The Citizen Vice Admiral shrugged and moved his hands as if he were tossing something into the air above the briefing room table.

“If he’d come in more cautiously, kept the range open, he still had more than enough missile power to take the system. His battleships were no match for SDs on a one-for-one basis, but he had thirty-six of them, with two dozen battlecruisers to back them up. If he’d held the range open and pounded the Graysons with missiles, he would’ve had an excellent chance of annihilating the defenders anyway, but he didn’t.

“That was a tactical failure on his part once all the pieces were in play, but, frankly, any strategist who depends on convincing his adversaries to do what he wants has made the kind of mistake even amateurs should know enough to avoid. Oh, it’s always worth trying to mislead the other side, convince him you’re going to hit him at Point A when you actually intend to blow hell out of Point B, but you should never—ever—set up a strategy under which the enemy has to do what you want if your own operations are going to succeed.”

“But wasn’t that what Thurston did? You just said he’d brought along enough firepower to win if he’d used it properly even when the enemy didn’t do what he wanted.”

“He did, but he lacked the will and preparedness to use it properly because his entire strategy had been built towards avoiding the need for a real fight. Frankly, he may have figured he had no option but to set it up that way if he was going to convince his superiors to let him try it. I once met Citizen Secretary Kline on a visit to the Octagan, and I hope you won’t take this wrongly, Sir, but he was one of the worst arguments for civilian control of the military you could imagine.”

He watched Honeker’s eyes as he spoke, but the people’s commissioner didn’t even blink.

“Citizen Secretary Kline’s biggest problem as a war minister,” the citizen vice admiral went on after a moment, “was that he was too afraid of losing to let himself have a real shot at winning. To be fair, the Navy wasn’t doing all that well in stand-up fights at the time—we were still reorganizing after the Harris Assassination, and we had a lot of people getting on-the-job training—but Kline’s idea was to stand on the defensive and let the enemy come to us. I think he hoped that if we did that, the Manties would make the mistakes instead of us, but you may have noticed that they don’t seem to make all that many mistakes. Besides, a primarily defensive strategy has to be a losing one when your operational area is two or three light-centuries across. You can’t possibly picket every single star system in sufficient strength to defeat a determined attack, and trying to simply guarantees your opponent the right to pick his fights. Which, if he has a clue as to what he’s doing, means he’ll hit you in one of the places where you’re too weak to stop him. If you hope to give yourself any kind of chance of actually winning a war, you simply have to take some chances in order to act offensively. I think some old wet-navy admiral from Old Earth said something along the lines of ‘He who will not risk cannot win,’ and it’s still true today.