I have a simple question to pose, requesting feed back and ideas, about what actions the RMN should take in the SL. I choose to pose the question by borrowing from the character “Daud.” I will follow with quotes from the books and my own reasoning at to what actions should be taken.
“What are the currently known and available targets in the SL that are on the firing range?”
SoF:Ch29(Admiral Michelle Henke) wrote:
“What we face is a war against the largest, most populous, most powerful star nation in history. Not a confrontation, not a conflict, not a crisis. Not any longer. A war. And wars, as we've discovered against the People's Republic of Haven, aren't won by standing on the defensive. At the moment, we enjoy a crushing combat advantage. How long that advantage will last is impossible to estimate, and it seems evident to me that it's our duty to our Empire and our Empress to use that advantage as decisively as possible and as quickly as possible. And it is also this fleet's specific responsibility to safeguard the star systems and the citizens of the Talbott Quadrant. The best way to do both of those things, in my opinion, is to take the war to the Sollies. We didn't start it, they did, and now they can deal with the consequences of their own actions.”
SFTS:Ch44 (Honor Harrington) wrote:
"So if we get into an all-out war with the League, our strategy is going to have to have a very definite political element. We'll have to make it clear that the war wasn't our idea. We'll have to drive home the notion that we're not after any sort of punitive peace, that we're not trying to annex any additional territory, that we have no desire to conduct reprisals against people who don't want to fight us. We need to tell them, every step of the way, that what we really want is a negotiated settlement . . . and at the same time, we have to hit the League as a whole so hard that the fracture lines already there under the surface open right up. We have to split the League into separate sectors, into successor states, none of which have the sheer size and concentrated industrial power and manpower of the present league. Successor states that are our own size, or smaller. And we have to negotiate bilateral peace treaties with each of those successor states as they declare their willingness to opt out of the general conflict to get us to stop beating on their heads. And once we have those peace treaties, we have to not only honor them, but step beyond them. We need to use trade incentives, mutual defense pacts, educational assistance, every single thing we can think of to show them that we are—and to really be, not just pretend to be—the sort of neighbor and ally they'll want around. In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."
With these thoughts in mind, I say that the RMN can not just capture wormhole termini. That's a mostly passive kind of an attack on undefended points in the SL. It doesn't do anything to reduce the SL's ability to counter attack, it only slows down their transit times in bringing together ships and committing any attack they choose to make. It does not stop them in any way or further reduce the SL's ability to make war. If that is all the further that RMN intends to go in their attacks on the SL, then the SL will have time to engineer their way to creating a fleet of ships that can defeat the GA.
I am in agreement with Admiral Henke, the RMN must take the initiative by attacking the SL as fast and as hard as possible to reduce the fighting ability of the SLN before they can maneuver their way into an effective counter attack. I must destroy or disable as many of the ships available to the SLN as I possibly can while the RMN technology advantage still holds. The best way to get at as many ships and hulls as possible, while killing as few people as possible, is to attack the mothballed fleets and the ships defending them.
The SL, regardless of how many total ships they have, don't have them gathered together in one spot. For the volume of space that they are defending, their ships are spread out rather sparsely. The RMN needs to use the wormholes to engage these far flung groups of ships and take them down in detail before they can be gathered together in any significant numbers. If the RMN can catch them in groups of a couple of SD's and associated supporting ships, take out the larger ships and leave only the smallest ships to pick up survivors of the battle. But even those smaller ships should be required to empty their missile magazines by firing them into the sun. (anywhere but at the RMN) Ships of the support train of the SLN that haul supplies or make repairs need to be disabled or captured. If the fleet can't be supplied, it can't fight.
However, the political thing also needs to be addressed in that if I do go into a system to destroy SLN ships, I must refrain from destroying anything that is not of military origin. Do not destroy planet orbitals that are used for commerce. Leave the planet's governments untouched. Make it very clear that only SLN equipment will be destroyed because it is a threat to the RMN. And make it equally clear that the GA would be interested in peaceful relations with anyone not participating in the Mandarin's war with the GA. Always stress that it is the “Mandarin's” and their unjust war that is being opposed, not the people of the SL. Do not seek out planets with SDF forces, leave them alone unless they attack fist or join the SLN in battle.
If the Mandarin's can be successfully blamed for what the members of the SL are suffering, it should create very large cracks in the SL. Beowulf was settled first and it then settled “satalite” planets. This is a pattern that most likely occurred repeatedly and maybe these “groups” will each form small star empires that will split off from the SL and be mutually supportive of each other in self defense.
But the RMN must attack! So if it's not the ships of the SLN and it's mothballed fleet, what other targets are on the firing range?
