by David Weber
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 N
avy’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 ad
dition 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.)
