House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (65 page)

Afterword

Building a Navy in the Honorverse

David Weber and Christopher Weuve

Introduction

Building a navy is a complicated endeavor, whether one is bending steel or turning phrases. Doing it right depends on understanding a set of key parameters that will define the structure of the navy. These parameters can be broken into six major areas:

1.
Strategic Assumptions

2.
Strategic Goals

3.
Fleet Missions

4.
Fleet Design

5.
Force Size

6.
Force Management

Each of these major categories builds on the one preceding it; conversely, a failure at a later step may require rethinking earlier steps, because sometimes “you can’t get there from here.” Each of these areas can be broken down into sub-topics.

By answering the questions implicit in all of these topics, you can define a navy. In this essay, David Weber teams up with a naval analyst formerly on the faculty of the US Naval War College to do just that.

Strategic Assumptions

The Strategic Assumptions are the essential starting place, the place where you define the context in which a navy operates. There are two essential parts—the Security Environment (the general threats to be countered) and the Fiscal Environment (the resources available to pay for it).

The nature and laws of interstellar warfare had evolved over several centuries, following the invention of the Warshawski sail, which made interstellar commerce—and warfare—practical. The weapons available were easily capable of sterilizing any inhabited planet and, with some disturbing episodes from the early days of interstellar warfare as examples, the “rules of war” reverted to an earlier model which attempted to limit the incredible destruction “total war” could wreak upon inhabited worlds. Planetary combat power per se was effectively insignificant in the conflicts that emerged; all hinged upon the space-going naval power available to the combatants, since any fleet that controlled a planet’s orbital space was, in fact, in a position to destroy any target upon that planet. The rules of war therefore required a planet to surrender when a hostile fleet had established control of the volume of space around it. If it failed to surrender, the enemy fleet was entitled to use kinetic or other bombardment against military targets on the surface of the planet until the planetary government yielded. Genocidal attack, attacks on nonmilitary targets, and “demonstration” attacks or terror attacks on population centers were forbidden, although it was accepted that in attacking military targets, collateral damage might well result to nonmilitary targets, as well. These rules were designed to protect planetary populations from indiscriminate attack, but the attacker was allowed a substantial degree of flexibility in the event that surrender was not forthcoming, on the theory that he was not obligated to suffer avoidable casualties among his own personnel if the defenders defied the accepted customs of war. The use of biological, lethal chemical, and weaponized nanotech attacks against inhabited planets were also precluded, however, and “legitimate military targets” did not create any exemptions for those weapons classes under any circumstances.

To at least a limited extent, the Solarian League (see below) also exercised a general interstellar peacekeeping function, in the form of the “Eridani Edict,” to see to it that the rules of war were observed. Incorporated into an amendment to the Solarian League Constitution, the Edict obligated the Solarian League Navy to punish—effectively, to destroy—the government of any star nation guilty of genocidal attack (including any use of proscribed biological, chemical, or nanotech weapons) or planetary bombardment of nonmilitary targets. In the case of pirates or brigands guilty of the same offense, the Eridani Edict classified them as “general enemies of all mankind” and authorized SLN warships and officers to summarily execute the offenders. In the case of “rogue states,” the government responsible for authorizing the Eridani violation was to be dissolved and replaced with one overseen and administered by the Office of Frontier Security until such time as the League could be confident the offense would not be repeated. Individual members of the government that authorized the violation were subject to arrest and prosecution in Solarian courts, and faced imprisonment and even execution. By 1800 PD, many non-Solarian star systems had come to the view that the Solarian League was utilizing its role as guardian and enforcer of the Eridani Edict as a tool to empower its own imperial expansion. The League, needless to say, rejected that view.

The tools of naval warfare had likewise evolved over that same period, but along a remarkably stable, incremental track. Navies were built around ships of the wall, the heaviest combatants in space, considered capable of “lying in the wall” of battle against their foreign counterparts and armed primarily with heavy, relatively short-ranged energy batteries, backed up by much lighter missile armaments. The wall was seen as the queen of battle, and it was commonly accepted that the only thing that could stop a solid, energy-armed core of dreadnoughts or superdreadnoughts was an equivalent force of the same classes of ships. Missiles were relatively ineffective against ships of the wall with properly designed and coordinated antimissile defenses, and the nature of the ships’ propulsion had a marked effect on combat in general. Since the ships impeller drive created an “impeller wedge” whose stress bands were impenetrable to any known weapon, it had become traditional by the early eighteenth century PD for a wall of battle which realized it was outclassed to break off the action, roll to present the impenetrable aspect of its impeller wedges, and retreat behind that shield before taking crippling damage. As a consequence, tactics had become increasingly sterile and the art of naval warfare focused on strategies by which an opponent could be compelled to retreat rather than on tactics that might permit an opponent’s destruction.

Lighter warships—battlecruisers and below—possessed lighter armor and weaker antimissile defenses and, due to their smaller size, were far less capable of absorbing damage. Those lighter classes made much greater use of missile armaments, particularly with the emergence of the laser head in approximately 1872 PD. The laser head significantly increased the damage missiles could inflict and simultaneously increased the standoff range at which they could attack their targets, making them much more difficult to intercept before they inflicted damage and thus far more dangerous. Even so, it was generally accepted in 1900 that ships of the wall remained effectively invulnerable to missile attack due to their massive defensive capabilities.

Warships smaller than destroyers (that is, generally massing less than approximately eighty thousand tons) were no longer regarded as effective combatants and were in the process of being rapidly phased out of all first-line navies. Systems and particularly valuable point targets, such as wormhole junctions or termini, might be further protected by permanently deployed fortresses (in effect, massive, slow-moving, sublight vessels with defenses and armament heavier even than ships of the wall could mount) and/or minefields (permanently deployed short-range missiles equipped with heavy contact nuclear warheads—or the more recently developed laser heads—which could be programmed to automatically attack any vessel not positively identified as friendly). Planets were seldom if ever armed, given the constraints of the accepted laws of warfare, but might be protected by orbital weapons platforms and/or minefields.

From the perspective of the Royal Manticoran Navy, the security environment (pre-1850 PD, approximately) was characterized by a large, central sphere in which the Solarian League (as the paramount economic, industrial, and military power of the explored galaxy) reigned supreme and security threats consisted primarily of pirates and the occasional “rogue state.” Pirates were regarded as a police function, rather than a truly naval function, and “rogue states” (normally consisting of independent star nations within the Solarian League’s sphere) were dealt with by Frontier Fleet and the Office of Frontier Security. The Solarian League was distant, overwhelming, and largely stabilizing, and as a result the Solarian League and its navy did not really factor into the SKM’s security calculations.

Outside the Solarian League, the security environment was divided between a relatively small number of multi-star system polities and a very large number of single-system star nations, the result of various colonization expeditions. The Star Kingdom of Manticore lay in the area that the Solarian League had labeled “the Haven Sector,” because the Republic of Haven (consisting of the Haven System itself and a handful of Haven’s daughter colonies) had by the seventeenth century PD become the center of a wealthy, dynamically expanding cluster of inhabited star systems anchored and supported by access from the Solarian League via the Manticoran Wormhole Junction. Unfortunately, by the middle of the nineteenth century PD, the situation in the Haven Sector had changed considerably.

From the Star Kingdom’s perspective, the significant political entities in a position to affect its security and strategic interests were, in order of size and/or military/industrial power (and exclusive of the Solarian League):

1.
The People’s Republic of Haven

2.
The Andermani Empire

3.
The Republic of Erewhon

4.
The Silesian Confederacy

Taking these in reverse order, the Confederacy was, in fact, larger in both spatial volume and population than the People’s Republic of 1850, but its central governing authority was essentially defunct, turning it into a “failed state” on an interstellar scale. Incapable of policing its own internal volume, it represented no direct threat to its neighbors except in so far as its weakness invited exploitation that might bring competing neighboring star nations into collision.

The Republic of Erewhon was a Solarian ally, although beginning to move away from that alliance in the face of the People’s Republic’s expansion and an Erewhonese perception that the Solarian League was unlikely to protect it against Havenite aggression, given the current relationship between the Solarian League and the People’s Republic. Erewhon’s uneasiness with the Office of Frontier Security’s increasingly open encroachment on independent star nations within the League’s self-defined sphere of interest also played a part in the progressive chill in Erewhon’s relations with the Solarians. The Republic’s military capability was restricted primarily to that of a system defense force, with a significant amount of firepower and access to current-generation, export-grade Solarian military technology, but without a significant power projection capability of its own.

The Andermani Empire, relatively removed from immediate proximity to the Star Kingdom of Manticore, was nonetheless a competitor with Manticore for influence, trade, and potential territorial expansion into the Silesian Confederacy as it crumbled. Its naval power was smaller than either the People’s Republic’s or the Star Kingdom’s, but still significant; it had a potent military tradition; and its location on the opposite side of the SKM from the People’s Republic lent its military capabilities a disproportionate strategic weight as a dangerous distraction from the primary threat.

The People’s Republic, after more than two T-centuries of disastrous economic policies and political corruption, had embarked upon an ambitious policy of interstellar expansion (under the so-called “Duquesne Plan”) in an effort to acquire the resources and economic muscle required to support its tottering, statist economy. Although the Haven System lay over 250 light-years from the Manticore Binary System, the Star Kingdom’s wealth and the strategic prize of its wormhole junction (see below) meant that Manticoran strategists must consider the threat which the expanding borders of the People’s Republic posed to their own security. The People’s Navy, despite several significant internal weaknesses (see below), was by far the largest and most experienced navy in the Haven Sector. Moreover, by 1900, it possessed a “tradition of victory” and confidence in its own capabilities bolstered by almost sixty T-years of steady, uniformly successful expansion through conquest.

The Star Kingdom itself was unique in the explored galaxy: a single-system political unit with no less than three inhabited planets and the location of the largest and wealthiest wormhole junction known to exist. Although its population density remained low, the Manticore Wormhole Junction conferred upon it a wealth and a political and economic “reach” which were quite astonishing. The Manticoran merchant marine was the largest single-system merchant marine in the galaxy, and in the mid-nineteenth century PD, it was expanding at a rapid rate. The Junction also turned the Manticore Binary System into a primary financial hub, supporting a very robust banking industry and stock market, backed by an extensive and sophisticated manufacturing sector. The Star Kingdom’s
per capita
income and standard of living were actually higher than those of the Solarian League’s core worlds, which explains what might make it a tempting target for Havenite expansion.