by David Weber
In terms of relative industrial and economic power, the People’s Republic of Haven and the Star Kingdom of Manticore were clearly the two preeminent star nations of the Haven Sector. On a per capita basis, there was no comparison between the output and economic strength of the two star nations, yet the sheer size of the People’s Republic meant that despite its relative economic inefficiency, its total industrial capability—and, particularly, the percentage of its industrial capability devoted to military purposes—was significantly greater than that of the Star Kingdom. Nonetheless, Manticore was in a far better position than any other non-Havenite star nation to match the power and strength of the PRH’s military establishment. Manticore also possessed a significantly more developed and capable domestic technology base than Haven, which, combined with the leadership of the House of Winton, made the Star Kingdom the logical focus for any interstellar alliance and/or collective security agreement aimed at restricting or limiting future Havenite expansion.
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 territ
ory? 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 ene
rgy 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.
