“She’s always been careful to maintain a faction on the Imperial Council, Sire.”
“Another source of side income, Mr. Saaret?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“I see. Well, keep an eye on her, Mr. Saaret.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“You called for me, Your Majesty?”
“Yes, Mr. Pullman. Be seated.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Mr. Pullman, how old is the Treaty of Earth?”
“Several hundred years, Sire. I wouldn’t know off the top of my head.”
“Are we a signatory, Mr. Pullman?”
“Yes, Sire. We did not participate in the drafting, but we did sign the treaty at some point. Well after it was established, as I recall.”
“As I understand it, Mr. Pullman, the Treaty places limitations on the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”
“That is correct, Sire.”
“Very well. Mr. Pullman, I need to know exactly what those limitations are, when they apply and when they don’t. The constraints and limitations, and the specific circumstances of their application. You are charged with researching these issues and providing me with a report. Your report should includes references to the text of the treaty itself, by chapter and verse, as well as discussion of any precedents arising from it.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“This work is to be done by the most limited group possible, and the report is to be confidential to me alone.”
“Very well, Sire.”
Dunham called a meeting of the three operational heads of the Imperial military forces: Imperial General Daggert, commander of the Imperial Guard, Imperial General Martin Kraus, Commandant of the Imperial Marines, and Imperial Admiral Howard Leicester, Chief of Naval Operations of the Imperial Navy.
General Kraus and Admiral Leicester, whose staff worked closely together on issues that spanned their services, rode together in Kraus’s car to the Imperial Palace.
“I wonder what His Majesty wants to talk to us about,” Kraus said.
“Hard to say, Marty,” Leicester said. “I’ve never had much to do with the Empress. I didn’t even meet the last one. That was all up to the bureaucracy.”
“My situation exactly. So it’s definitely strange to be called to meet with the new Emperor.”
“And so soon. It’s only been a couple of days.”
“Then again, Howard, he is a military man. Served in the Imperial Marines. Received the Cross of Sintar. Legitimately, by the way, not by buying it.”
“Well, it’ll be interesting. Same old stuff, or something new?”
“New, I think,” Kraus said. “That leaves open a whole lot of possibilities, though.”
For this meeting, Dunham did not wear his Imperial Guard uniform, but wore instead a simple business suit. He would otherwise, symbolically at least, be outranked by everyone in the room. He wore the small version of the Cross of Sintar on his lapel, the Empire’s highest decoration for valor, which none of the others had received. This would more and more become his standard work dress.
They were waiting in the conference room when Perrin opened the door for him and he entered. They all stood as he took his seat at the table.
“Be seated.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” they all answered.
“The reason I called you all here is your reporting structure is gone. It will not be replaced with another civilian bureaucracy. Instead, I will be your direct report, and act as commander in chief. There will be no civilian reporting structure for the Imperial military’s operational commands. They will, now and in the future, report to the Throne.”
Kraus and Leicester, who had been nervous about being called to the palace, visibly relaxed.
“With your leave, Sire, that sounds like a very good idea to me,” Leicester said.
“Seconded,” Kraus said.
Daggert simply nodded.
“The promotions board is also gone,” Dunham said. “We would be better off promoting people by time in grade alone than to hand-select those most willing to play the patronage and corruption game they were running. That is not to disparage any of you gentlemen. One has to play the game at the table, and I understand that. But we will not be operating in the same manner going forward.”
Nods all around at that.
“We all know people who shouldn’t have the commands they have, and others who were passed over for command for refusal to play the game. I want you to review your first two levels of subordinates for those situations and correct them, and then propagate it down through your service. This is completely on your authority as the commanding officer of your service and without the possibility of being overridden or countermanded by some civilian pocket-stuffer. Do you understand, gentlemen?”
“Yes, Sire,” Leicester said.
“Sounds good, Sire,” Kraus said.
“I want you to be fastidious in avoiding favoritism and ass-kissing in your personnel moves, gentlemen. We’re all adults here, I hope, and we can do without that nonsense in crafting a military that values excellence in military skill and conduct.
“In the same vein, I suspect there are ideas that have been pooh-poohed and waved off not because they weren’t good ideas, but because they ran against some special interest somewhere in the bureaucracy or their benefactors. A sort of general don’t-rock-the-boat attitude, let’s just keep doing things this way. I want you to seek those out and re-evaluate them with the only criterion being the benefit to the service, special interests be damned. We know they’re out there. Surface them and look into them.
“In short, you now each own your service, gentlemen. Do right by it. Make it the military it should be. The sword of the Emperor, not the handmaiden of the bureaucracy.”
“Excellent,” Leicester said.
“Thank you, Sire,” Kraus said.
“On to the next matter. You have weapons and ships that are not as reliable, not as capable, as they should be. My research staff has uncovered why that is and how it happened. It will not happen going forward. The acquisition process is being restructured. For every class of weapon, the services will be given multiple choices of approved weapons. You will then select from those approved weapons the ones that meet your needs best, which perform best in your estimation, not those selected by some empty suit in an office somewhere. Some REMF who’s never been shot at is not going to select weapons for our people at the pointy end of the stick. Not anymore.
“Now, to correct our current situation, we need to know what the worst offenders are. Which classes of ships, which types of weapons, need replacing or upgrading most desperately. I want to see from each of you, within the month, a prioritized list of what systems are most problematic. We are going to upgrade or replace all that crap, so our soldiers and spacers aren’t being killed by their own equipment. If our enemy wants our people dead, they’re going to have to kill them themselves.”
“Yes, Sire,” Leicester said.
“Outstanding, Sire,” Kraus said.
“Let’s move on. How many counter-insurgency operations do we have underway right now? How many places are we fighting?”
“About seven hundred, Sire,” Kraus said. “Which seems like a great deal, but out of a hundred and fifty thousand planets, it’s under half a percent.”
“Let’s take Wollaston as an example with which I am personally familiar. How long have we been fighting there?”
“Twenty years, Sire, give or take,” Kraus said.
“And has the situation there gotten better or worse over time?”
“Actually worse, Sire,” Kraus said. “It’s the rules of engagement. We’re so worried about killing a non-combatant, we can’t get at the combatants. And they know it, and take measures to make sure we can’t get at them.”
“And why are the rules of engagement set up that way?”
Kraus and Leicester looked at each other.
“Speak frankly, gentlemen. I’m a big boy, and I
can handle the truth. Particularly given I already know the answer.”
“The weapons manufacturers don’t want these situations resolved, Sire,” Kraus said. “In all these situations, we expend ammunition, we wear out weapons systems, we require additional materiel. They’re making a fortune off these insurgencies. If they were resolved, their revenues would go down significantly.”
Dunham nodded.
“Thank you for being honest, General Kraus. I want frank discussions with you, just as you do from your commanders. Or should, anyway.
“I agree with you. The people making those decisions – the decisions about rules of engagement – in the civilian bureaucracy were all being paid off by the weapons manufacturers. That will no longer happen. We will make the rules of engagement for our forces, you and I, and we will make those rules of engagement such that we will resolve these situations by winning them.
“To that end, I am going to make Wollaston an example of what one can expect when one is in revolt against the Sintaran Empire. General Kraus, I want you to draw up plans for the expeditious withdrawal of all our expeditionary forces on the continent of Oryssia on Wollaston.”
“Withdrawal, Sire?” Kraus asked.
“Yes, General Kraus. Admiral Leicester, let’s get the proper resources heading in that direction at your earliest opportunity. My plan for ending the insurgency on Wollaston is going to involve your forces, so you should include combat elements, not just transport ships. Err on the side of too much power, if you would. Way too much.”
Kraus and Leicester looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
“In the meantime, I recommend you read the history of the Emperor Hadrian’s resolution of the Judean Revolt.”
“Emperor Hadrian, Sire?” Leicester asked.
“Yes, Admiral Leicester. Hadrian, Emperor of Rome. About three thousand years ago.”
“How does that apply to Wollaston, Sire?” Kraus asked.
“We’re going to see if going Roman on them still works, General Kraus. And then we’ll see how many of these other insurgencies and their foreign supporters conclude that provoking the Sintaran Empire is no longer desirable.
“Or even survivable.”
“What do you think?” Kraus asked Leicester in the car after their meeting with the Emperor.
“I think I need to read up on the Emperor Hadrian.”
“You and me both.”
New Ideas
The Zoo was exciting these days. Valery Markov had given the group the assignment of coming up with a new administrative structure for the Empire. It was like throwing raw meat into a lion cage.
Those deeply engaged in an existing project, like the rewrite of Imperial Law, kept on at their own projects, but all the loose horsepower tore into the new problem.
Database whiz-kid Jae-Seong Park took on the task of determining just how much of the government was left in place. He queried the Imperial government’s personnel database for every Imperial employee on Sintar who was above a specific pay grade, linking them to their supervisor, and then queried through the VR system for who was no longer an active connection.
Over the course of three days, he built a map of the Imperial government’s bureaucracy as it was prior to the civil war, and color-coded red the entry for everyone who was non-responsive to VR and presumed dead. He then color-coded blue the entry for everyone who no longer had a surviving superior in the structure. There were forty-two hundred department heads who had been cut off from the Emperor by the implosion of the Imperial Council building.
He then set to mapping the Imperial Police offices and their reporting structure. That would actually take longer, much longer, because there were so many Imperial Police offices on planets across the Empire.
Other groups wrestled with possible architectures to replace the prior administrative structure of the Empire. One group in particular was determined to not just replicate the past.
“OK, so what have we learned so far?” Peggy Martin asked.
“There’s been a lot of different ways to administer a large government, but most of them don’t work very well?” Karan Singh said.
“More like all of them, eventually,” Charlotte Proust said.
“Well, it really divides into two categories, right?” Liao Jiahong asked. “The structure, and how you pick people to fill it. As for picking people, there’s aristocratic, plutocratic, nepotistic, meritocratic, democratic, and factional. The structures tend to be either vertical or horizontal. Rome and other ancient civilizations tended to be horizontal, with all the provinces being run by a provincial governor, while the United States and the other industrial states of pre-space history tended to be vertical, with a cabinet minister or secretary running each portion, dividing governance up by their functional areas.”
“And then you have the British Empire at its height,” Proust said, “which had a cabinet government at home as well as provincial governors in its possessions.”
“That’s sort of what we had as well, right?” Martin asked. “Sector governors are horizontal, but the Imperial Council was vertical.”
“Yes, but one has to be weaker than the other,” Liao said. “The Sintaran Empire has been a weak-sector government, with a strong Council. Rome was more of a strong-province government, with a weaker central council.”
“What about the other measure?” Proust asked. “How people are picked.”
“Let’s see,” Singh said. “The British Empire at its height was largely aristocratic. The United States of America was nominally democratic but arguably plutocratic, especially as it went on. The Soviet Union was factional, in that the best party members ran everything. The Chinese Empire was a mixed bag. Under some emperors it was meritocratic, under some it was plutocratic, and under some it was nepotistic.”
“Those last were the worst,” Liao said. “Just because you’re the emperor’s brother doesn’t mean you have a clue how to govern a province.”
“Are we going at this all wrong?” Proust asked. “What about using computers to parse out the Emperor’s orders to the bureaucracy?”
“That’s been tried, and failed pretty spectacularly,” Martin said. “Remember the Kingdom of Verdoc?”
“Ouch,” Proust said. “Yeah, that got out of hand pretty quickly. Never mind.”
“We might be able to do something else, though,” Singh said. “Using VR. How about something like this? The Emperor makes his policy preferences known to the department heads, in monthly or bi-weekly talks in VR. And there’s a group of Advisers. Maybe fifty of them or so. When a department head needs direction, he sends the question to the Advisers – you know, posts it on a board in the VR or something – and any Adviser who wants to answer can. They can even argue among themselves. Advisers who like another Adviser’s answer can just check that answer. Then let the departments run themselves. How many reports are out there now, given the top three tiers of the bureaucracy are gone?”
“About four thousand, Jay said. He’s still nailing it down,” Proust answered.
“Four thousand department heads, running loose? The mind boggles,” Liao said.
“Maybe not,” Martin said. “There were only forty people on the Imperial Council, and look how out on a limb they got.”
“And four thousand makes it better?” Liao asked.
“I think it does,” Martin said. “The Emperor could remove any of the department heads with little political impact, unlike with the prior Council. And none of them have enough power to cause real trouble. They would have to team up, in some pretty big groups. In Karan’s plan, I would expect the Emperor could also remove any of the Advisers as well, basically for giving bad advice. Then governance becomes spelling out the policy goals, and monitoring the Advisers and the department heads. But there’s no big concentration of power below the Emperor to metastasize into a bloc that actively obstructs Imperial policy the way the Council did for twenty years.”
“I think we ought to write it up and p
ost it,” Proust said. “Let the group tear into it. But I have to admit, I kind of like it.”
“What do you think of Karan’s proposal?” Oleg Petrov asked.
“I think he’s crazy,” Rachel Macintyre said. “Four thousand direct reports? How is anybody supposed to manage that?”
“But what if you put just one layer of managers back in?” Petrov asked. “More like five or six hundred section heads. With the setup Singh’s talking about, that might work.”
“How many are here now?” Macintyre asked, looking around the zoo.
“VR says it’s two hundred and five,” Petrov said.
“OK, so five or six hundred might work. More than that is too much, though. I think, anyway. The next question is how do you pick those five hundred people.”
“Well, if you gathered the departments together in groups the way they were before, you could have the department heads elect their boss. Who of their number do they want to work for?”
“Hmm. Maybe. Could work, I guess. Maybe not in every case. But I guess that’s why the Emperor gets to kick people out of that group, right? Maybe then the department heads have to elect someone else.”
“That would work. Let’s write up the modification and see where it goes.”
“Did you see this thread from Karan?” Ivan Orlov asked.
“Yeah. What do you think?” Maria Estevez asked.
“I’m not sure. I think it has possibilities. I don’t like the idea of bosses, though. Why don’t the people in the same area just use each other as a support group?”
“Like a group meeting, but without the boss? That could work,” David Finley said.
“They could still select one of their number to attend the Emperor’s addresses, though,” Barb Gibson said. “To keep the numbers manageable.”
“Well, in VR, everybody could watch his address. So I don’t understand the issue there,” Orlov said.
“Not everybody could ask questions, though,” Gibson said.
“That’s true of any group above about a dozen people. So I don’t see questions being possible anyway,” Orlov said.
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