This is only slighty tangential, but given how Star Trek space combat works (vast space with tiny but hugely important orbitals, plus knife-fight ranges), many of the turn-of-the-century ideas on naval combat can apply. I'm personally a fan of Corbett over Mahan, and feel that
Some Principles of Maritime Strategy is required reading on any armchair admiral's list.
I admit to being less familiar with Corbett than Mahan, but the fundamental problem with applying Corbett's analysis is that it doesn't lead to
any of the doctrine trees, and in fact doesn't lead to a coherent strategic vision for us at all. Because at the
basic level, Corbett's conclusion as applied to Trek is "command of space is paramount, keep your supply lines open, preserve your fleet."
To which the obvious rejoinder is "yes, obviously, you are totally right... but
how?"
Against a cloak-capable opponent, trying to win by pure commerce protection and convoying is almost certainly a losing game, for instance. Maybe the Federation can pull it off with its massive advantage to countercloaking, but it's not going to be easy. Striking at the raiders' visible bases becomes fairly important, in that situation.
Against the Cardassians, the problem of protecting our commerce isn't so much of a problem- but we'd still have to go on the offensive sooner or later or the Cardassians will just outwait us. The main war aim we are likely to have in a war with Cardassia, that we're
not likely to achieve naturally just by being
us, would be to secure the neutrality of Bajor. We're not getting that without offensive operations.
So it comes back to the offensive.
...
Now, for offensive maritime/space warfare, the Corbettian solution would be the blockade, but blockading doesn't work well in three-dimensional space. Distant blockade isn't going to work. Your ships wind up so spread out that it's not very realistic to expect them to reliably intercept threats- plus, the blockading ships become targets for the enemy fleet in their own right. Furthermore, the enemy's territory is a closed reason that all fits inside a big bubble, and is largely autarkic. A distant blockade becomes indistinguishable from commerce raiding in general under such conditions- and as far as I can tell, you're not advocating Wolfpack doctrine.
So if you're not planning to win a war with a distant blockade of the enemy nation/continent as a whole (the RN strategy during WWI and WWII)... you wind up committed to close blockade. But
that only works if you have overwhelming force. You need greater overall numbers, since you need 'lol don't even try' levels of force parked outside each of the enemy's major fleet bases. And you have to stay
close to those fleet bases, so that you can prevent the enemy from 'sneaking out' and joining the combined forces of two or more bases in order to crush one of your blockade squadrons. It was the need to prevent this that led to Nelson having to frantically zig-zag all over the Atlantic and Mediterranean during the runup to the Battle of Trafalgar, and frankly Nelson only won at Trafalgar due to the superior fighting qualities of his ships.
All in all, while the
defensive side of Corbett's military thinking (as far as I understand it) basically applies to our kind of space warfare fairly well, the offensive side isn't very useful. Corbett's thinking would suggest the idea that we can avoid major battles and just gradually strangle an opponent by blocking off their spacelanes, so long as we keep our own open. This is no more or less practical, in my opinion, than other strategies based on physically destroying enemy ships or bases.
All offensive strategies are based on the assumption that you have superior force, at least locally if not globally.
One of my primary points was that Decisive Battle invites defeat in detail by having a large force waiting to initiate battle and smaller forces threatening various installations, which is a situation that Base Strike attempts to avoid by avoiding battle with that fleet entirely.
Have you read Liddell-Hart's work on the 'indirect approach?'
The classic successful method for winning an offensive victory against a roughly equal force, that has the advantage of being able to defend from fortified places, is different than the method you describe. Sure, Nash and Thuir's method worked for them around Ixaria because they had superior forces, and would have failed without superior force. But that doesn't mean their way only way to do it.
The most effective way of dealing with the situation you're worried about is
not to first threaten a defended target, then jump the fleet that moves to reinforce that target with an entirely separate force.
It is to maneuver your force so as to threaten
multiple targets, in such close proximity that the enemy cannot wait for you to go on the move before committing reinforcements. Thus, they must either:
1) Reinforce only one target, and risk having the other be utterly crushed, because the ungarrisoned fortifications are too weak to hold off a large force.
2) Reinforce several targets, inviting defeat in detail if the enemy pounces on any one of the targets before it can be reinforced from the others.
3) Launch a counterattack against your threatening force.
There are other variations on this strategy that work, of course. Such as maneuvering to cut the supply line of an enemy force. Then they have a limited time to act before their supplies run out. Again, they have a series of unpalatable options, followed by "or we could attack the force that's giving us trouble."
...
One of the items I have to predicate this problem on is parity in forces, which is actually going to be a fairly common situation - just look at the GBZ. If for nothing else but game balance reasons, we aren't about to gain superior forces to all of our potential enemies in all zones where we want to win.
Presuming parity in forces, I cannot see a reason that Decisive Battle does not invite defeat in detail in offensive operations.
Decisive Battle doctrine strongly encourages concentration of force, rendering defeat in detail unlikely when on the offensive. There are a variety of ways to impel an enemy fleet to give battle against a
roughly equal force, without dividing one's command in the face of the enemy.
You seem to be conflating the difficulty of forcing an enemy to give battle against an obviously
greater force, with the concern that we may not have a greater force to begin with. To me, these concerns appear mutually exclusive. If we have roughly equal balance of forces compared to the enemy, then by definition the enemy will be much less worried about the possible consequences of fighting us. Under decisive battle doctrines, it then falls upon us to find ways to convince the enemy that we have equal strength by concealing a secret advantage, or to maneuver the enemy into an unfavorable position, or to somehow divide his force as he comes at us to drive us away.
