. It allows each system to demonstrate its Imperial solidarity without exposing the RMN to what DW has rightly described as the lethally dangerous security threat inherent in regional access to their highest-tech systems and capabilities:
And there is another, far less altruistic reason to encourage civilian infrastructure growth as the means to jumpstart the economies of the Talbott Cluster and Silesia: security. For the foreseeable future, the security arrangements -- and I'm speaking here of "security" in the counter-intelligence sense, not in the sense of fighting off hostile fleets -- in the Cluster and in Silesia are going to be causing lots and lots of ulcers down to ONI's home offices. In Silesia, you're dealing with the leftovers of a crony capitalism kleptocracy. There are going to be a great many people who feel no special sense of loyalty to the Star Kingdom, and who see an opportunity to get richer than Croesus by flogging Manticoran military technology to the Sollies (or, while hostilities are still underway, to Haven, for that matter). The same problems are going to apply in Talbott, where people like Tonkovic and her fellow oligarchs are going to see the same opportunities and face the same temptations. It's certainly fair to argue that there are people in the "Old Star Kingdom" who are as inherently dishonest as anyone in Talbott or Silesia. However, that overlooks the fact that both Talbott and Silesia are new to the Manticoran system, without the institutional framework of long-standing loyalty and patriotism and, at least as importantly, without the same degree of penetration and coverage by Manticoran security personnel and agencies who are intimately familiar with the players in the societies in question. Before the Star Kingdom can feel confident in its security in these newly acquired star systems, it's going to have to fully integrate the existing intelligence agencies in those star systems with its own pre-existing intelligence and security services. Until that happens, it would be criminally negligent for them to be building highly sensitive hardware in those areas.
(See:
http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... ngton/46/1)
The ‘classic’ shape for such local forces when fully developed (which takes a long time) is a small number of modern second class capital ships, after transitioning via a ‘light local coast defence force and coastal defences’ to that plus obsolescent former capital ships of the Imperial power (guess where Victoria got HMVS
Nelson from) to a modern trade protection force based on locally produced vessels plus imported ones, usually a bit behind the Imperial Navy’s current best, but not that far behind. Less ‘trustworthy’ systems will not put that sort of effort in (Silesian systems, untrustworthy TQ systems etc). This building of trust proceeds in the way DW says above, he’s obviously done some study of Imperial dynamics, and yes it takes a long time because it depends on funded ACTIONS, not words.
Now, all of this is not to say that the navies of the Honorverse won't eventually build something which might once have been classified as a "fast battleship." If they do so, however, it's going to be because of "bracket creep" and changes in the minimum platform size to continue to fill existing tactical niches. What is much more likely to happen than for anyone to design a "battleship" which anyone but a lunatic would take into action against true wallers is that someone (like, he said innocently, the RMN) will design a "battlecruiser" whose size will fall well into the tonnage range of a relatively small battleship as of the time of The Short Victorious War. This ship, however, will not be intended to engage, hold off, or deter "proper" ships of the wall. It will be intended to do precisely what battlecruisers have always done under Manticoran doctrine: kill cruisers, protect/raid commerce, carry out deep-penetration raids on deep-space industry, etc.. If they have absolutely no choice but to engage ships of the wall, they will be far more capable in that role than smaller, older battlecruisers might have been, but that doesn't mean that it will ever be a Good Idea. If the RMN builds such ships it will scale battlecruisers up rather than scaling superdreadnoughts down. Either way, the traditional "battleship" as a sort of intermediate step between cruisers and wallers will almost certainly disappear from the design philosophies of all "deep-space" navies. It's quite possible that something in that range will continue to be built by second-and third-rate navies as the equivalent of a "coastal defense battleship," but no one with pretensions to power projection or with large areas (and the resources to match) to protect will use such vessels.
This is precisely the form of second class modern capital ship SDF’s will aspire to. They are thoroughly useful ships for a trade protection/local defence force. Most important is their deterrence effect. If System X is known to have a modern little pocket navy which includes a pair of these ‘fast battleships’ on top of the local ‘coast defences’ and light forces then the raiding group has to be so big as to make the game not worth the candle. It's no longer a cheap option against that level of local naval force.
This was the basis of Australian strategic assessment from 1887 onwards, and it worked because it was backed up by a strategic response capability of the Imperial Navy as well. In this case, that’s represented by the ‘nodal RMN forces’.
It then gets very interesting from the Imperial Navy perspective. A SDF which has developed this level of capability – and only the best of them will – has just proven that it’s a fully trustworthy strategic partner AND it has solved the security problems mentioned above.
Even better, it has ship types and capabilities the Imperial Navy will never develop as they are niche capabilities built to meet local perceptions of threat. A modern SDF with this ‘modern fast BB’ capability is also a very capable deep raiding force itself, able to shatter (say) SLN picket forces and escort forces composed of elderly BC and CA. I am not saying that the RMN will use such SDF in that manner, but it is a strategic option and it’s an immensely powerful internal political message inside the Empire. Of course, they have to replace the SDF in its local defence role should it be off a-viking, but a visit by a Flying Squadron with a couple of older capital ship types can easily do that, and again that’s a powerful message in terms of intra-Imperial politics.
Such an option might not be worth it from the RMN military outcomes perspective, but might be so attractive politically in terms of intra-Imperial politics that it's actually a no-brainer. If (say), the Rembrandt SDF was able to do that after X years of development inside the Empire
on their own shilling, then it's a no-brainer to approve a Rembrandt SDF Squadron of the RMN raid because of the impact that will have on the other TQ governments. They will ALL want to work towards the local status the Rembrandt government just obtained.
Well, that’s my 30 minutes again. More later.
(BTW I am not entirely convinced by Nick Lambert’s argument in his
Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War)
Cheers: mark
