OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

@ThinksMarkedly

yes great discussion
I do realize my read on this is rather unique. I probably wouldn’t have entertained this idea to this degree had it not been for the fact, that AAC has a hell of a lot of issues and White Haven simply being not up to the task explains a lot.
If one day I can come up with a convincing reason for Kuzak not rolling pods, I’m a happy man as far as AAC in concerned. Well that and a reason for all the missing wallers.

Indeed we have no textev that there was a discussion with the Allies, but there's also zero textev that there wasn't. What we do know is that the cease-fire for the summit was discussed, as unilateral negotiation with Haven was the capital sin of High Ridge, so resumption of hostilities must have been too. But the latter is my extrapolation.

I think there simply wouldn’t have been time for consultations. Timeline is a bit tricky but the assassination attempt on Queen Berry and James Webster happened in April 1921.
Harrington attacked Lovat on May 15 1921. Allowing for transit times this means Eighth Fleet would deploy mere days after the news of the assassination attempts reached Manticore.
There’s no time to even inform the Allies at Yeltsin or Potsdam about the resumption of hostilities, let alone here back from them.

I guess they could have informed the ambassadors and the relevant Admirals present in the Manticore system, but I absolutely do not think that any of them would have any authority to oppose a decision made by the Manticoran head of state and de facto leader of the Manticoran Alliance. I think the distinction Harrington and Caparelli make between units available for Alliance duty and versus available fleet units overall is very telling in this regard. Manticore/the Queen/the RMN didn’t have authority over the entire Alliance wall of battle. Just over those units that were specifically detached for Alliance duty. But those units were committed without any reservation by their star nations.

Also, the absence of textev can be evidence in itself. If there were never ever any consultations depicted for Manticore to commit alliance units to operations, it’s likely they weren’t necessary. And while I may be wrong on this, the only instance I can remember offhand was in The Short Victorious War, when Manticore decided to try to get the approval of Grayson before committing to the scheme that let to the Third Battle of Yeltsin. And this was not about Manticore getting approval because they had to as to the terms of their Alliance or anything but a mere courtesy thing.

I do agree with you there. But that's knowing Theisman's mind. My argument is that the Alliance planners could not count on that. And by not trying to continue to deceive Theisman that they had more firepower than they actually did, they would be inviting such an attack before they were ready.

For argument's sake let’s assume this is true. What’s your take on the earliest possible point in time the Alliance should conceivably expect a decisive attack by Theisman as a worst case scenario?

My take is this – do you need to assume a decisive attack is imminent since you think Haven sabotage the summit and thus must have been preparing for an offensive all this time? If that’s the case you leave Eighth Fleet at Home because you need it to defend against a decapitating attack at Manticore in May 1921.

We know in actuality this thought never crossed minds. Maybe it should have, would have been logical if you believe Haven sabotaged the talks.

So say – second scenario – you don’t believe Theisman has already prepared a decisive attack during the failed summit talks. Maybe you’ve got even Intelligence reports that there are no major RHN fleet movements or something. Do you thus inform Theisman that the war is back on so that he can just go with it and implement his next attack plans? Of course not. You leave him hanging. If he decides to implement an attack plan, too bad, but your main goal is to count down the clock until August 1921 when Apollo is ready.

But say – third scenario - you inform him about your intentions of renewing active operations for some stupid reason.
Do you believe it’s in any way feasible to assume that then Theisman would attack at Manticore in say June or July, before Apollo is ready? I don’t see it. How would Manticore ever arrive at that conclusion? I mean even if you totally believe the Cutworm raids were the only reason for Theismans inaction since Thunderbolt, you still don’t make the jump from ‘maybe he’ll hit us worse than he did with Gobi’ to ‘he’ll throw 300 of the wall at Manticore A’.

But say you assume that Theisman will go for broke for some reason. What would you then make think that an attack on Lovat would deter him from doing so? He just committed 300 of the wall for an decisive attack. Another attack won’t change his mind, he is already all in. Why would only further incite him by basically demonstrating to him that this attack is his only hope of wining anyway? Wouldn’t make any sense.

So to repeat and sum up, three scenarios:
1) Theisman has prepared to attack during the summit talks -> you don’t attack at Lovat, you need Eighth Fleet to defend against the imminent attack
2) You don’t think Theisman was preparing an attack and thus you don’t inform him that the war is back on -> he very, very likely won’t attack but if he does it won’t be decisive (if it is -> scenario 1). Either way, he’ll just run down the clock and the window of vulnerability closes in August.
3) You inform Theisman of your intentions to renew active operations. You still don’t have any reason to expect a decisive attack. You still don’t need to attack to run down the clock.

And if he’s indeed committed to attacking you with 300 of the wall, an attack on Lovat won’t change his mind.

Under what circumstances would you then come to the conclusion that you need to attack at Lovat to deter Theisman from attacking? I just don’t see it. No scenario of Manticore's interpretation of Theismans strategic thinking leads us to a renewal of Sanskrit.

There’s always just two good arguments: You leave Eighth Fleet at home because you expect an attack or you leave Eighth Fleet at home because you don’t expect an attack and you’ll run down the clock anyway and further raids won’t change the equation.

There is no conceivable scenario that leads to attacking at Lovat and demonstrating to Theisman that there is a rapidly closing window of vulnerability and he’s toast unless he wins the war with a decapitation strike within two tmonths.

The sad truth is simply this: None of these considerations where on White Havens mind when the Queen pushed for military action and he offered her Sanskrit again. It’s a complete and utter failure as far as strategy is concerned and everything that followed that fateful day is on him. He was brilliant as an aggressive fleet commander, but he has no business playing Space Lord.

He wouldn't have violated the chain of command any more than he "could have flown without countergrav" (from his conversation with Pritchart). But coming up with Beatrice was his and his planners' doing, not an ask by Pritchart.

Not that it is particularly relevant but it was specifically asked by Pritchart. Pritchart actually did what the Queen should have done and ask Theisman to prepare a range of possible options, anything from another Gobi to and all-out attack. Theisman specifically says so in AAC:

"Beatrice is no slap in the face, Madam President," he said quietly. "Beatrice is an all-out bid for outright military victory. You said you wanted one end of your spectrum of options to be the most powerful one we could put together. Beatrice is it."

My take on Theisman in this conversation is that he’s extremely hesitant about Beatrice and really doesn’t want to do it if he can avoid it at all.

There are a lot of assumptions there. First, that an attack in April/May would have inflicted such inconsiderable losses that Theisman would have overlooked it. Theisman is not stupid, as he's often demonstrated. The fact that his wallers got blown up one after the other, once targeted, is just piling on what was obvious after the attack: Apollo missiles had incredibly much better accuracy than those without. The number of pods fired was not the issue. So the RHN would have noticed the strategic shift and adapted accordingly.
[…]

To your first point, you’re assuming an attack in February/March (Solon happened in November 1920) at Lovat would have looked like the actual battle. This isn’t the case. Eighth Fleet would have lacked Apollo pods to sustain an engagement against two trapping groups. They would have been forced to mix Apollo shots with regular missile strikes and the result would have been inconclusive.

The RHN would have obviously noticed a significant change in the effectiveness of Eighth Fleets missile barrage, but it’s inconceivable to assume that they jump from ‘oh crap, they are x percent more effective now’ to ‘oops, this is a weapon system that will blow us out of space no matter what’.

Also an assumption is not nearly as convincing as actually seeing it happen. You can always argue an intelligence estimate. Eighth Fleet blowing up two trapping forces without them getting a shot of is another matter entirely.
Note, I’m not arguing it wasn’t a bad call to test Apollo in an early Sanskrit. I’m arguing that outright revealing the full capability of Apollo in the later Sanskrit was way, way worse.

To your second point, I just don’t by the whole effectiveness argument at all. It has never made any sense. Everyone has sophisticated battle simulators and Manticore knows everything there is to know about the capabilities of the enemy. They know exactly what the missile defense of a Sovereign of Space SDP can and cannot do. There never, ever was an instance during the war were anyone run into a gross miscalculation that was not introduced by a previously unknown technology on the other side.

And no, it doesn’t make much sense just to assume that by some miracle, Haven has increased the defensive effectiveness of the podlayers tenfold and is somehow able to void Apollo before ever seeing it.

Also – the strategic calculation again is real simple. Apollo either works or it doesn’t. Say it doesn’t work – whether you find out when Eighth Fleet gets blown out of space at Lovat or when Theisman is attacking Manticore doesn’t matter at all. You’ve lost at that point anyway.

Star Knight wrote:I’m not ignoring anything. The original Sanskrit is just not very relevant to the discussion about the renewal of Sanskrit.

But a couple of points:
1) Yes, they always planned to test Apollo during Sanskrit. There’s a crucial different however between what they could have done originally and what they actually did when they launched Sanskrit after months of delay.
Eighth Fleet simply wouldn’t have had enough Apollo capable wallers and more importantely Apollo missile pods to copy the performance of the actual operation.

The difference isn't "didn't have enough" and "did have enough", it was in terms of margin. When Sanskrit was originally supposed to go, 8th Fleet had just barely enough Apollo pods/ships to make it work. Three(?) months later they had more ships and a buffer of additional pods. The operation was not possible without Apollo unless they'd brought half of 3rd Fleet with them.

This means the strategic impact wouldn’t have nearly been the same. The RHN would of course have noticed some missiles behaving in odd ways and be somewhat more effective and wondered about it, but since it wouldn’t have been possible to just blow one or even two trapping forces out of space with now casualties, the strategic impact would have been neglible no matter what.

That's pretty insulting to Thiesman's intelligence. ANY use of Apollo would have been enough to get the Havenites thinking, especially the survivors of the first war. They have to have some heightened awareness of potential technological tricks coming from Manticore, especially the survivors of Buttercup. That sort of new hardware would wave all sorts of red flags in their minds, a collective "Oh my God here we go again."

3) I dispute the idea that even the original Sanskrit was planned through the correct admiralty channels. Or to be more precise, I don’t think it was done in a constructive decision making environment. I’ve been over this before and won’t repeat every detail again, but neither Caparelli or Givens really have any choice in the matter. White Haven is driving the agenda, not them. They were very much forced to follow his lead and enact his orders, they were not at any point during the second war able to act independently from his meddling.
If you don’t agree with this admittedly pretty unique interpretation of the plot in AAC I don’t mind. I’m not here to convince you, I just want to offer an different take based on what I took from a plot designed to get from A to C no matter what.

For someone who isn't here to convince me, you hammer at the theory pretty hard. Past the point of reason, to be honest. Your theory would make a lot more sense if White Haven was a bungling idiot, but it really seems to be a stretch for someone who is regarded as one of the top naval strategists available. Even if he was interfering with operational planning more than he should (keeping in mind the only other wartime First Lord we've seen wasn't a naval officer at all), you seem to have assigned him the level of strategic sense we'd have expected from Janacek, which is in severe conflict with the rest of the series.

From your discussion with ThinksMarkedly:

I think there simply wouldn’t have been time for consultations. Timeline is a bit tricky but the assassination attempt on Queen Berry and James Webster happened in April 1921.
Harrington attacked Lovat on May 15 1921. Allowing for transit times this means Eighth Fleet would deploy mere days after the news of the assassination attempts reached Manticore.
There’s no time to even inform the Allies at Yeltsin or Potsdam about the resumption of hostilities, let alone here back from them.

Correct. It's incredibly difficult to wage a war by committee; far more so if you're also conducting discussions by snail mail.

I guess they could have informed the ambassadors and the relevant Admirals present in the Manticore system, but I absolutely do not think that any of them would have any authority to oppose a decision made by the Manticoran head of state and de facto leader of the Manticoran Alliance.

I think one of the benefits of having 8th Fleet's staff do much of the offensive planning for the war is that it got Grayson input into the planning stages in the only practical manner available. I suppose there are probably some Grayson and later Andermani officers assigned to the war college to contribute to overall strategic planning, but "consultations with allies" is going to by necessity be limited to those allies' representatives that happen to be physically located on Manticore. There's a reason ambassadors are Really Important People when they have the authority (and need) to be able to commit their nation to action without consulting the government that appointed them.

And while I may be wrong on this, the only instance I can remember offhand was in The Short Victorious War, when Manticore decided to try to get the approval of Grayson before committing to the scheme that let to the Third Battle of Yeltsin. And this was not about Manticore getting approval because they had to as to the terms of their Alliance or anything but a mere courtesy thing.

That wasn't a courtesy thing so much as a moral thing. There's a vast difference between committing a few of your ally's ships to offensive action and deliberately trying to draw the enemy into throwing an all-out attack into that ally's home (only) system. If it goes badly wrong, that ally could suffer catastrophic damage or even be knocked out of the war entirely. Manticore basically lured the Peeps into throwing the first-war equivalent of Beatrice at Yeltsin; that's a hell of an ask to give an ally unless you've discussed it with them first!

For argument's sake let’s assume this is true. What’s your take on the earliest possible point in time the Alliance should conceivably expect a decisive attack by Theisman as a worst case scenario?

My take is this – do you need to assume a decisive attack is imminent since you think Haven sabotage the summit and thus must have been preparing for an offensive all this time? If that’s the case you leave Eighth Fleet at Home because you need it to defend against a decapitating attack at Manticore in May 1921.

We know in actuality this thought never crossed minds. Maybe it should have, would have been logical if you believe Haven sabotaged the talks.

As soon as travel time allowed following Elizabeth's announcement of resuming hostilities. It was even addressed in text as such. I don't have time to dig out the text at the moment, but even Elizabeth addresses one of the selling points of Sanskrit being that 8th Fleet can do it and be back to Trevor's Star before Haven can react to her note announcing the resumption of hostilities. Sanskrit never really leaves Manticore uncovered since Haven can't know it's left on a strike in time to react to that absence, and can't know hostilities have resumed so they have no reason to be launching Beatrice preemptively, either.

And really, Beatrice goes in not long after that absolute earliest time possible. Just the time needed to hear about Lovat and activate Beatrice.

There is no conceivable scenario that leads to attacking at Lovat and demonstrating to Theisman that there is a rapidly closing window of vulnerability and he’s toast unless he wins the war with a decapitation strike within two tmonths.

The attack at Lovat was intended to convince Thiesman that the window has already closed. Any calculation that Haven has a chance is based on both the number of SDs and the relative effectiveness of them. Lovat was an attempt to convince Thiesman that his calculations of relative effectiveness were badly off - having three times as many SDs that are two-thirds as effective gives him a good chance of winning; having three times as many SDs that are only 10% as effective means he has no chance of winning.

Unfortunately it was mostly a bluff and Thiesman called them on it.

Can't say it enough, incredible discussion guys.

Please forgive the raised hand in the back of the class.

1. Was Beatrice possible w/o the ships squirreled away at Bolthole?

If not, then the Manticoran Admiralty made no wrong decisions.

2. Was Beatrice probable/likely w/o Bolthole? Then same conclusion. I can't see how the Admiralty could have, indeed should have based any strategy on an appreciation of ships they knew nothing about. That's an intelligence failure. Givens bailiwick.

@kzt,
In an exchange with me, RFC stated that you were still wrong about Chin. What was that about?

Also, seeing that AAC is being considered for the dead horses thread, then I'll assume RFC chimed in somewhere. What does he have to say about why Kuzak didn't roll pods, and the 35 SDs in the twilight zone?

Authors are like the police, never one around when you need them. LOL

I think David thinks I was criticizing Chin for not jumping out on time. I don’t remember that. Kuzak had obviously suffered a mental breakdown and you can critize the CO of home fleet too, though he made a smaller number of terrible decisions.

The Haven plan was not bad. The terrible editing of the terrible book that left out a few critical points, like the RHN Apollo range assumptions being way off, didn’t do the reader any favors.

kzt wrote:I think David thinks I was criticizing Chin for not jumping out on time. I don’t remember that. Kuzak had obviously suffered a mental breakdown and you can critize the CO of home fleet too, though he made a smaller number of terrible decisions.

The Haven plan was not bad. The terrible editing of the terrible book that left out a few critical points, like the RHN Apollo range assumptions being way off, didn’t do the reader any favors.

Thanks. I thought he just mixed the two up in his mind and really meant to say Kuzak. He was annoyed with me at the time. If indeed he meant to say that you were wrong about Kuzak, then the question becomes what did he have to say about Kuzak?

At any rate, I wondered why Chin didn't hyper the hell out as well, as I would imagine everyone did. Better safe than sorry. I thought that Chin could have easily hypered back in like Honor did herself in the Sol system.

Anyways, thanks.

n7axw wrote:Wow. Has this discussion ever been a case of 20-40 hindsight. The only thing that Manticore could have done to anticipate Haven's next move was on the basis of past behavior. Based on that there was no reason to anticipate Beatrice.

And every reason to think they couldn't. They didn't realize Haven was holding back, the observed tempo implied they didn't have the capability of something like Beatrice.

IIRC, the Queen's temper was the real problem. Had she continued to Torch instead of blowing her stack in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Berry, things could probably have been worked through, especially with cats present...

Yup, if there's anyone who fell down on the job it's her.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

n7axw wrote:Wow. Has this discussion ever been a case of 20-40 hindsight. The only thing that Manticore could have done to anticipate Haven's next move was on the basis of past behavior. Based on that there was no reason to anticipate Beatrice.

And every reason to think they couldn't. They didn't realize Haven was holding back, the observed tempo implied they didn't have the capability of something like Beatrice.

IIRC, the Queen's temper was the real problem. Had she continued to Torch instead of blowing her stack in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Berry, things could probably have been worked through, especially with cats present...

Yup, if there's anyone who fell down on the job it's her.

Hate to throw her under the bus because I love her to pieces, but I'm going to take one step back. Pat Givens was standing beside me. Didn't she take responsibility for the intelligence failure for Bolthole's success?

@chita
Manticore knew about Bolthole and their force level projections were accurate in AAC. So it’s an non-issue.

@ Galactic Sapper

The difference isn't "didn't have enough" and "did have enough", it was in terms of margin. When Sanskrit was originally supposed to go, 8th Fleet had just barely enough Apollo pods/ships to make it work. Three(?) months later they had more ships and a buffer of additional pods. The operation was not possible without Apollo unless they'd brought half of 3rd Fleet with them.

Depends on their estimation of the strength of the trapping forces. They would have had 18 SDPs in an early Sanskrit as well, just not many Apollo pods as you said. Eighth Fleet received no reinforcements between the early Sanskrit force levels and the later execution. Doesn’t make much sense and should likely have been changed in editing, but AAC.

Anyway at Solon the RMN Battle Division stood against an entire RHN Battle Squadron. Second Zanzibar had similar odds and a similar outcome until Tourville rearmed. It’s inconceivable the RHN could have engaged Eighth Fleet at Lovat at similar 3 to 1 odds or 50+ SDP in each trapping force.

Indeed this didn’t happen when Lovat was actually attacked months later. The actually trapping forces consisted of 16 SDPs in each bogey. Woefully inadequate to tackle Eighth Fleet.

So even if we assume that the original early Sanskrit would have seen a similar RHN strength, Eighth Fleet would have been able to attack each bogey independently and destroy them in detail with relative ease without Apollo.

That's pretty insulting to Thiesman's intelligence. ANY use of Apollo would have been enough to get the Havenites thinking, especially the survivors of the first war. They have to have some heightened awareness of potential technological tricks coming from Manticore, especially the survivors of Buttercup. That sort of new hardware would wave all sorts of red flags in their minds, a collective "Oh my God here we go again."

Hightened awareness or not, a few Apollo pods mixed in each salvo wouldn’t have let them to conclude a major paradigm shift was coming. A significant uptick in RMN missile effectiveness yes, but not that never before seen effectiveness of Apollo.

Even if we assume any of the trapping forces would have gotten away and they wouldn’t just have to rely on inner system sensor data.

For someone who isn't here to convince me, you hammer at the theory pretty hard. Past the point of reason, to be honest. Your theory would make a lot more sense if White Haven was a bungling idiot, but it really seems to be a stretch for someone who is regarded as one of the top naval strategists available. Even if he was interfering with operational planning more than he should (keeping in mind the only other wartime First Lord we've seen wasn't a naval officer at all), you seem to have assigned him the level of strategic sense we'd have expected from Janacek, which is in severe conflict with the rest of the series.

You seem unable to grasp the idea that while White Haven may be undoubtable be a very good field commander, this doesn’t necessarily make him suited for other duties. And while he may be regarded as a ‘top naval strategist’ based on his previous superior performance as a tactician this is simply not reflected in his actual record as First Lord. I frankly do not care what everyone who has spent worshipping him for the past decades thinks about his appointment, I look at his actual performance
This is not an outlandish thesis in fact it happens all the time in the real world. Just look up the Peter principle.
Or to pick a purely military comparison, as Lee discovered at Gettysburg after the death of Jackson at Chancellorsville, good division commanders don’t necessarily make good corps commanders. Different job description.

I think one of the benefits of having 8th Fleet's staff do much of the offensive planning for the war is that it got Grayson input into the planning stages in the only practical manner available. I suppose there are probably some Grayson and later Andermani officers assigned to the war college to contribute to overall strategic planning, but "consultations with allies" is going to by necessity be limited to those allies' representatives that happen to be physically located on Manticore. There's a reason ambassadors are Really Important People when they have the authority (and need) to be able to commit their nation to action without consulting the government that appointed them.

Well…
Commodore Brigham – Chief of Staff - RMN
Captain Jaruwalski – Operations Officer - RMN
Commander Reynolds – Intelligence Officer – RMN
There are no GSN or IAN officers in Eigth Fleets command staff. Nor are there any IAN officers anywhere in Eighth Fleet until after Sanskrit.
If you wanted to, you could seek the input of CO of Task Force 82, but at that point you could literally pick and lowly squadron CO and call it a day.
If you want to have input from foreign flag officers (and I’m not saying you wouldn’t) you simply put them on the strategy board.

That wasn't a courtesy thing so much as a moral thing. There's a vast difference between committing a few of your ally's ships to offensive action and deliberately trying to draw the enemy into throwing an all-out attack into that ally's home (only) system. If it goes badly wrong, that ally could suffer catastrophic damage or even be knocked out of the war entirely. Manticore basically lured the Peeps into throwing the first-war equivalent of Beatrice at Yeltsin; that's a hell of an ask to give an ally unless you've discussed it with them first!

Ok sure, moral thing. The point is they didn’t have to have their consent to do it. They had the authority to do it unilaterally, they just preferred to ask the Grayson anyway. Which of course was the right thing to do.

As soon as travel time allowed following Elizabeth's announcement of resuming hostilities. It was even addressed in text as such. I don't have time to dig out the text at the moment, but even Elizabeth addresses one of the selling points of Sanskrit being that 8th Fleet can do it and be back to Trevor's Star before Haven can react to her note announcing the resumption of hostilities. Sanskrit never really leaves Manticore uncovered since Haven can't know it's left on a strike in time to react to that absence, and can't know hostilities have resumed so they have no reason to be launching Beatrice preemptively, either.

Yes. But the discussion between ThinksMarkedly and me assumes that since Manticore thinks Haven sabotage the talks, they would have to also assume that Haven has already been preparing for their next move the entire time and would execute it no matter if and when Manticore tells them it’s on again.
In actuality, the Queen and White Haven assume that Haven has not prepared anything of the sort and would merely start preparing for an offensive after Manticore tells them to get going again. And this is why in their minds Eighth Fleet can make it back in time. If Haven can kick off right the minute the note makes it to the capital, Eighth Fleet would very likely not make it back in time.

And really, Beatrice goes in not long after that absolute earliest time possible. Just the time needed to hear about Lovat and activate Beatrice.

Not the earliest time possible if Theisman had prepared for it during the Summit talks, as Manticore would have had to assume if they indeed think Haven was responsible for sabotaging the talks.
But in actuality, if Theisman had been delayed for another four weeks he’d run into Apollo system defense ports and all would have been well. Thus it’s idiotic to not run down the clock and attack Lovat in May instead of waiting just another couple of weeks to be sure.
White Haven even proposed this for half a second during the fateful meeting with the Queen. But then argued against it because somehow a delay of just a couple of weeks could let to the situation the League changing the equation or somesuch nonsense.

The attack at Lovat was intended to convince Thiesman that the window has already closed. Any calculation that Haven has a chance is based on both the number of SDs and the relative effectiveness of them. Lovat was an attempt to convince Thiesman that his calculations of relative effectiveness were badly off - having three times as many SDs that are two-thirds as effective gives him a good chance of winning; having three times as many SDs that are only 10% as effective means he has no chance of winning.

Yes. Unfortunately for the RMN, Theisman has a working brain and figured out whats what in about two seconds flat. As would be expected from someone actually competent on his job.

Star Knight wrote:I think there simply wouldn’t have been time for consultations. Timeline is a bit tricky but the assassination attempt on Queen Berry and James Webster happened in April 1921.
Harrington attacked Lovat on May 15 1921. Allowing for transit times this means Eighth Fleet would deploy mere days after the news of the assassination attempts reached Manticore.
There’s no time to even inform the Allies at Yeltsin or Potsdam about the resumption of hostilities, let alone here back from them.

I guess they could have informed the ambassadors and the relevant Admirals present in the Manticore system, but I absolutely do not think that any of them would have any authority to oppose a decision made by the Manticoran head of state and de facto leader of the Manticoran Alliance. I think the distinction Harrington and Caparelli make between units available for Alliance duty and versus available fleet units overall is very telling in this regard. Manticore/the Queen/the RMN didn’t have authority over the entire Alliance wall of battle. Just over those units that were specifically detached for Alliance duty. But those units were committed without any reservation by their star nations.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I didn't mean consultation with Yeltsin or New Berlin on the operational aspects. That would have been a 5-week loop and completely unacceptable for running a war. I would maintain that the resumption of hostilities would have been at least advised, though probably they didn't wait for a reply since it would mean losing the strategic initiative.

The resumption of hostilities was probably agreed upon by the ambassadors in Landing. And the operational decisions were agreed with by the top admirals of the IAN and GSN. Specifically for the latter, that would have been Admiral Judah Yanakov, which was actually the CO of TF 82 that did participate in Lovat.

Whether any of them would have had the wherewithal to raise a concern is a different story. They were not stupid, though (Yanakov became High Admiral after Oyster Bay).

For argument's sake let’s assume this is true. What’s your take on the earliest possible point in time the Alliance should conceivably expect a decisive attack by Theisman as a worst case scenario?

There was actually some textev for this and I think it's even in the part you posted (sorry, it's late today). See also Galactic Supper's reply: they were expecting any attack in the MBS to take much longer than it actually took. My understanding was that the early attack was only possible because Theisman had been preparing for Beatrice as soon as the summit was cancelled, but Manticore did not consider that possible.

Which of course is quite stupid. If there was even a chance that the Havenites had sabotaged their own summit for their gains, it would stand to reason they had prepared to do something after that happened to obtain some advantage. Which was your argument:

My take is this – do you need to assume a decisive attack is imminent since you think Haven sabotage the summit and thus must have been preparing for an offensive all this time? If that’s the case you leave Eighth Fleet at Home because you need it to defend against a decapitating attack at Manticore in May 1921.

We know in actuality this thought never crossed minds. Maybe it should have, would have been logical if you believe Haven sabotaged the talks.

Indeed. So either we assume stupidity or that there was some other reason why they thought the attack couldn't have been this early. My new theory is that the Allies completely underestimated the capabilities of the RHN. After all, Theisman had been holding back and this never registered.

[I realise I'm grasping for straws to try and explain something that might not have occurred to David when writing, but that's the fun of the forum]

Do you believe it’s in any way feasible to assume that then Theisman would attack at Manticore in say June or July, before Apollo is ready? I don’t see it. How would Manticore ever arrive at that conclusion? I mean even if you totally believe the Cutworm raids were the only reason for Theismans inaction since Thunderbolt, you still don’t make the jump from ‘maybe he’ll hit us worse than he did with Gobi’ to ‘he’ll throw 300 of the wall at Manticore A’.

I would say that they were worried that he could do that. By keeping the RHN off-balance, defending their central worlds, they could not mass for an attack before the system defence pods are ready.

At the same time, showing off Apollo was supposed to make the Havenites think that the home systems were defended by Apollo, exactly like you're proposing they did. It was a bluff to make the RHN calculate they couldn't successfully attack any of the home systems. They would still fight one or two more battles, but not send 2 million spacers on a suicide mission.

The sad truth is simply this: None of these considerations where on White Havens mind when the Queen pushed for military action and he offered her Sanskrit again. It’s a complete and utter failure as far as strategy is concerned and everything that followed that fateful day is on him. He was brilliant as an aggressive fleet commander, but he has no business playing Space Lord.

And that might have happened. White Haven and the other admirals are humans and have their failings, biases and blind spots. As I said before, this is like a Black Swan: once it's happened, you can see how inevitable it was. But predicting it would happen is was too outlandish.

To your first point, you’re assuming an attack in February/March (Solon happened in November 1920) at Lovat would have looked like the actual battle. This isn’t the case. Eighth Fleet would have lacked Apollo pods to sustain an engagement against two trapping groups. They would have been forced to mix Apollo shots with regular missile strikes and the result would have been inconclusive.

No, I'm not assuming the unveiling of Apollo as early as February would have looked anything like it did in June. There would be no destroying of squadron after squadron of Soverign of Spaces. But there would have been sufficient evidence to make Theisman pause. It was, after all, the objective of unveiling Apollo.

Note, I’m not arguing it wasn’t a bad call to test Apollo in an early Sanskrit. I’m arguing that outright revealing the full capability of Apollo in the later Sanskrit was way, way worse.

And you may be right. We'll never know.

To your second point, I just don’t by the whole effectiveness argument at all. It has never made any sense. Everyone has sophisticated battle simulators and Manticore knows everything there is to know about the capabilities of the enemy. They know exactly what the missile defense of a Sovereign of Space SDP can and cannot do. There never, ever was an instance during the war were anyone run into a gross miscalculation that was not introduced by a previously unknown technology on the other side.

And no, it doesn’t make much sense just to assume that by some miracle, Haven has increased the defensive effectiveness of the podlayers tenfold and is somehow able to void Apollo before ever seeing it.

That's not what I meant. I meant that until you actually do it, you don't know if the Havenites won't accidentally stumble upon something you hadn't thought of. In real life, I work with software development and there's one saying we have, which is that the first thing your user will do upon getting your software is to try something you had not predicted and find a bug. It really did happen to me a few short months ago...

We also do know that when Eighth Fleet got to play with actual Apollos, not just simulators, they were finding innovative ways to use them (I think it's in your paste from the book). MDMs and LACs before them also did surprise and had better performance numbers than the designers had predicted. Ditto for the conflict with the SLN later: even with the data captured at New Tuscany, at the Battle of Spindle they allocated far more Apollo missiles per SD in Crandall's fleet than were actually necessary.

Also – the strategic calculation again is real simple. Apollo either works or it doesn’t. Say it doesn’t work – whether you find out when Eighth Fleet gets blown out of space at Lovat or when Theisman is attacking Manticore doesn’t matter at all. You’ve lost at that point anyway.

There are levels of "work". They might have calculated that there would be a markedly increase in efficiency and targetting, especially given information for follow-up waves of missiles that get fine-tuned by the mothership TAO to get past defences. We know from Hypatia that Kotouč's TAO was adjusting the missile waves after each successful attack based on the data from Ghost Rider. But that was adjusting with a one minute light lag, so any missiles closer to the enemy than 60 seconds of flight time would be unable to receive further adjustments.

And then they find out that the first two gross of pods fired blew two SD(P)s up with all handsd. "Oops"

cthia wrote:1. Was Beatrice possible w/o the ships squirreled away at Bolthole?

If not, then the Manticoran Admiralty made no wrong decisions.

2. Was Beatrice probable/likely w/o Bolthole? Then same conclusion. I can't see how the Admiralty could have, indeed should have based any strategy on an appreciation of ships they knew nothing about. That's an intelligence failure. Givens bailiwick.

No, it definitely was not possible without the ships from Bolthole. You've probably got a point that Manticore had no idea just how many ships the RHN had built at Bolthole. Before the BoMa, the RHN had something like 900 SDs, 600 of which were SD(P)s.

The intel couldn't be too far off, since you can't really hide 2 to 3 million spacers who have gone through your academies. But a "mere" 100 SD(P)s off makes a hell of a difference. And since they had no idea where Bolthole was, knowing its production rates and how many ships were being worked up there would be difficult.