“One of the points on which I differed with Rajani was his belief that even if the Manties had a significant missile advantage, a big enough force of superdreadnoughts would have the anti-missile defenses to blunt their attack. I felt what had happened to Admiral Crandall suggested that wasn’t necessarily true; in my opinion, what’s happened to Admiral Filareta confirms that it wasn’t. Until we can develop and build capital ships that can stand up to the kind of enormous salvos Harrington employed against Eleventh Fleet—and I’m sorry to say it, Sir, but that’s going to take quite some time—capital ships aren’t going to be any more survivable against heavy Manty or Havenite firepower than battlecruisers. Or, to put it another way, battlecruisers are going to be as survivable as superdreadnoughts under those circumstances.

“Considering all of that, and considering the pod-launched missiles Technodyne made available to Eleventh Fleet, I believe our best option at this time is to go with a commerce and infrastructure-raiding strategy, carried out by battlecruisers and lighter units equipped with missile pods, while simultaneously pushing further development of the new Technodyne birds with the greatest urgency possible. We know the Manties and the Havenites have developed missiles which are at least as long ranged and which clearly have heavier warheads and substantially better electronic warfare capabilities than Technodyne’s do. Knowing that, we also know it’s possible to develop such missiles, and I’m confident we’ll find it’s faster to duplicate what they’ve done than they found it to develop the capabilities from scratch.

“What I’m proposing is what I believe is our best option for driving them back onto the defensive, or at least blunting their own offensives against us, in a way which will give us time to improve on the present Technodyne platform until, hopefully, we’ll be in a position to match their performance. I think it’s likely our individual missiles’ performance will still be inferior to theirs, but with sufficient superiority in numbers, that’s acceptable.”

“And you believe this is an attainable strategy?” Kolokoltsov asked.

“I believe it’s the closest to an achievable strategy available to us, Sir,” Kingsford replied unflinchingly. “Obviously, there are political and economic aspects to it which I’m not in a position to address. For example, the point Captain Gweon raised about possible direct taxation, since we’d definitely require large amounts of money. Nowhere near as much as we’d require if we were trying to modernize the Reserve or build new capital ships, but still a far bigger budget than the peacetime Navy’s. I realize that’s going to open an entirely different can of worms for the political leadership, but I’m not really qualified to address that aspect of the problem.”

Kolokoltsov nodded once again, lying back in his chair and thinking hard.