He paused again, this time without grinding his teeth together, and glanced around the conference room. The expressions on the faces looking back at him had become at least a little more thoughtful as he spoke, and he allowed himself to feel a very slight flicker of satisfaction at the evidence that his own reasoned manner was having an effect.

“Whatever their intentions, though,” he continued, “the second point I raised is probably the more important one. In the final analysis, ships of the wall are only platforms for weapons. What really matters is the weapons those platforms carry, and at the moment nothing we know suggests that the Republic has somehow managed to overcome the technological gap between our capabilities. While Theisman and Pritchart may have managed to build a shipyard complex somewhere that we didn’t know about, the mere fact that a yard exists says nothing about the sophistication of its technical capabilities. It’s going to take longer for us to develop that sort of information, but Admiral Jurgensen’s technical people have been running continual threat update assessments of the Republic’s technology.”

He made certain that neither his tone nor his expression revealed his awareness that he was heading out onto thin ice.

“By their most pessimistic estimates, the Republic’s R&D is still years from matching our capabilities. In that regard, it’s significant that Theisman hasn’t claimed that they’ve managed to put any CLACs into commission. Building the carriers themselves isn’t any more difficult than building SD(P)s. In fact, it’s a simpler problem in naval design. So the fact that they apparently don’t have any of them may well be an indicator that their tech base still isn’t up to the task of producing a LAC design good enough to justify building carriers to put it on.

“Obviously, that’s nothing more than a hypothesis at this point. We certainly can’t prove or disprove it on the basis of the evidence available to us. But if it’s true, then it’s just one more indication of the wide gap between our basic military technology and theirs, and that’s the significant point. Until they can deploy weapons systems which match the range and accuracy of ours—or, perhaps even more important, the defensive capabilities of our electronic warfare systems—the actual tonnage ratios are relatively unimportant.”

“Unimportant?” New Kiev repeated. The single word came out with an utter lack of emphasis which, in its own way, was as emphatic as a snort of disbelief.

“Relatively unimportant,” he corrected in a voice just barely on the warm side of frosty. “Obviously that’s not the same thing as ‘insignificant,’ Marisa. But as Eighth Fleet demonstrated in Operation Buttercup, capability trumps simple numbers. To put it in its simplest possible terms, if our ships can kill their ships at twice their effective range, then it really doesn’t matter if they have more hulls than we do. All it does is give our fire control crews more targets.”

“I see what you’re saying,” High Ridge said, and his voice was noticeably warmer than it had been at the beginning of the meeting. Which, Janacek knew, was because he wanted to find his First Lord’s reassurances reassuring.