Re-training MHoGatA

Even just providing cadre for 800,000+ infantry is a big job. Where did the AoG find all those NCOs and officers? Especially ones that have any practical experience of modern weapons and tactics? I think we will find that either the retraining is much more limited than Maigwair hopes, or that he has had to gut several other armies of experienced leadership to do it, or both, which will come back to bite him. I don't think RFC will let him just magic all that cadre out of nowhere, at least I hope not.

Come to that I doubt the decision to give practically all the most modern weapons to the least trained and experienced force available will turn out to be particularly sound either.

Randomiser wrote:Even just providing cadre for 800,000+ infantry is a big job. Where did the AoG find all those NCOs and officers? Especially ones that have any practical experience of modern weapons and tactics? I think we will find that either the retraining is much more limited than Maigwair hopes, or that he has had to gut several other armies of experienced leadership to do it, or both, which will come back to bite him. I don't think RFC will let him just magic all that cadre out of nowhere, at least I hope not.

Come to that I doubt the decision to give practically all the most modern weapons to the least trained and experienced force available will turn out to be particularly sound either.

Taking your point a step further, one would have to ask, what other armies? They sent all those pikemen back to the borderlands from the Sylvan Gap to be refitted and retrained. The Army of the Glacierheart is still sitting on the Daivyn facing opposition. None of this helps. So I don't know where those officers and noncoms come from either.

Don

Training is good and having outside NCO's actually caring and teaching will go a long way. But the weight of fire and experience in the fighting of battles will not be on the side of the MHoGatA. It will be interesting to see how RFC deals with the division of MHoGatA and where the conflicts will play out.

Maintaining one Army is unsupportable logistically and splitting up the Army is preparing to be defeated seperately. I can not come up with a situation that wins for the CoGA. But of course they lose or there wouldn't be 3 more books.

dwileye13 wrote:Training is good and having outside NCO's actually caring and teaching will go a long way. But the weight of fire and experience in the fighting of battles will not be on the side of the MHoGatA. It will be interesting to see how RFC deals with the division of MHoGatA and where the conflicts will play out.

Maintaining one Army is unsupportable logistically and splitting up the Army is preparing to be defeated seperately. I can not come up with a situation that wins for the CoGA. But of course they lose or there wouldn't be 3 more books.

How do you know the series doesn't end with Merlin viewing the burned out remains of the Empire of Charis dotted with the victorious armies of God just as OWL warns him that a massive fleet has apparently just entered Safehold space? The celery stealer could do that, you know.

jgnfld wrote:How do you know there series doesn't end with Merlin viewing the burned out remains of the Empire of Charis dotted with the victorious armies of God just as OWL warns him that a massive fleet has apparently just entered Safehold space? The celery stealer could do that, you know.

I'm afraid that you are thinking of GRRM in this instance...

Yeah.

GRRM might do that "just for the heck of it" but we would have to extremely annoy David Weber for him to do something like that.

Of course, a few years back somebody in the "Baen Honorverse" conference (on Baen's Bar) had heard that David Weber was going to kill off Honor Harrington (this was before he changed his mind).

He wanted to start a campaign to "make" David Weber change his plans.

Fortunately he was convinced that it was "not the thing to do" because IMO done wrongly it might have convinced David Weber to write an "everybody dies book" to end the Honor series.

Joat42 wrote:

jgnfld wrote:How do you know there series doesn't end with Merlin viewing the burned out remains of the Empire of Charis dotted with the victorious armies of God just as OWL warns him that a massive fleet has apparently just entered Safehold space? The celery stealer could do that, you know.

I'm afraid that you are thinking of GRRM in this instance...

DrakBibliophile wrote:Yeah.

GRRM might do that "just for the heck of it" but we would have to extremely annoy David Weber for him to do something like that.

Might be fun for him to write that last page though :

"Nimue and Merlin repaired to their cave in the Mountains of Light. OWL provided imagery and they watched as the Gbaba fleet closed in on the planet to finish the cycle of destruction they had started so many centuries ago..."

It would probably serve us all right for him to pay us back in spades for all the assumptions of victory!

---

GRRM???

jgnfld wrote:

DrakBibliophile wrote:Yeah.

GRRM might do that "just for the heck of it" but we would have to extremely annoy David Weber for him to do something like that.

Might be fun for him to write that last page though :

"Nimue and Merlin repaired to their cave in the Mountains of Light. OWL provided imagery and they watched as the Gbaba fleet closed in on the planet to finish the cycle of destruction they had started so many centuries ago..."

It would probably serve us all right for him to pay us back in spades for all the assumptions of victory!

---

GRRM???

Nah, better would be to have that last page describing Cayleb's sword Excalibur being thrown into a lake and Nimue putting Merlin into sleep mode in his hidden cave. Throw in a reference to a grail, and we have the makings of a classic story.

Will any of this army be sent to dohlar to hold the border? It would help bloody the army, and return all those weapons to the fight. They dont all have to be sent, just enough to lessen the strain on the langhorne canal, and stop the advance of the allied forces into dohlar. THe inquisition would prefer, that they could force them back and advance back into hte republic. It also, would allow those men sent from the navy to the army to return, bolstering thirsk forces.

Hi Randomiser,

Getting back to the thread topic, I've pegged the MHoGatA's cavalry at around 400,000 so the infantry should be around 1.2 million, while the initial strength of the AoG was 500,000.

The ratio of officers and NCO's at the regimental level in the AoG is just over 4-1 for the infantry and 5-1 in the cavalry.

I suspect the MHoGatA had much higher ratios of officers and NCO's to enlisted, and still will after the additions, while a lot of the AoG pike enlisted would enjoy the higher pay of promotion even with a foreign army so I'd expect many to jump at the chance, besides wounded, and those tired of essentially police duties, NTM those who figure volunteering and getting promoted is better than being volunteered to make up losses in Wyrshym and Kaitswyrth's armies.

While some wounded etc have had time to make it down the Langhorne before the GCR, going overland would have delayed many from Wyrshym after meeting BGV, while Kaitswyrth's contribution if any would have come from casualties against General Taisyn, so their experience against the ICN is rather limited to say the least.

Arming the IHA with the breech-loaders is also simple logistics, as the nearest force available to be equipped.

If the MHoGatA commanders had had a clue they would have demanded them for obvious reasons, the fact that Magwair had to use them as a bribe says volumes about the MHoGatA's Command awareness of how war has changed, but like another empire, they don't seem very interested in that, since they feel regardless of what happens, it won't effect their empire, as long as they're in charge.

What they believe and what's going to happen are two different things of course.

L

Randomiser wrote:Even just providing cadre for 800,000+ infantry is a big job. Where did the AoG find all those NCOs and officers? Especially ones that have any practical experience of modern weapons and tactics? I think we will find that either the retraining is much more limited than Maigwair hopes, or that he has had to gut several other armies of experienced leadership to do it, or both, which will come back to bite him. I don't think RFC will let him just magic all that cadre out of nowhere, at least I hope not.

Come to that I doubt the decision to give practically all the most modern weapons to the least trained and experienced force available will turn out to be particularly sound either.