United in Duty, Unmatched in Resolve

LORE: The United Nations Unified Naval Command and Fleet Design 2500 (Pt. 1)

Mar 28, 2023

IN MUNERE CONCORDIA, IN FORTITUDINE INCOMPARABILIA

Origins

The United Nations Unified Naval Command (UNINAVCOM or UN-UNC, founded 2347) is one of two prominent United Nations military structures that sprung out of the 2337-2343 Minervan War of Independence, the first interstellar war, the other being its sister organization, the Composite Marine Forces Command (COMPMARFORCOM).

After the invention of faster-than-light slipstream travel in the twenty-third century, experiments with the new drives showed an outsized influence of gravitational force at long distances inside the slipstream, and an anomalously high mass concentration that only appeared in the higher dimensions of slipspace travel in one of the moons of the habitable exoplanet ε Eridani III. The planet would soon be named Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom, missing among the major planets of the Solar System. The anomalous slipstream influence of her moon, Aegis, came to provide its planet a 'natural harbor' in slipspace, and the planet itself was a natural target for colonization as unlike the recently terraformed Mars, it would not require a centuries long project to transform it into a garden. It already was one.

Under the blessing of the United Nations, countries and corporations seeded the resource-rich, environmentally pristine world with colonization projects, the first waves departing from Mars, the cradle of FTL travel. The early days were rough, with native, nonsapient wildlife and pathogens wreaking havoc on the settlements. Colonists banded together to survive and rekindled the spirit of their forebears on the Red Planet— a spirit of individual sacrifice for the collective good, fundamental to all spacefarers but forgotten as the centuries progressed. Minervan society developed therefore in a way that came to see the colonial authorities as exploitative, and revolted against them starting in 2337 in the Battle of Hunter's Point, when rioters stormed the garrison there and siezed the weapons inside. A bloody and violent six years followed, with UN member nations' ships pouring into the Epsilon Eridani system as fast as their second-gen slipstream drives would allow, united under the banner of the UN Peacekeeping Mission to the Eridani Colonies (MERIDCOL). MERIDCOL was clunky and inharmonious, intended only to keep the peace as a military police force for the colonies, with national militaries exercising considerable levels of discretion within operational objectives and parameters as it gradually shifted into a military role. The Minervan independence movement held no shortage of unity, even seeing disaffected UN and corporate law enforcement/military personnel defecting to their ranks.

Yet the birth of the Unified Naval Command lies in the death knell of the old militaries. Backed into a corner in 2343, the Independence Forces had pushed UN resistance back to a single section of a single city. Seongnam City was one of the oldest colonies on the planet and held in its Uptown a MERIDCOL garrison. The Loyalist Governor of Seongnam, Loyalist civilians fearful of retribution, and a group of American, Canadian, Federal Chinese, Dutch, Martian, and Korean troops were holed up in the bunker below, having mostly withdrawn from the aboveground compound which had nearly been overrun under force of arms and siezed UN armor over the course of the month-long siege. The Secretary-General had ordered Canadian Army General Henri 'Hank Hell' Havelock to return the trapped Loyalists and soldiers alive to Sol. Havelock swore to do so, but bucked against what he saw as handicapping restrictions of his command, lobbying the Canadian government to approve the release of tactical nuclear weapons on evening political opinion shows, claiming space to ground bombardment was the only way to end the war in the UN's favor. The Prime Minister folded under immense public pressure, and Havelock's theory would recieve one reluctant test before being consigned to the dustbin of history with all the other mass murderers.

On March 10, 2343, a single space-to-space nuclear missile, hastily rigged with a heat shield and reprogrammed for ground attack, was launched from orbit onto the city block that held the garrison, the first use of such a device since the twenty-first century. The weapon was considered a tactical device for the purposes of space warfare, but with ground-bombardment nuclear weapons rare in this day and age, and none on hand in ε Eridani, it was considerably stronger than necessary for the job. Predictably, the attacking Independence Forces were devastated, organic and synthetic alike. However, the devastation spread beyond the compound alone, and many civilians who had not evacuated the area were killed. The scenes of destruction were seen the worlds over, and while UN dropships successfully extracted their personnel from the bunker amidst the radioactive ash, even the most ardent supporters of the war in Sol could hardly justify an intensified campaign behind Havelock's doctrine. A final, futile attempt was made to return troops to the surface by one of the space elevators some months later, after the Minervans had managed to put together a comprehensive anti-orbital defense, which resulted in a one-sided slaughter of the invading forces.

Seeking an easy political off-ramp, the United Nations brought the Independence Forces to the table, used Havelock as a scapegoat for their lack of oversight of national forces, and negotiated a treaty to end the War, granting Minerva's Republics independence and a seat at the UN General Assembly. The seat was never filled. However, one of the promises the UN made at the Treaty of Bradbury would not go unfulfilled, seeing fruition just a few years later. The UN would bring its wild dogs to heel. National militaries would never again be allowed to act unilaterally outside the UN chain of command.

The Unified Naval Command was born.

A Word on Doctrine

The doctrine of the United Nations Unified Naval Command (UN-UNC) may best be summarized by the term independent interdependence. While individual units of a UN fleet are often intended to be deployed in groups that specialize in one particular aspect of the battle, these specialist 'blocks' are never the entirety of a battlegroup, instead placed into the larger puzzle that is a UN-UNC deployment. Much like the nations that fund and ostensibly own them, UN ships are capable of considerable degrees of independent action, but will usually never act alone— rather, UN battlegroups will seem almost 'fluid', as a larger group will split or reallocate its forces to better suit a given tactical picture, giving individual Captains great latitude to seize and act upon the initiative, and even improvise or modify the operational plan to a certain extent.
As a result of the expectation that individual warships be capable of fairly independent operation, the UN shies away from hyperspecialized warship designs, favoring a more multi-role approach. UN ships are sturdy and ruggedized, typically fitted with a greater degree of armor than their Minervan counterparts, and crews are extensively trained in damage control and direct in-field equipment repair without relying on outside assistance from depot bases, stations, or ships. This has given UN-UNC sailors of some rates a legendary reputation of being able to fix just about anything, including the EMPAC coilgun cannons whose reputation for difficult maintenance was only surpassed by their reputation for extreme precision at the edge of their range envelopes.
Through the concept of the "Fluid Battlegroup", a term coined by Admiral Chandra Jimoh in 2474 at the introduction of the doctrine (the goal of which was to avoid the rigid inflexibility of UN-UNC naval units demonstrated in the Maybe War of 2470), a UN-UNC battlegroup is constructed as a 'core group' supplemented by 'mission units'. The core group will typically be matched with a redundant array of possible mission units, which it will cross-train with in a series of frequent, recurring exercises. They will also establish close and enduring relationships with their potential mission units, even when not deployed together. This promotes cohesion in what would otherwise be ad-hoc formations, and encourages a smooth 'handoff' when a mission unit may depart one core group for another one they are also affiliated with. The modular nature of this fleet structure enables a battlegroup to be tailored to the mission, and to exercise a considerable amount of autonomy in decisions regarding force allocation— as no mission group is totally helpless on its own, some commanders have taken to using their attached groups to construct 'fleets within fleets'.
A common mission group is the Destroyer 'wolfpack'. A wolfpack is a group of Destroyer-sized subcapital ships, such as DDKs, DDEs, DDGs, IAQs, DAGs, or DLGs, tailored to operation independent of capital ships and to act as a space action group in their own right, leveraging maneuverability and unpredictability to punch above their weight and provide effective space control. Wolfpacks are commonly seen attached to larger battlegroups and broken off to 'hunt' when the time is right, but are often also found on independent patrol.
Through a 'system of systems' approach, the UN-UNC's commanders had hoped to outmatch their Minervan adversaries, no matter what shape or form the threat would take— in order to ensure a victory that may not be swift, but would certainly be final, over the UN's greatest foe in its centuries-long existence. While initially suffering losses, even having been pushed so far back that Minervan boots made landfall deep into Sol's Outer Planets, the resolve and mettle of United Nations Unified Forces at Europa broke the well-laid plans of the Minervan military and quickly seized the initiative, pushing the FMR back into the bloody pre-Crisis stalemate. In this Guide, we hope to familiarize you, the reader, with the vessels that fought the Fools' War 'United In Duty, Unmatched in Resolve' in a neutral and unbiased manner; both in memory of the people who fought and perished aboard them under the flags of a hundred different countries, and in hopes that such bloodshed shall be avoided among humanity in the generations to come.
—Kane’s Fighting Ships of the Fools' War, pg. 4 (2539)

Fleet Design 2500

Fleet Design 2500 (FLTDES 2500), began as a case study commissioned by the Hessert administration (2484-2494) into a refined and streamlined Navy for the twenty-sixth century. It is built on the lessons of the Maybe War of 2470 and exists largely against the will of the Secretary-General that commissioned it. Shaped by Admiral Chandra Jimoh's vision of victory by fluidity, the warships of this new century would need to be capable, resilient, and above all, versatile. Fleet Design 2500 did away with several hullcodes entirely, for example eliminating the traditional demarcation between escort (DDE) and hunter/killer (DDK) destroyers in favor of multimission guided munitions destroyers (DDG). Initially meeting much pushback by Secretary-General Shirui Hessert (Colonist-Solidarity, MFD) herself after realizing that the study called for a larger rather than smaller Navy— contravening a central pillar that the postwar détente between Sol and Epsilon Eridani rested upon— Fleet Design 2500 was an ailing shadow of itself by the time the cold-warrior SecGen James 'Jimmy' Liu (Liberal-Labour-National, AUS) took power in 2504, who built what the program became today.

Under the Liu administration, FLTDES 2500 begun its shock-and-awe campaign against its budget limitations. The turbocharged shipbuilding program was the basis of the Liu administration's goal of a 6000-ship Navy, and managed to successfully fund all its mandates— and more. While some of the more cost-effective subcapital ship programs had been in full swing even before the new administration, it was now that the keystones of the new Navy were finally approved— the DRN-277 OLYMPUS-Class dreadnought was long touted as an infrastructure and jobs program for the Martian shipyards that were to design her, but moreover, she would be a vehicle to finally fund the long-desired renovations to the UN-owned Elysium Island Naval Shipyard, which had been neglected under previous administrations who had shied away from increasing defense spending, and was the only yard large enough to construct her. Eventually cancelled in favor of the derived SCV-001 THARSIS-Class supercarrier, the DRN-277, or ‘drain-277’ as its budgetary critics often called it, nonetheless provided the impetus necessary to build the Elysian Channel Space Tether and rennovate the ailing shipyard. Under the Liu administration and the political advocacy of the Naval Policy Working Group, a group of intelligence and analysis professionals within the UNC and the UN Intelligence Community, funding was secured for a huge production run of five of the behemoth warships of the THARSIS-Class SCV at the cost of the 6000-ship Navy, slashing 800 of the 2000 ordered SERPENTIS-Class DDG to fund THARSIS, TRANQUILITY, PACIFIC, ATLANTIC, and IMBRIUM. Only THARSIS would be completed by the start of the Fools' War (then known to the UN as the Second Minervan War, or in the parlance of both UN and Minervan navies, ‘The Big One’), and would be pulled from her testing program at the Space Warfare Development Range in Epsilon Indi to fight the War.

The Naval Policy Working Group was a controversial yet influential organization, with its opaque structure and unelected membership raising suspicion among the media— and proving to be an evergreen wellspring of conspiracy theories— even as more public-facing members of it sought to sway the public to their side. The NPWG butted heads with the Liu administration and what they called the 'Destroyer Mafia', with their demands to cut DDG production in favor of large, unproven capital supercarriers seen as strategically reckless by some, fiscally irresponsible by others, and outright sacrilege by adherents of the 6000-ship Navy. The NPWG came to be known as the 'Carrier Mob' in reply, and while the Secretary for Defense referred to the early 25-noughts as a 'gang war' in military procurement, the remark was not far off. Following UN and FMR warships coming to blows at the Akrotiri Skirmish in July 2506, however, the NPWG had come out on top, arguing that the Minervans' defeat of the UN forces at Akrotiri proved that while destroyer wolfpacks were effective, they were not invincible nor were they capable of overmatch except in excessive numbers that would be practically impossible to achieve. This train of reasoning was questioned by many, but with Liu's 6000-ship Navy already on its deathbed due to budgetary bloat and cost overruns across a number of defense spending projects— particularly the infamously disastrous CGV-174 ARCTURUS-Class heavy cruiser and the Aerospace Dominance Fighter Program— he caved to the Working Group and authorized the construction of the THARSIS-Class SCV in full.

The UNC Today (2523)

ALYA-Class Destroyer Leader GNS ACHIMOTA (DLG-144). The ALYA-Class is a derivative of the SERPENTIS-Class DDG and one of the many fruits of FD2500.

In the shadow of FLTDES 2500, the UN-UNC stands at 5,265 ships, the majority of which are either corvettes, fast attack boats, or reallocated Coast Guard cutters. Barring those, roughly 2,000 of the total, the remaining ships are an eclectic mix of pre- and post- FLTDES 2500 ships, as well as a healthy number of PLURIBUS-Class arsenal ships, DAG conversions of older DDE/K hulls previously slated for decommissioning that can less be described as a 'class' and more as a hodgepodge of common-architecture conversions. The subcapital ships are dominated by destroyers, older ORION-Class hunter-killer destroyers (DDK) and DAUNTLESS-Class escort destroyers (DDE) augmented by the flood of new DDG-852 SERPENTIS-Class multimission DDGs; and the SERPENTIS-derived IAQ-373 UNUKALHAI-Class interdictor is a renowned and feared cyber/signals warfare ship. The capital ships are dominated by a mix of battleships and carriers, with few cruisers despite FLTDES 2500’s concerted, failed attempt to change that. UNC battleships are renowned for their precise main guns, and UNC carriers now field the multirole General Dynamics ASF-17C Panther, the first true aerospace fighter, in sobering numbers.

The United Nations Unified Naval Command holds a fistful of thunder and bears the standards of a hundred nations on a hundred worlds. Unlike their predecessors, these dogs of war are held firmly by the hand of Mars on one leash— a leash that has lengthened in the wake of the Maybe War. Fluid, versatile, and independent, the UNC stands ready, united in duty, unmatched in resolve, should old grudges be brought to bear and new struggles come to a head.