by David Weber
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!
Frequently Asked Questions
David Weber
What are the other sentient species and how do they interact with humanity?
I regret to say that we aren’t going to answer this question in any detail at this time. I will say that there are additional sentient species in the Honorverse, at least one of whom has been “uplifted” to current human levels of technology and trades with humans. I have taken the position in the Honorverse, however, that it is unlikely for there to be numerous species at comparable or near comparable levels of technological development at any given moment. And, since I chose to write about a human-versus-human conflict, humanity had to be the primary star-traveling species. By default, that moved most of the nonhuman species to pre-space and/or primitive technologies. The reason I’m not going to answer this question in detail is that while I have several species roughed out, I don’t intend to introduce them into the books anytime soon, and as a storyteller, I need to keep my options open on reworking or modifying my rough notes in order to best suit my needs at the time I do introduce them. Assuming, of course, that I do!
