Intelligence Briefings: Rachni Fleet Doctrine
It's rather amusing how offended people sometimes get, when they're informed that the Rachni's fleet doctrine bears the most resemblance to elcor ground support doctrine, of all the military schools of thought in the galaxy. Surely, they say, the Swarm could not
possibly have conquered a third of the galaxy with the
elcor's way of doing things.
Regrettably for those people's pride, it does in fact seem to be the case. The Rachni's maneuvers indicate a strong focus on army-first thinking. The rachni habitually colonize anything that they can survive, and they react with insane hostility to the presence of pre-existing sapient populations on those bodies. Their fleet and their army work together seamlessly, to the point where we speculate that they have procedures for a merged chain of command during assault operations, much as the elcor do. This means one thing: if the Rachni want a planet, they take it. If they secure orbital supremacy and the ability to land troops, there's no army in the galaxy that can survive the hell that follows.
That said, this we already knew. It's not a revelation. That the rachni have optimized
literally every branch of their military to the task of storming planets doesn't add to that. We are interested in the implications for the naval war.
Let's start with the obvious: fleet composition. We know the Rachni to produce some dedicated bombardment vessels. These vessels typically come in frigate displacement for easy mass production, and deploy small mass accelerators and dedicated orbit-to-surface/air/ship missiles. These vessels possess limited naval combat abilities; their main guns are too small to threaten large warships and can't reliably aquire small ones, and their missiles are not designed for orbital ship-to-ship combat. Furthermore, they typically don't possess even armor appropriate to their size, as they are not meant for combat, and do not have combat-grade drives. Slow, fragile, toothless targets, in other words. However, we do not consider these vessels when examining Rachni
fleet doctrine, as these vessels do not operate as part of a battle line, and are in fact militarily negligible in a void combat. We thus exclude them from our analysis, going forward.
While the Rachni do produce dedicated bombardment fleets, they still have a doctrinal role for naval warships in support of ground operations. Dedicated bombardment craft, as discussed, cannot function in a naval combat. Thus, in order to launch ground operations in front systems which can conceivably be threatened, the Rachni must use its warship fleet. This drives their production priorities accordingly, and their navy remains focused on ground support above all else. The fleets the Rachni produce to these specifications tend to be relatively small -- comparable to Virmirean Battle Fleets, as opposed to RoR War Fleets -- in order to maximize the ground they can cover.
Much like the elcor, the Rachni utilize an extremely cruiser-heavy force, with dreadnoughts in a secondary role and screening ships relegated to tertiary roles. The reason for this is simple economics. Dreadnoughts are gross overkill for planetary bombardment unless one intends to reduce the planet to dust -- which the Rachni obviously do not generally want, even as tolerant as they are of extreme conditions. That said, they remain fearsome weapons in any environment, ground or space. In space, their use is obvious. On the ground, a mass accelerator is a mass accelerator -- they can modulate the strength of their fire, after all. Dreadnoughts thus receive a secondary focus. Frigates and corvettes, while mildly useful for their ability to enter the atmosphere and deliver precision bombardment to hardened installations, must expose themselves to return fire in order to do so. Given that atmospheric craft and missiles already perform such roles perfectly well, there is little need to risk expensive void warships for such missions, and screening vessels see little investment.
Cruisers, meanwhile, can project mass-destruction firepower across the surface of a planet within minutes of the need being identified, are cheap to mass-produce compared to dreadnoughts, and are completely invincible to any sustained attempts at retaliation. They epitomize the strengths of orbital dominance over a ground campaign, and therefore form the bulk of any Rachni fleet.
This has a number of implications when engaging the Rachni fleets. First of all, the challenges. A heavy cruiser focus means that the Rachni have the ships to respond to any kind of situation. Patrol duties? Split off some CLs. Counter raiding? CLs with a CA in command. Scouting? CLs. Artillery battle? Massed cruiser fire. Fleet melee? Design your CLs with torpedo tubes and watch numbers tell. Cruisers are versatile and cost-effective ships, and rachni doctrine exploits this to the hilt. They enjoy significant amounts of tactical flexibility. This holds especially true given that, while frigates remain a low priority for rachni fleets, their sheer numbers mean that there is by no means a
small amount of them in any given fight, and they do still field dreadnoughts. The rachni lean heavily on their cruisers, shoring up their situational weaknesses with larger or smaller warships.
Now, our advantages. While the rachni are flexible, and know how to use that flexibility, they lack specialization. According to Admiral Kassa'Malan, the Citadel's combined fleets still adhere to Mahakian doctrine, and thus field an extravagant number of dreadnoughts. At the extreme ranges opening a fight, they dominate the engagement thanks to the Rachni's tendency to de-emphasize dreadnoughts. Rachni fleets are also extremely brittle. Their screens, while objectively large, are proportionally small, and once they are depleted, a rachni fleet is very vulnerable to torpedo runs from screening vessels. All of these factors add up to low tactical endurance. Cruisers perform well, but not wonderfully, at any range, but cannot counter the strengths of a more specialized force. Once their large and small ships take losses, the Rachni lack the support they need to compete in a specialist's favored environment.
In particular, this paradigm means promising things for Virmire. We have noticed in past engagements that the Rachni rarely, in situations with rough numerical parity, field enough dreadnoughts to decisively exploit the inferiority of our battlecruisers at extreme range. We have been consistently able to close to more favorable ranges, and once we enter a melee, the rachni completely lack enough of a screening force to prevent a BC from dominating the fight. We have used this, repeatedly and to great effect, in the campaigns of the past few years. Virmire simply produces more megatonnage of capital ships per fleet.
Moving forward, we should bear in mind that the Rachni will likely innovate in response to our developments. In particular, now that we speculate that the front has stabilized and the Rachni do not have to focus on maintaining their previously crushing levels of attrition, we expect them to begin fielding their own battlecruiser designs within the next few years. Indeed, our successes and those of the Citadel and Terminus on other fronts may prompt a radical change in Rachni naval doctrine. Virmire must remain an active participant in the war in order to track changes in their doctrine. We have innovated; so too shall they. For now, however, we have a good understanding of their operations.
