Operation Mirage

"A Legion that can be made to ask for sanction in three places at once will, for as long as the High Command takes to answer, be in none of them."Institute of Xenology, study of the Voor Legion, 2320

Operation Mirage was the opening campaign of the Voor War, fought by the Grand Armada of the United Nations of Earth in the Ciriban Gulf from September 2333 to January 2334. It was not a battle. It was a campaign of deception and small strikes, designed to confuse the Voor Legion's Gulf formations, draw them apart, and avoid the thing every officer in the Grand Armada had been trained to avoid: a meeting with concentrated hearths on the Legion's terms.

The campaign had three phases. Raids on Myrum and Kastaba on 12 September 2333 destroyed the depot from which the Legion's northern offensive was to stage, and the High Command cancelled the offensive on 4 October. Strikes into Achernar and Swur drew the Legion's Swur group forward to Media, where the First Battle of Media of 6 November convinced it that the federation's main strength lay in the south. Then, on 9 November, the Home Fleet left Media in secret and joined the Binami Fleet at Cirban, one jump from Haedus. The Haedus group, reduced to five hearths, sat a jump from a fleet of 200 hulls it did not know was there. Grand Admiral Tyson Vol issued the order for the Battle of the Mog on 2 January 2334.

Background

War Plan Purple

War Plan Purple had been written for this war since 2320. It rested on one observation from the Institute of Xenology's study of the Voor: every Voor engagement needed a General's sanction, and every General's move needed the High Command's. A Fleet Commander engaged on a General's sanction, a General moved a hearth group on the High Commander's, and the High Commander sat at Hiverion, a day's Voor jump from the Gulf and a day back. Purple's last paragraph assumed that the Legion would fight the way the study said it did. Mirage was the test.

Purple's authors also accepted a hard limit. A hearth's projectors reached 200,000 kilometres, two and a half times the range at which the Navy's heaviest rail could hurt it. Five concentrated hearths on their own terms would destroy any fleet the federation could put against them. The plan never sought a battle on those terms.

The Legion's plan

When the war began on 7 August 2333, the Legion's Gulf formations held twelve hearths in two groups. The Haedus group of seven stood under General Volar Vex, and the Swur group of five under General Ahnar Varn. A third General held the anchorage and the reserve at Kastaba. The Institute later recovered his name from the court's record as Ilvar Teshk. The Legion's plan was the doctrine's: a northern offensive through Myrum into Nomotar, to reduce the three forts there and open the road to Binami, while the Swur group held the south. It was to begin in October. The Navy's stealth pickets read the plan from where the hearths were, and the Institute confirmed it after the war.

Opposing forces

Grand Armada

Grand Admiral Tyson Vol commanded from the carrier Glory a fleet of 306 hulls, organised for the operation as three large fleets and three small ones.

• The Home Fleet, under Fleet Admiral Izabel Beattie, went to Nomotar on 4 August behind the forts Tethers, Manila and Chasma, to hold the northern gate.
• The Saolea Fleet, under Fleet Admiral Sean Santiago, held Saolea and Media in the south, to block the Swur group from the Saolea sector.
• The Binami Fleet, under Admiral Peter Ndambiri, held Cirban behind the forts Delambre, Hellas Gate and Pauldron, to keep pressure on the Haedus group and prevent reinforcement from Kastaba arriving unseen.
• The strike fleets, Alpha under Admiral Scarlet Maynard, Bravo under Admiral Valentina Zhao and Charlie under Admiral Rawiri Smith, each of four light cruisers, six heavy frigates or Ravens and twelve corvettes, were built to jump, strike and charge. In the Navy's phrase they were fleeting shadows, to attack fast and be gone before a sanction could answer.

Voor Legion

The Gulf's three formations, under the Generals at Haedus, Swur and Kastaba, held twelve hearths, 30 heavy cruisers, 50 light cruisers and 120 destroyers in July 2333. It was the largest Voor force the pickets had ever counted in one place, because the Legion had spent five years moving it there. Its sensor networks at each system's edge gave it warning of any arrival, and every Legion ship jumped 25 light years and charged in a day.

Phase one: Myrum and Kastaba

The first phase went for the Legion's rear. On 12 September 2333, in the same six-hour window, Alpha Fleet arrived at Myrum's edge and Bravo Fleet at Kastaba's. Each fell inward for four days while its coils charged, struck what the Legion had left at the system's Pillai radius, and jumped out on the fifth day, before any formation at Haedus or Swur could have been sanctioned to answer.

At Myrum, Alpha destroyed the patrol anchorage, the courier station, four destroyers and the depot that the northern offensive was to have staged from, for the loss of one Ardent-class corvette, the Rimmon, to a destroyer's projector on the way out. At Kastaba, against the reserve General's own anchorage, Bravo killed a light cruiser, burned the reserve's fuel depot and two hearths' worth of stores in orbit, and put missiles into the escort screen of the hearth Vur Duri. Zhao then withdrew, on Purple's rule that a strike fleet did not fight a hearth. Bravo lost two corvettes.

The raids did what the plan said they would. Vex's offensive had lost its depot, and his rear was now, for the first time in the Legion's memory, a place where enemy ships appeared. He asked Hiverion for sanction to secure Myrum and Kastaba before advancing. Hiverion, on the pickets' observation of the couriers, took nine days to give it. On 4 October 2333, on the Institute's reading of the court's record, the High Commander cancelled the northern offensive and ordered the Gulf formations to secure their supply lines and prevent further raids. It was the order the raids had been made to provoke. Purple's authors read the picket report of the cancellation on 20 October. The Navy's histories record that the plan's last paragraph was, from that day, no longer an assumption.

Phase two: Achernar and Swur

The second phase went for the Legion's temper. Through October and November Charlie Fleet under Smith, who had written the strike doctrine and now flew it, made a series of strikes into the Achernar and Swur systems, the Swur group's own anchorage and the system behind it. The strikes were designed to be seen rather than to destroy. They hit sensor nodes, courier stations and the Swur anchorage's outer works, so that Varn would ask for sanction to answer them and the High Command would give it.

The Legion answered as the plan wanted. In October Varn asked to move the Swur group forward to Media, the human system one jump from Swur, to catch the raiders at their base and open the southern road. On 28 October the High Commander, who had cancelled the north, sanctioned the south, and the Swur group's five hearths moved.

The First Battle of Media

The Swur group arrived at Media's edge on 2 November 2333, with five hearths, twelve cruisers and fifty destroyers, on a course for the Navy post and the two defence platforms at Media's Pillai radius. It found the Saolea Fleet and the Home Fleet waiting for it at the platforms, 140 hulls, which Vol had brought together in the ten days since the sanction. The battle of 6 November was fought at the platforms' range over nine hours, with light losses on both sides, because neither side wanted it. Varn withdrew to Swur on 7 November with his hearths intact. See First Battle of Media.

Varn's lesson was that the federation's main strength lay in the south. Through November the High Command shifted the Gulf's defensive posture south, moving two of the Haedus group's hearths to Swur and turning the Kastaba reserve's attention to the Saolea approaches.

The masterstroke

The Home Fleet did not stay at Media. On 9 November 2333, two days after Varn's withdrawal and before the Legion's couriers could have carried the battle's account to Hiverion, Beattie's fleet charged its coils at Media's edge and jumped north-west. It made three jumps over sixteen days and joined Ndambiri's Binami Fleet at Cirban, behind Delambre, Hellas Gate and Pauldron, on 25 November 2333. The Saolea Fleet stayed at Media with Charlie Fleet and made itself visible. The Legion's pickets at Media's edge saw a fleet that was still there, and the Voor court's record shows no report of the Home Fleet's departure until December.

The Navy's histories call the movement a masterstroke of psychological warfare, with some justice. It caught the High Command off guard, split the Gulf formations between the south they had been taught to fear and the north they had been taught was quiet, and left Haedus, the chokepoint the Navy meant to strike, with the weakest hearth group in the Gulf in front of it.

The watch on Haedus

Two Buckler-class stealth corvettes lay cold at Haedus's outer edge through December and January. Their count of the anchorage, five hearths, 18 heavy cruisers, 30 light cruisers and 90 destroyers, reached Cirban by courier on 29 December 2333. They also mapped the sensor network at the system's edge: 140 nodes in a shell at about 60 astronomical units. Vol issued the order for the operation the fleet would call the Mog on 2 January 2334.

Outcome

Operation Mirage cost the Grand Armada three corvettes, one of them the Focus, 400 strike craft and 1,100 dead. It cost the Legion an anchorage, two depots, a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser, twelve destroyers, its northern offensive and the initiative. On 1 January 2334 the Legion's Gulf formations were where the Navy had put them: seven hearths in the south, at Swur and the Saolea approaches, watching a fleet that was not the main one; five at Haedus, watching nothing; and the reserve at Kastaba, whose depot was ash.

Significance

Mirage proved War Plan Purple's central assumption before the war's first decisive battle. The Legion's chain of sanction made it slow, and its doctrine made it concentrate where it was attacked, and a fleet that could jump, strike and be gone could use both. The Navy's staff college at Fortaleza teaches Mirage as the model of a deception campaign, and its three phases, the rear, the temper and the stroke, are the course's structure. The method returned in every campaign of the war: at the Mog, at Exedor in 2336 and at Leesak in 2337.

Order of battle

BOOK SOURCES

1. Solar Eternal, Part VIII, §8.1 "War Plan Purple" and §8.4 "The Voor Legion"
2. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.1 "Operation Mirage"
3. Solar Eternal, Part IX, §9.2 "Clash of Titans: The Battle of the Mog"