Strategic Goals
The Strategic Assumptions phase defines both the need and the resources available; in the Strategic Goals phase, those two ideas are brought together to define the strategic outcome the navy is attempting to achieve, and the role the fleet has in the larger strategic picture.
The Royal Manticoran Navy’s strategic goals and responsibilities, as of 1900 PD, in order of priority, were defined as:
1. The defense and security of the Manticore Binary System, its planets, its population, and its industrial base.
2. The defense and security of the central terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction and the industrial and economic base associated with it.
3. The protection and security of the secondary termini of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction.
4. The protection and security of Manticoran commerce and the Manticoran merchant marine.
5. In conjunction with 4, the enforcement of the Cherwell Convention for the suppression of the interstellar genetic slave trade.
Although the Navy’s strategic requirements had been defined as above for more than three centuries, actual emphasis for many years had been much more focused on the fourth goal than any of the three responsibilities that preceded it. In large part that was because, during that period, no realistic threat to the Manticore Binary System itself, to the Junction, or to the Junction’s secondary termini seemed to exist. This had freed the Navy to concentrate on the commerce protection/anti-piracy portion of its mission, and it was uncompromisingly oriented in that direction at least until the middle of the reign of Queen Samantha II (1802–1857 PD). By the end of King Roger III’s reign (1857–1883), a fundamental realignment of naval policy and emphasis had occurred in response to the threat of the steadily expanding PRH and Roger’s personal leadership in face of that threat. The RMN’s wall of battle had been significantly augmented, commerce protection had been downgraded in importance to match the Royal Navy’s longstanding official strategic hierarchy, and operational doctrine and training had been uncompromisingly reoriented to emphasize realistic (and rigorous) training for fleet actions and combat tactics. During that same period, a major R&D effort was put in place as part of a consciously designed RMN policy of offsetting its numerical weakness vis-à-vis the People’s Navy with a qualitative superiority in weapons technology and training.
Fleet Missions
The first step, Strategic Goals, defined the navy’s role writ large; this second step defines the navy’s role vis-à-vis other services, and in general terms what the fleet does in support of its missions. In this step, there are three sub-steps.
SERVICE ROLES AND MISSIONS
The first is Service Roles and Missions. What services exist, and which parts of the larger strategic puzzle are allocated to each service? What type of mission does each service consider a core capability? Note that these roles do not have to be rigid. The US Marine Corps entered World War II, for instance, with a heavy service emphasis on conducting amphibious landings, but the US Army conducted plenty of amphibious landings, too, even in the Pacific where the Marines were concentrated.
In the case of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the Navy is unquestionably the senior military service. Both the Royal Manticoran Marine Corps and the Royal Manticoran Army come under Navy jurisdiction and control in war time, and the RMMC is placed directly under the operational control of the First Space Lord in peacetime, as well.
The Navy is tasked to provide combat, support, and logistic functions for its own operations and for those of the Marines and/or Army when operating outside the Manticore Binary System. For this purpose, the Navy has established a small number of official “fleet stations” outside the Star Kingdom itself (usually in areas where it is conducting sustained commerce protection operations or there is a perceived need to support an allied star nation’s security and a permanent, forward deployed presence seems necessary).
Prior to the year 1890 PD, the RMN’s entire wall of battle was organized into “Home Fleet,” which remained in the Manticore Binary System, positioned to defend the system and its planets or the Junction against any aggressor. Lighter units were more often assigned to fleet stations to project power and presence into areas of particular importance to the Star Kingdom’s commercial posture. In addition, a very significant portion of the RMN’s cruisers and destroyers were routinely assigned to convoy protection and piracy suppression missions, especially within the Silesian Confederacy. By 1900–1905, as the situation vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of Haven worsened and as the collective security system known as the “Manticoran Alliance” grew, individual squadrons or even small task forces of capital ships came to be assigned to the more significant fleet stations, many of which were by then being organized as strategic nodes within the Manticoran Alliance rather than primarily as trade protection nodes.
The Royal Manticoran Marine Corps is a flexible organization whose members are crosstrained to perform integral functions aboard the warships to which their detachments are assigned. Marines man weapons systems, perform damage control functions, provide the ship’s security and boarding detachments, constitute an organic landing force capability, and are often deployed on humanitarian missions in the face of natural or man-made disaster. In addition, the Royal Marines are the primary offensive planetary combat arm of the Star Kingdom, operating in up to brigade strength from specially designed transports and assault ships at need. Such expeditionary forces (prior to 1905, at least) were seldom required, and the SKM maintained sufficient assault vessels to mount no more than three brigade-level expeditions simultaneously. With the outbreak of open hostilities against the People’s Republic, the RMMC underwent significant expansion, but generally continued to operate only in brigade-level strength or below. The Royal Navy is responsible for the Marines’ transport, logistics, landing craft, and fire support.
The Royal Manticoran Army as of 1900 PD was primarily a domestic security force. The term “Army” represented something of a misnomer, in that the Army was a unified service responsible for all planetary combat—that is, for atmospheric and maritime combat, as well as land combat. The Navy was tasked to provide space-to-surface fire support and landing capability as and when the Army required it, but there was no great expectation that naval support would be required, and joint operational doctrine remained woefully underdeveloped in that regard. With the outbreak of hostilities between the Manticoran Alliance and the People’s Republic of Haven, the RMA began a steady, relatively rapid expansion, as it was tasked to provide planetary garrisons for Havenite systems as they were occupied and to provide security forces for Allied planets whose own infrastructure limitations prevented them from raising and equipping modern planetary combat forces of their own.
FLEET CONOPS
The second sub-step is Fleet Concept of Operations, or CONOPS. In general, what do you envision the fleet doing? When and where will the fleet execute the missions defined in the last step? Will the fleet fight near home, or will it fight in enemy territory? Is it offensive in orientation, or defensive?
Prior to the Havenite Wars, as the conflict between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People’s Republic came to be known, no one had fought a major interstellar war in over three hundred years, and war-fighting doctrine was sadly underdeveloped. The People’s Navy, the senior armed force of the People’s Republic of Haven, had more combat experience in 1900 PD than any other navy, including the Solarian League Navy, in the explored galaxy. Virtually all of that experience, however, had been gained against relatively small, single-system star nations, none of whom had been able to build a navy capable of mounting a sustained or serious resistance to the People’s Navy.
In general terms, the Solarian League Navy, because of its preeminent status, was taken (remarkably uncritically) as the doctrinal and operational model for the rest of the galaxy. The fact that no one else in the galaxy had the sheer size, industrial capacity, and manpower of the SLN was, apparently, lost on most independent navies of the time. SLN doctrine called for a remorseless, unstoppable, system-by-system advance towards the home star system of any opponent. It was an attritional strategy, designed to compel the enemy to confront the Solarian wall of battle by threatening objectives which had to be defended, creating a series of engagements in which superior Solarian numbers and (in theory, at least) war-fighting technology would grind the opposing fleet into dust. This was a doctrine that emphasized steady, incremental advances, destroying and/or occupying enemy fleet bases and star systems, rather than any sort of misdirection or deep-strike missions.
The possibility of such deep strikes always existed, however, particularly in the case of star nations that had only a single system to lose. That described the Star Kingdom of Manticore quite well, and that threat had to be defended against. As a consequence, Manticoran strategic doctrine emphasized the absolute necessity of maintaining sufficient strength in Home Fleet to protect the Manticore Binary System and Wormhole Junction against attack. Offensive operations could be carried out only with that portion of the Navy available after the home star system’s security and essential infrastructure had been provided for. Within that limitation, the RMN’s strategists sought persistently to take the offensive against the People’s Republic, although always with an eye towards their own forces’ lines of supply and rear area security.
The People’s Republic of Haven’s strategic doctrine mirrored that of the Solarian League Navy, and it had worked well for the People’s Navy prior to its collision with the Star Kingdom of Manticore. The technological capabilities of the Royal Manticoran Navy came as a very unpleasant surprise to the People’s Navy, but even more significant in the early stages of the Havenite Wars was the revolution organized against the Legislaturalist regime by Robert Stanton Pierre and his followers. Dismayed by its losses in the opening engagements against Manticore, the People’s Navy’s officer corps found itself under attack domestically, as well, and the Pierre Purges, ruthlessly carried out by Pierre’s Committee of Public safety, cost the PN an enormous percentage of its senior officers. That loss of operational experience, coupled with rigid political oversight by “People’s Commissioners” with little or no naval experience of their own, greatly inhibited Havenite operational flexibility. Unconstrained by such rigid political control and without such grievous, self-inflicted losses among its officer corps, the RMN enjoyed a much steeper learning curve during the first several years of the Havenite Wars. Coupled with a steadily increasing technological edge, the Manticoran concept of operations became far more sophisticated than that of the People’s Navy, with significant consequences for the People’s Republic.
In particular, Manticoran strategic thinking evolved steadily away from the incremental, predictable, step-by-step advance prescribed by Havenite (and Solarian) doctrine in favor of deep strikes, well behind the enemy’s front lines, to destroy his warmaking infrastructure and to engage his system defense forces in isolation from his main battle fleet, defeating them in detail and inflicting a steady stream of attritional losses. It was, in fact, in many ways an elaboration and further development of the original concept that both Manticore and Haven had borrowed from the Solarian League.
FLEET POSTURE
The final sub-step under Fleet Missions is the Fleet Posture. Is the fleet forward deployed or based outside of the home system(s)? Is it garrison-based, i.e., homeported in the home system(s)? Does it conduct frequent deployments or patrols, or does it largely stay near home space and only go out for training? Pre-World War II, for instance, the US Navy was garrison based; until right before the start of the war, the battlefleet was homeported in the continental US. It spent a lot of time training at sea (garrison-based does not imply inactive), but generally the fleet stayed close to US territory, and the trips were generally short. Post-World War II, in contrast, the US adopted a policy of forward deploying some forces in overseas ports, and extended deployments in areas the US considered critical. Fleet Posture is not where the fleet units are based—that step is yet to come—but how it is based and how forward-leaning it is.
Manticoran strategic doctrine was considerably more sophis-ticated than its Solarian and Havenite antecedents, and in many ways it turned the Star Kingdom’s single-system vulnerability into a relative advantage. Prior to the First Haven War, the Star Kingdom had only two absolutely critical targets to protect: the Manticore Wormhole Junction and the Manticore Binary System itself. Even after active conflict began, Manticore had far fewer such vital defensive requirements, with the exception of two or three critical systems which were to be taken along the way, such as Trevor’s Star. That meant it could deploy a larger percentage of its smaller fleet to adequately meet its rear area defensive needs.
Because of the nature of hyper travel, “rear areas” in the classic sense of a zone protected from attack by a “front line” did not truly exist, of course, since attacking forces could readily evade detection or interception on their way to their targets. Instead, “rear-area” targets were defined as those objectives far enough behind the volume of active operations as to take some time for strike forces to reach and sufficiently important for industrial, logistic, or economic reasons to be worth reaching and attacking in the first place. The far larger People’s Republic had many more such vulnerable points, and providing adequate security for its vital areas drew off a far greater proportion of its fleet strength. Not only that, but it was literally impossible for the People’s Navy to provide strong enough system defense forces everywhere to prevent the RMN from amassing crushing numerical superiority at points of its choice, resulting in a steady, grinding flow of Havenite losses.
Fleet Design
In the preceding steps, the environment has been described and the fleet’s general role in that environment has been defined. We’ve also fleshed out the missions of the fleet, including where it is based and where it expects to fight. To this point, though, we have only talked about fleets. Now we start to discuss the ships that make up the fleet.
FLEET CAPABILITIES, SIZE, AND MIX
The military (both uniformed and civilian analysts) often talk about both capability (what you can do) and capacity (how much you can do). So, Fleet Capabilities are the tasks that the fleet can do, as embodied in its platforms. Modern US Aegis ships, for instance, can provide area-wide air defense against air and missile threats. Most can embark helicopters and conduct operations against enemy submarines and other surface vessels as well. Fleet Size is the total number of ships in the fleet. Fleet Mix describes how many of each different type of ship. Between Fleet Capabilities, Fleet Size, and Fleet Mix, the capabilities and capacity of the overall fleet have been explained.
Prior to the end of the nineteenth century PD, the evolution of warship types and functions had been remarkably stable (see above), and had generally sorted itself into the following ship types, from largest to smallest.
The ship of the wall, usually a superdreadnought massing between seven and eight million tons, was essentially an energy weapons platform. It was designed and armored to bring its energy batteries into range of an opponent and stay there until that opponent was destroyed, and it had no other function. Maneuverability and acceleration capability were totally secondary; protection and brute firepower were the primary considerations.
The superdreadnought had supplanted the dreadnought for the same reasons the dreadnought had supplanted the battleship. As gradual improvements in inertial compensators allowed steadily larger hulls to be accelerated at acceleration rates in the “capital ship” zone (roughly 350 to 450 gravities), those larger hulls gained a decisive qualitative advantage. A designer could simply put more weapons—and more active and passive defenses—into the larger unit, which exerted a gradual, slow, but inexorable upward pressure on the mass of ships considered fit to “lie in the wall of battle.”
Dreadnoughts were simply superdreadnoughts writ small—lower displacement units, massing between four and seven million tons, with the same design function and philosophy as the superdreadnought. They continued to be built after the emergence of the superdreadnought by cost-conscious navies (like the RMN) that wished to expand the number of units in their wall but could not afford to standardize on the larger vessel. Individually, they remained superior to any lesser opponent than an SD and technological advantages could go far towards equalizing the playing field even against the larger ship, yet by the mid-nineteenth century, they had become a clear second-choice decision for major navies.
Battleships, massing between one and a half and four million tons, had once been the galactic standard for ships of the wall. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, they were thoroughly obsolete, simply because they were far too fragile to survive a “proper waller’s” fire long enough to make their own lighter, less numerous weapons effective. They were, however, used, especially by the People’s Republic for rear area security. The SKM itself built two squadrons of battleships as part of the initial force buildup to protect the home system after the discovery of and first transit through the Junction. By the time the RMN needed a proper wall of battle, however, dreadnoughts had already entered the picture, and all Manticoran battleships had been decommissioned by the time of the First Havenite War.
Battlecruisers, massing between five hundred thousand and a million tons, were the fast, powerful screening and raiding units of choice. Designed to destroy anything they couldn’t outrun, they were envisioned as commerce-raiders par excellence and (especially by the People’s Navy) as antimissile screening units for the wall of battle. Unlike ships of the wall, their offensive weapon suites tended to allocate far more tonnage (proportionately) to missile tubes and magazines, in keeping with their role as “space-control” units.
At the outbreak of the Havenite Wars, cruisers and destroyers were also considered suitable for use as screening and light antimissile escorts for the wall of battle. Experience, and the increasing lethality of missiles (especially Manticoran missiles), demonstrated that this was no longer in fact true—that such light units were simply not survivable in fleet combat scenarios. They were, therefore, increasingly designated for convoy work, commerce raiding, patrol duties, sensor pickets, etc., and released from fleet combat duties.
In 1900 PD, the People’s Navy’s cumulative tonnage was approximately twice that of the Royal Manticoran Navy, but the RMN, which found it necessary to provide security for a far smaller total number of star systems, could concentrate a higher percentage of its total available tonnage in ships of the wall. At the start of the war, the RMN had 188 superdreadnoughts and 121 dreadnoughts in commission, while the PN had 412 superdreadnoughts and 48 dreadnoughts, backed up by 374 battleships for rear area security. As the Havenite Wars continued, the percentage of tonnage devoted to ships “below the wall” in both navies plummeted as the unsuitability of those lighter units for fleet combat became increasingly evident.
The introduction of missile pods near the beginning of the war fundamentally altered naval tactics. No longer would ships of the wall slug it out in protracted duels that might begin at long range but must culminate in the inevitable short-range pounding match. Instead, with the massive opening salvos made possible by the pods (themselves largely unarmored and hence vulnerable to destruction), the opening salvo of an engagement was often the only salvo. Initially, pods were towed on tractors behind existing ships, but beginning in about 1910 PD, the Manticoran introduction of the multidrive missile, married to the use of pods, completely transformed the nature of combat and hence of the platforms best optimized for it. With the arrival of the MDM, the energy-armed superdreadnought became hopelessly obsolete, and the resulting total redesign produced the “podnought,” or SD(P): a hollow-cored design intended to deploy pods of very large, very capable, very long ranged, and very lethal missiles in the largest possible numbers. The possession of that weapon and those ships gave the RMN an overwhelming advantage, which brought the first phase of the Havenite Wars to a disastrous conclusion for the People’s Republic in 1914–1915 PD.
FLEET LAYDOWN
The final element of Fleet Design is the Fleet Laydown. Where are the parts of the fleet located? How many bases exist, and how many/what type of ships per base are located at each base? Before World War I, for instance, the Royal Navy concentrated its battlefleet in bases in the northern United Kingdom, to better position itself to engage the German High Sea Fleet. This meant that the most powerful navy in the world was often underrepresented on some of its far-flung naval outposts.
As Manticore repositioned itself to confront the Havenite threat, its deployment patterns changed. Historically, the Manticoran wall of battle had always been kept concentrated in the home system in order to protect the Star Kingdom’s inhabited planets, its infrastructure, and the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. On the occasions—such as the dispatch of capital ships to Silesia after the Battle of Carson or the short “war” with San Martin—when capital ships had been employed outside the Manticore Binary System, they were dispatched directly from First Fleet for the specific operation but remained administratively attached to First Fleet and returned to it as promptly as possible.
A redistribution of forces was a fundamental part of Roger III’s planning, although that was not perhaps immediately apparent. First Fleet was officially redesignated Home Fleet as a clear indication of its function and also additional numbered fleets were soon to be organized. As the size of the Manticoran wall of battle increased and as the Manticoran Alliance acquired additional members, detachments of ships of the wall were permanently deployed to critical naval stations like Grendelsbane and Hancock or to the support of Allied star systems such as Alizon and the Caliphate of Zanzibar. Such detachments were normally accompanied by appropriate scouting and screening units, although in the case of the system like Alizon light local naval units might be assigned for that purpose.
Home Fleet’s responsibilities were somewhat simplified by increasing the number of fortresses deployed to protect the Junction. Although the total manpower cost of the Junction forts was high in absolute terms, it was substantially lower in terms of manpower per unit of fire, given the forts’ powerful armaments and defenses. The forts served two functions: first, to protect against a conventional attack through hyper-space; second, to prevent a surprise attack through the Junction itself. In many ways, the latter threat was a graver concern for Manticoran analysts than the threat of a conventional attack, particularly before the introduction of the laser head. Wartime experience and steady improvement in both missile and mine laser head technology were to demonstrate that the fear of an attack through the Junction had been grossly overinflated, but no one in the Admiralty was aware of that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Once Manticore had captured Trevor’s Star, the vast majority of the Junction forts were speedily decommissioned, leaving only a sufficient number to serve as command platforms for the heavy numbers of system defense missile pods deployed to protect it against conventional attack. This liberated large quantities of trained personnel for duty aboard the ships of the steadily expanding Manticoran wall of battle.
Additional fleet stations—such Hancock Station—were established to provide fleet concentration points and advanced repair and maintenance nodes in accordance with the traditional strategic doctrine which required defensive depth against the steady, incremental advance contemplated by most fleet planners. Several years of active wartime operations and the gradual evolution on Manticore’s part of the doctrine of the deep strike would eventually suggest that Manticore had actually established too many of those advanced bases. While the provision of logistics nodes closer to the scene of active operations was convenient, the same support was available from the Fleet Train of fast freighters and repair ships which could operate with fleet units far from home. Moreover, each of those isolated fleet stations became a defensive liability in its own right, tying down and dispersing combat power which might otherwise have been concentrated into offensive striking forces. By the end of the First Havenite War, Admiralty thinking had hardened toward the abandonment of all but the largest and most important of the fleet stations. In theory, the disestablishment of the more peripheral fleet stations would permit the forces normally tied to them to be redistributed to better protect the truly critical ones. The redeployment had only begun at the time of the ceasefire, however, and the Janacek Admiralty predictably failed to complete its implementation before Operation Thunderbolt.
One consequence of the Navy’s redeployment, coupled with procurement plans which of necessity concentrated on the construction of capital ships, was a steady drawdown in the numbers of lighter units previously available for commerce protection in the Silesian Confederacy. Destroyers and cruisers were required to scout for and screen the battle squadrons, and they were being built in smaller numbers. Accordingly, the policy of maintaining light units semi-permanently on station “visiting” Silesian star systems had to be discontinued in favor of rotating patrols and convoy escort. The new policy allowed the Navy to economize on platforms but provided a lower level of security and protection for merchant traffic in Silesia.
The long, arduous, and eventually successful campaign to capture Trevor’s Star had major strategic consequences. The Royal Manticoran Navy’s prewar operational planning had emphasized the need to secure Trevor’s Star in order to neutralize the threat of any attack through the Junction. By the time Admiral White Haven’s Sixth Fleet actually captured Trevor’s Star, the realistic threat of an attack through its terminus of the Junction had been effectively nullified (if it had ever actually existed at all), but the Navy’s strategists had not yet realized that was the case. In the event, Trevor’s Star’s greatest value to the Star Kingdom lay in the advanced, secure base it provided. Two hundred and ten light-years from Manticore, deep into what had been the Havenite sphere, Trevor’s Star was only a single transit from the Manticore Binary System itself, and transit through the Junction provided not only a huge savings in time but also complete security against Havenite commerce-raiders. It shortened the operational loop for offensive Manticoran operations and freed up large numbers of light units which would otherwise have been required to escort the shipping supporting it. The formation of Third Fleet to protect it did not dilute the Navy’s striking power as one might have anticipated. Indeed, in many ways, Third Fleet became a ready reserve for Home Fleet (and vice versa), freeing the newly formed Eighth Fleet for what ultimately proved decisive offensive operations against the core star systems of the People’s Republic of Haven.
Force Size
The fleet is more than just ships—it also consists of people and infrastructure. On the people side, what is the fleet’s Manning Strategy: How many guys do you need to man the fleet, and how do you get them? Are they conscripts or volunteers, and how qualified is the base of people you draw upon? Do you fully man the ships in peacetime, or do you maintain just a cadre to be augmented with new recruits if there is a war? What sort of reserve forces are there, and how and when do you “call up the reserves”? What’s the ratio of officers to enlisted (do you even break it down that way?), and does that ratio change depending on whether you are at peace or at war? Do you automate to decrease the number of people you need, or have large crews to improve flexibility?
Traditionally, the Royal Manticoran Navy is manned by volunteers: professional, long-service officers and senior noncoms who choose to make the Navy a lifetime career form the backbone of the service. Prior to the Havenite Wars, the standard enlistment term was for six Manticoran years (approximately seven T-years); following the outbreak of the Havenite Wars, enlistment became “for the duration of hostilities.”
Throughout the period of hostilities, the RMN made strenuous and largely successful efforts to meet its manning requirements through voluntary enlistments. It succeeded in large part because of the high premium the Star Kingdom’s citizens placed upon military service and the preservation of their independence after the long, agonizing buildup of the sixty-year-long “Cold War” between the People’s Republic and the Star Kingdom and its allies. Good pay, good benefits, significant technical training opportunities, and the opportunity for promotion and advancement inherent in the steadily expanding Navy also helped attract quality personnel. By 1914, the Navy was seriously considering conscription, but the adoption of increased shipboard automation drastically curtailed manning requirements, which eased much of the pressure. There were countervailing pressures, of course, including the adoption of large numbers of new, highly capable light attack craft, but the enormous ships’ companies required by prewar ships of the wall had become a thing of the past, and the Navy’s ability to stand down the forts covering the Manticoran Wormhole Junction following the liberation of Trevor’s Star freed up a very substantial manpower pool.
It should be borne in mind that the enormous size of the Manticoran merchant marine provided both major advantages and disadvantages when it came to manning the fleet. On the one hand, the merchant marine provided an enormous pool of experienced spacers, and somewhere between a third and a half of all merchant officers held in reserve Navy commissions, as well. That equated to a reserve of trained, capable manpower no other navy in the galaxy probably could have matched. The existence of that merchant marine, however, was also a major factor in the economic and industrial power of the Star Kingdom. Manticore literally could not afford to draw down its merchant marine—indeed, it needed its merchant marine to continue to expand—if it was to meet the economic and industrial demands of war against an opponent the size of the People’s Republic of Haven. So even though the merchant marine represented an enormous theoretical manpower reserve, the Admiralty was in fact constantly aware that it could not draw too heavily upon that reserve except in the most dire of emergencies lest it destroy the Star Kingdom’s long-term ability to sustain the war.
It would be difficult to overstate the Star Kingdom’s qualitative advantage when comparing RMN personnel to those of the People’s Navy, particularly after the Pierre purge of the Havenite officer corps. Unlike the RMN, the PN had depended upon conscription from the very beginning. Although there was a solid core of professional officers and NCOs prior to the Havenite Wars, that experienced cadre suffered brutal losses as the combined result of combat against an equally professional navy with superior weapons and doctrine, on the one hand, and of political purges, on the other. This was particularly unfortunate in the People’s Navy’s case because the educational level of the People’s Republic was far lower than that of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. In essence, the People’s Navy’s recruits required much more training and, even after that training, tended to be less individually capable than their Manticoran counterparts. Duties which in the RMN would have been routinely carried out by junior enlisted personnel were the province of senior NCOs in the People’s Navy, which meant the loss of those senior NCOs had a serious impact on the PN’s combat capability. On the other hand, because of its reliance on conscription, the People’s Navy could always meet its manpower numbers, even if it could not match its opponent’s manpower quality.
ORGANIC SUPPORT FUNCTIONS
The fleet is more than just ships—it also includes shore facilities and perhaps capabilities and capacity “borrowed” from other providers. Organic Support Functions are those functions the fleet does for itself, such as providing tankers that are assigned to the fleet. Shore Infrastructure are those services that are not located with the fleet, such as shipyards and fleet depots.
The RMN’s “shore establishment” in 1920 PD is concentrated, as it has been for the past sixty to seventy T-years, in the Star Kingdom’s major space stations: HMSS Vulcan (Sphinx orbit), HMSS Hephaestus (Manticore orbit), and HMSS Weyland (Gryphon orbit). These are enormous aggregates of fabrication, building, and maintenance capability, with a level of sophistication and capability unmatched anywhere else in the explored galaxy. Weyland, orbiting the secondary component of the Manticore Binary System, is the site of most of the RMN’s critical research and development activity.
The Navy maintains an extensive Fleet Train, consisting of supply ships, fuel tankers, maintenance and repair vessels, mobile shipyard modules, personnel transports, etc. The majority of the Navy-crewed vessels belong to Fifth Fleet and the Joint Navy Military Transport Command, and are equipped with military-grade impellers, inertial compensators, hyper generators, and particle screens in order to permit them to maneuver freely with the fleet units they are tasked to support. In addition to the JNMTC, however, the RMN routinely charters civilian vessels for transport and service duties in rear areas and where the ability to “keep up” with fleet units is not a critical factor.
In Manticoran practice, fleet stations are permanent duty assignments outside the Manticoran home system. Fleet stations may range from as little as a handful of destroyers to as much as an entire task force or even fleet of ships of the wall, and organic fleet support is assigned to each station as appropriate. Generally, any fleet station will be provided with at least one major repair ship and at least a pair of missile colliers, since by their very nature such stations do not normally possess local capability to meet the Navy’s needs in those respects.
This basing doctrine contrasted sharply with Havenite doctrine. The People’s Navy’s practice was to establish numerous major nodal bases distributed throughout the large volume of the PRH. Fleets units were relatively “short legged,” tied to the nodal bases to which they were assigned, and with limited organic support capability. Havenite strategic doctrine envisioned the dispatch of powerful task forces and/or fleets in short, sharp, heavily weighted and rapidly decisive campaigns, after which the fleet units would be withdrawn to the nearest forward base for repairs, servicing, and training while occupation and pacification forces secured the newly occupied territory. (The basic conceptual model for this doctrine was the Solarian division of the SLN into designated Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet units, although the demarcation between the units assigned to each task was not so sharply and formally drawn in the PN as in the SLN.) This was a major factor in both its fleet structure and logistic planning. (See below.)
Force Management
Force Size decisions determine how you get your navy manned and supported; Force Management describes how you keep the force in fighting trim.
PERSONNEL POLICIES
First, there’s the issue of Personnel Policies. How much personnel turnover do you plan for? The US Army, for instance, assumes that a substantial number of enlisted soldiers will make the Army their career. The US Marine Corps, on the other hand, is designed on the assumption that very few Marines will go career. (Take a look at their respective commercials sometime, and notice the difference in emphasis regarding the long term.) What’s the “personnel tempo” for the force, i.e., how often are the people deployed, away from their families. PERSTEMPO issues have a high impact of personnel retention.
The modern RMN is a well-paying, professional force built around well-educated, well-trained, and long-serving personnel. Four factors define the pool of available people from which the RMN draws. First, Manticore has always had a first-rate educational system. Coupled with the educational and training opportunities presented by the RMN itself (gravitics techs, for example, receive training equivalent to several years of undergraduate education), the end result is that, rate for rate, RMN personnel as a group are probably the best trained and most competent in the galaxy. Second, the RMN has been expanding for the last sixty T-years. This means that not only is the Bureau of Personnel constantly hungry for new recruits, but that the RMN is seen as a place where advancement is not only possible, but required. Third, Manticore’s large merchant marine functions not only as a limited manpower reserve, but also as a place for follow-on employment—in other words, it makes the RMN more attractive because a recruit knows that, worst case, they have a fallback where RMN-taught skills will be highly valued. Moreover, since the RMN is in effect “always hiring,” merchant spacers often maintain reserve status, knowing that they can always return to active service if need be. And, finally, the RMN has established a reputation for producing victory after victory against numerically superior forces which endows it with a “mystique” few military forces in history have matched and none have exceeded.
The cumulative effect of these factors is a system where the RMN is viewed both as an excellent career and as a good place to start, and RMN personnel policy is based on the assumption that the average new recruit is probably going to stay in the navy for decades, even if not in a single unbroken stretch. Of course, in this way like many others the RMN is unique—few other star nations are experiencing such booming growth, and few other navies have expanded at such a precipitous rate.
Personnel Tempo (PERSTEMPO) is a strong determinant of retention rates. Higher PERSTEMPO means more time away from family, and hence a high peacetime PERSTEMPO negatively affects retention. Currently, RMN PERSTEMPO is running high, as it always does in wartime. Given that enlistments these days are “for the duration,” it has had no negative impact on retention rates.
LOGISTICS CONCEPT
A second Force Management issue is the Logistics Concept. How do you provide for the fleet? Do you maintain large depots forward deployed, or large depots well to the rear? Do you have small depots and depend on just-in-time logistics?
In the case of the Royal Manticoran Navy, logistic concepts are quite flexible. The degree to which resources—supplies and maintenance/support resources—are forward deployed depends on the nature of the fleet station or base. Given the fact that the prewar RMN had only a single home star system to worry about, the vast majority of its important depots and supply ships were (and are) maintained in the Manticore Binary System. Many of those depots are located aboard or in close proximity to the major space stations, but critical components—like ammunition depots, in particular—are also stockpiled at discrete, widely separated points within the star system in order to protect them in the unlikely event of an enemy attack on the system itself.
RMN warships are normally provisioned and supplied for minimum six-month deployments, and are supported by fleet or chartered freighters. Given the lift capacity of a four-million-ton freighter, the quantities of supplies which can be forward deployed on shipboard are very, very high, and the Fleet Train is usually capable of sustaining necessary levels of provisions, spare parts, ammunition, etc., without undue strain. Obviously this is not always the case under wartime conditions, but it is the ideal.
The RMN is built around the concept of “underway replenishment.” That is, its Fleet Train and logistics tail is designed to take supplies to forward deployed ships as necessary, rather than returning those ships to base to resupply. This is in distinct contrast to prewar Havenite practice (see above) and the flexibility it provided contributed significantly to the Manticoran evolution of deep-strike doctrine. With a far greater number of star systems, the People’s Navy was able to establish a widespread system of depots, centered around Duquesne Base in the Barnett System for operations against the Manticoran Alliance. The operational concept called for Havenite ships to return on a rotating basis to those depots to resupply as needed, and facilities to provide the maintenance the undertrained, conscript crews weren’t truly capable of providing out of their own resources, were also located in the depot systems. What was intended to provide a dispersed, flexible, widespread support net, however, turned out to be a limiting factor on wartime operations. The People’s Navy had been oriented around short, intense campaigns against relatively small opponents without the military strength or strategic depth to long resist the sort of overwhelming power the People’s Republic could deploy against them. Against an opponent which failed to oblige by collapsing quickly, the Havenite prewar logistics and depot concept proved woefully inadequate, and throughout the period from 1905 to 1915 PD, the People’s Navy was never able to match the Royal Manticoran Navy’s strategic and operational mobility because of its lack of an equivalent Fleet Train to keep its units supplied and maintained “on the move.”
LEVEL OF READINESS
The third issue in managing the force is the Level of Readiness, both Afloat and Ashore. Are the forces ready to fight immediately, or do they need to ramp up? Are their stockpiles of materiel in place, or do they need time to build up? Between the World Wars, for instance, Great Britain explicitly adopted a “Ten Year Rule,” a codified assumption that the next war would not occur for at least ten years. Such assumptions can be dangerous—it requires an awful lot of prediction to notice changes that far in advance, and domestic considerations can lead to the assumption taking on a political life of its own.
By the time the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People’s Republic of Haven actually met in combat, both sides had been actively preparing for over half a T-century. In theory, the level of readiness—both for the fleet and for its “shore establishment”—was very high on both sides. Indeed, the peacetime ammunition loadout for the Royal Manticoran Navy was identical to its wartime loadout, and from 1880 PD on, personnel strengths aboard Manticoran warships were maintained at one hundred percent of wartime manning requirements. The People’s Navy was at a lower level of manning, and although it was theoretically at the same level in terms of matériel, it was, in fact, probably at no more than eighty-five percent of Manticoran levels of readiness prior to about 1904 PD. At that point, in the Legislaturalists’ deliberate buildup to hostilities against Manticore, readiness was increased to very nearly the same level as in the RMN. One effect of the increase in personnel, however, was to dilute the experience levels of its units on the very verge of war by the introduction of so many newly trained personnel. This was exacerbated by the PRH’s educational deficiencies, since it took a proportionately longer time for Havenite personnel to acquire the necessary expertise.
The Star Kingdom of Manticore, however, had a significant advantage in terms of its fixed-support infrastructure. It had fewer fully developed bases and depots, but those it possessed were much more capable and tended to be considerably larger. They were maintained at that level by a rigorous system of training exercises, drills, and inspections intended to ensure (largely successfully) that when the inevitable hostilities against the People’s Republic of Haven began, the fleet’s support structure would be as close to one hundred percent readiness as was humanly possible. In terms of mobile logistical support, there was no real comparison between the two navies. The RMN’s organic logistical command was far more highly developed and capable, and the sheer size of the Manticoran merchant marine gave the Admiralty a far deeper pool of “ships taken up from trade” which could be used to augment the Navy’s own personnel and supply lift at need.
ACQUISITION STRATEGY
Finally, there’s the question of how you go about buying the stuff you need for your navy, especially given that a warship is a significant capital investment with a long design cycle and construction cycle.
The Royal Manticoran Navy’s acquisition strategy and requirements were greatly eased by the size and capability of the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s industrial base. The fact that the Star Kingdom’s home industries built and maintained one of—if not the—largest merchant fleets in the entire galaxy gave it a basic “heavy industry” capability no other single star system could have matched. The possession of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, coupled with the size of the Manticoran merchant marine, provided a cash flow for the Manticoran government of prodigious size. Even a minor increase in Junction transit fees generated a major increase in revenues, and Manticore was in a position to leverage its status as a major financial and investment center into the sale of war bonds and other investment instruments to support its war effort. Despite that, and even with unprecedented levels of taxation, the Star Kingdom was forced into a pattern of deficit spending that was distinctly alien to its traditional fiscal policies. This resulted in a significant level of inflation for the first time in modern Manticoran experience, although by the standards of most wartime economies, Manticore’s managed to avoid “overheating” through a combination of wise fiscal management, the continuing expansion of its merchant fleet and carrying trade, aggressive pursuit of still more foreign markets for civilian goods as a means of maintaining and expanding its general industrial base and economy, and the enormous “natural resource” provided by the Junction.
As the war continued and emphasis shifted more and more drastically toward missile combat with the introduction of the multidrive missile, platform costs came to be dominated by ammunition costs, and enormous missile production lines were set up. Strenuous efforts were made at every stage in the process to rationalize weapons design in a way that would permit the most economical possible volume production. Given the sheer scale of that production, the per-unit cost of not simply expendable munitions but of warship hulls and components fell drastically as the war continued. Despite the much greater size and lethality of the MDM, the cost of a late-generation multidrive missile was actually lower for the Star Kingdom than the cost of a late prewar single-drive missile had been, largely because of the relatively small numbers in which those prewar weapons had been purchased and manufactured and because the “bells and whistles” of their design had not been nearly so ruthlessly rationalized. One of the outstanding achievements of the Star Kingdom’s military industrial base throughout the Havenite Wars was the ability to introduce new and even radically upgraded weapons without major disruptions of output, largely as a legacy of Roger III’s insistence on prewar planning towards exactly that end.
In contrast, the People’s Republic was never able to match the efficiency of Manticoran industry and ship building, nor did it have a resource remotely like the Manticoran Wormhole Junction as a revenue generator. It did, however, have a command economy that was over a century old when the war began. In many ways, the PRH was less constrained by fiscal policy than Manticore because its domestic economy was a largely closed system which the government could manipulate in whatever fashion it chose. Ultimately, the strain was ruinous and unsustainable, but in the short- and midterm, the government was in a position to direct and control resources and trained manpower in a way Manticore simply couldn’t have matched. The coercive power of State Security and the other revolutionary police and spy organizations set up under Oscar Saint-Just at Robert Pierre’s direction also helped enormously in providing “direction” to the Havenite war effort. And, last but not least, the sheer numbers of political prisoners held by the PRH provided Haven with a massive supply of slave labor which required no wages whatsoever.
Under the circumstances, Pierre’s ability to actually reform the PRH’s currency, rationalize taxation, reduce the Basic Living Stipend, and reintroduce the notion of wage-based labor was little less than miraculous. It would never have been possible without the iron support of StateSec and of the People’s Commissioners assigned to the PRH’s military forces and it was accompanied by a degree of disruption and civilian hardship which required often brutal measures (see the Leveller Revolt in 1911 PD), but that should not be allowed to take away from the sheer magnitude of the accomplishment.
Despite that, it is questionable how much longer Pierre or Saint-Just could have sustained the PRH’s war effort if the introduction of the MDM in 1914 PD had not brought the first phase of the Havenite wars to a crashing halt. It is indisputably true that the Star Kingdom proved far more capable than Haven of transitioning back to a peacetime economy in the wake of Thomas Theisman’s overthrow of the Committee of Public Safety, and the ongoing economic strain of the Havenite civil war between Theisman’s supporters and those still loyal to the Committee of Public Safety or seeking to carve out their own empires came very near to undoing Pierre’s accomplishments. The sheer size of the PRH came to the restored Republic’s rescue, however, proving once again that with a sufficiently large population and resource base, even a relatively inefficient economy can generate large absolute revenue streams.
Putting It All Together
The model we have described is shown in the figure below.
These, then, are the sorts of things one needs to think about when designing a navy. The answers to each of these questions do not exist in a vacuum—not only do earlier decisions set the stage for later decisions, but there is a lot of interrelatedness between the issues under discussion. Those feedback loops have been omitted from the illustration for sake of clarity, but they are there.
Sometimes it might become apparent later in the process that an earlier decision has created an untenable situation downstream. In the real world, this mismatch is an indication that the process needs to be rethought, usually because the original plan was too ambitious. An author has a bit more leeway, and can change “ground truth” to provide the answers he needs for narrative purposes.
This model comes from the “Naval Metaphors in Science Fiction” talk that Chris often does at science fiction conventions. He observes that most science fiction does not cover the whole model; at best it might cover Fleet Missions and Fleet Design in detail, with most other areas only vaguely defined. It would be disingenuous to say that David went through each and every one of these steps as presented when he defined the navies of the Honorverse. But, one thing Chris noted when he showed David the illustration above was that David had a ready answer for each and every one of these sections, answers that were obviously the result of long and careful analysis of both real-world history and the setting he had created. In the real world, these are questions that must be answered. In a fictional universe, an author at least needs to know these questions exist, and to have thought about them, even if only in general terms.
The view presented here is obviously not the final word on the topic, as each and every one of these subheadings could be an essay in and of itself, for each navy in the Honorverse. In addition, there are a lot of elements that we’ve only glossed over. First, there are a lot of important issues below that are not discussed, such as the political will to build a navy. Second, a navy is a dynamic thing—it changes with time. Sometimes this is because technology changes, but oftentimes it is because other factors change: The strategic situation gets better or worse; new missions get added, old missions get subtracted; the education level of the population changes, affecting the navy’s personnel requirements, etc. Science fiction authors have the luxury of a clean sheet of paper, but real policymakers do not, and sometimes tomorrow’s navy is defined not by the navy they want but by the navy they have today. Third, this model does not discuss the importance of doctrine and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TT&P). Doctrine describes what you want to do, and TT&P describes how you use your stuff to do it, so generally doctrine is an important input into the design process, and TT&P is an important output. (For our purposes, you can think of doctrine and tactics as being part of the fleet you are buying.) Finally, the entire process is permeated by a discussion of the potential threat. Threat is part of the strategic environment, it determines the usefulness of individual ship design, it affects basing and force sizing decisions, etc.
In other words, there’s plenty more ideas to explore!