House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion (68 page)

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 addition 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.)

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.