But that was the real crux of the matter, when she came right down to it. Any military organization had a pronounced tendency to take its direction from the attitudes of its senior commanders, and the complacency and arrogance of the political admirals currently running the Admiralty were reflected among an unfortunately large and growing proportion of the Navy’s officers. The manpower reductions mandated as part of the build down had been disproportionately concentrated among experienced personnel, particularly in the senior noncom and enlisted grades, which helped explain some of the problem, but it certainly didn’t excuse it. Total numerical reductions in the regular officer corps had been lower than anywhere else, since the first priority had been to release reservist officers back to the merchant marine and civilian economy. That had actually increased the proportion of active-duty officers who were Academy graduates, but all too many of the better regulars had become so disgusted with the Janacek Admiralty that they had voluntarily gone on half-pay status and followed their reserve fellows into merchant service. The ones who remained were all too often the ones who found the current Admiralty attitude a comfortable fit. Which didn’t say anything good about their own training and readiness attitudes.

It wasn’t anything overt enough for the officers who hadn’t been affected to effectively combat. It was just… sloppiness. It was the Navy’s smugly comfortable belief in its own God-given superiority to anyone who might be foolish enough to cross swords with it. The belief that the inherent supremacy of the RMN would suffice to crush any opponent… which made the unrelenting drills and training exercises which had always been so much a part of the Royal Navy seem superfluous.

The inexperience of the LAC crews which had been assigned to Alice Truman’s CLACs was one thing. The huge expansion in LACs which the Janacek Admiralty had undertaken as its low-cost answer to rear area security had spread the surviving combat-experienced LAC crews all too thin, and the LAC groups had taken their own losses of experienced personnel. The vast majority of her own LAC crews had been assigned to their present duties only after the truce had brought active operations to a close, which certainly explained their rough edges. Whether or not it justified them was another matter entirely. The people who’d trained them had had access to all of the after-action reports of the COLACs who’d actually led the Shrikes and Ferrets in combat. They’d also had Truman’s original training syllabus and notes to draw upon. But no one would have guessed that from the initial performance of the LAC groups of green, inexperienced crews Honor had been assigned for Sidemore Station.

Yet however understandable her LACs deficiencies might be, her battle squadrons weren’t a lot better, and with far less excuse. The same complacency and lack of attention to routine training had spread its subtle malaise through the ships of the wall, as well. Especially the older, pre-pod classes. Those ships were almost universally regarded as obsolescent, at best, and even the personnel assigned to them seemed to have come to regard them as secondary units. As little more than backup for the SD(P)s.