“In addition, even including its Silesian territories, the Talbott Sector, and all of the Havenite star systems combined, their alliance has a much smaller number of star systems. They can’t afford the attrition we can, yet they have enough systems that if we can compel them to divert forces to protect them, we can significantly reduce the striking power of their fleets.

“Moreover, as Captain Gweon’s just pointed out, their ability to sustain the war effort against us is largely dependent on their ability to absorb the economic power we’re losing. So anything we can do to prevent them from doing that would be very much worthwhile. Attacking their commerce and the support facilities in areas trading with them—both of which are legitimate targets under the rules of warfare—is one way to slow that absorption down. If we can in the process inflict sufficient pain on people who’ve attempted to shift from our camp to their camp, we might also be able to discourage further defections. And perhaps most importantly of all, the real focus of the strategy would be to force them to divert combat power from offense to defense. If we’re hitting them everywhere we possibly can with in-and-out raids, they’ll be forced to tie down millions of tons of warships in system protection and convoy defense.”

He paused, and Kolokoltsov nodded slowly, expression thoughtful.

“All right, that makes sense,” he said. “I’m not clear on why you think we’ll be able to do that, though, given what you and Captain Gweon have both just said about the Manties’ current tactical advantages.”

“Sir, the strategy I’m proposing would depend primarily on battlecruisers and lighter units, not ships-of-the-wall. That would mean we wouldn’t face the expense of trying to mobilize a vast tonnage of capital ships that would only tie up manpower, suck up resources, and provide virtually nothing in terms of actual combat power. We already have a lot of battlecruisers in Frontier Fleet, plus those assigned to Battle Fleet, of course. And we can build more battlecruisers a lot faster than we could build more superdreadnoughts. Moreover, I think we have to assume the ‘exaggerated reports’ of Manty increases in inertial compensator efficiency may actually have been accurate. If that’s the case, our battlecruisers probably come a lot closer to being able to match the acceleration curves of their superdreadnoughts. Our capital ships certainly wouldn’t be able to.