It is a categorical fact that we in the Federated Suns are at war, have been at war, in fact, for over a century and a half. The necessity for conducting military training maneuvers-wargames-when our armed forces have been stretched to the limit defending our frontiers for so long a time escapes me utterly. "Us Techs can't keep working magic forever, you know." Kathi Leander, on Klathandu IV. Techs throughout the human sphere are finding it harder and harder to come up with the spare parts necessary to keep military units at a reasonable level of combat efficiency. Do maneuvers such as Galahad hasten the onset of a new round of Dark Ages? What makes this so-called Operation Galahad even more preposterous is the realization that, for the past two decades at least, the vast, interstellar struggle for ascendancy known as the Third Successor State War has been bogged down in a hopeless deadlock, with none of the five combatants able to acheive significant military advantage over the others. After one hundred sixty, years of bloodshed, after so many, many years of watching the very fabric of our culture unravel in the scorching waste of war, perhaps the one good thing that can be said for the current situation is that the combatants are rapidly becoming too exhausted to continue the struggle! With resources stretched to the limit, with seemingly endless casualty lists, with those very keystones of the modern battlefield, the BattleMachs, vanishing faster than our ravaged industry can possibly replace them, we are faced with a new and daunting prospect ... that of peace, true and lasting peace, in our time! And what does Hansa Davion hope to achieve with his bellicose saber-rattling, these games and threats and childish gestures set in the guise of training exercises? What he hopes to gain, and what the actually gains may be two entirely different things. Whatever Davion expected to win through his Operation Galahad, what he has achieved in fact is a staggering expenditure in both war material and in treasury outlays--the taxpayers C-Bills, in fact. More, he has stirred up military activity in response in both the Kurita and the Liao camps, making new raids and reprisals more likely, where before mutual exhaustion had rendered them less likely. Perhaps worst of all, he has made accidental collision between the hostile forces along both marches more tharr likely-inevitable, in fact. If a century and a half of warfare has taught us anything, it is that a raid by one side will provoke a raid by the other, tit-for-tat, in an ongoing spiral of raids andcounter-raids which seemsto have no ending short of genocide. If Hansa Davion hopes to end the fighting between the sundered Houses of the old Star League, R seems to me he has two possible alternatives. He could mount an all-out, crushing invasion of the Federated Suns' old enemies, destroy their fleets and armies, sack Luthien and Sian and depose their leaders. Kurita and Liao are unlikely to cooperate in such a scenario of all-out warfare, and Davion would be well-advised to conserve our dwindling military strengthfor the attempt and not squander it in useless, wasteful gestures such as Operation Galahad. Alternatively, he could seek peace. House Kurita and House Liao both are as exhausted by centuries of nearly continuous, warfare as are we. Perhaps an offer of peace, a formal request for truce and negotiations towards a peaceful resolution of the differences between us would be received with relief rather than suspicion, But the key to such an offer would be a willingness to back down from confrontation, a willingness to demonstrate our own willingness to give peace a chance. In neither scenario is there room for the wasteful almost-war of Operation Galahad. More What is Hanse Up To? What is Hanse Up To? Operation Galahad: The Waste of Almost-War Operation Galahad: The Price of Vigilence Back to BattleTechnology Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1987 by Pacific Rim Publishing. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com