Author Topic: Steele vs. Lopez  (Read 10869 times)

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Offline CT27

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In the mission "Her Finest Hour" from BP:  WIH, who do you think was more in the right concerning actions taken?  Was Admiral Lopez right to stick around after being ordered to leave and Steele issued a bad order...or did Admiral Steele issue the correct course of action and Lopez messed up?
What was the best choice for the GTVA militarily?




As kind of a secondary question, if Lopez survives the war and gets back to GTVA territory somehow, was what she did worthy of a court-martial?

 

Offline DahBlount

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That is indeed a good question. Personally, I feel like Lopez made the right decision because the odds were heavily in his/her (can't remember atm) favor initially due to beam weapons and the fact that the UEF only fielded a small force against the fortifications around the station. What Lopez was unable to consider was the off possibility of the Frigates destroying the Cruisers and finding a way to wreck the turret screen in a very short time, thus opening up the ability for a larger confrontation. The better choice from a tactical stand point would have been to leave as soon as the orders came in and avoid any more losses than were needed.

What Lopez did was disobey an order from a superior (Steele isn't his/her superior in rank, but in function since he is in command of the whole operation in Sol), this IS grounds for a court martial. However if the UEF is able to secure a victory or draw, and the Elders feel like it, they can ask for Lopez to be pardoned under the ceasefire agreement (I think).
« Last Edit: September 05, 2014, 12:45:03 am by DahBlount »
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Offline Aesaar

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She disobeyed a direct order to depart and it resulted in the capture or destruction of her destroyer.

 

Offline niffiwan

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Yeah - the only way to "survive" disobeying a direct order is for it to result in success, not failure.
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Offline QuakeIV

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I concur, she has a court martial coming.  A deserved one at that, she disobeyed a direct order, which resulted in disaster.

 

Offline CT27

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The question is:  was she "right" or militarily correct to disobey the order to leave the area?

In other words, was a destroyer worth 'more' than trying to save more people like Lopez was trying to do?

 

Offline The E

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It's a decision that can and probably will be debated among military historians for decades to come.
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Offline Gee1337

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Lopez's decision to disobey was militarily incorrect when quantifying military assets. Even though the Carthage is an old destroyer, it had been heavily modded and was more than a match for any vessel that UEA could throw at it, with it's hardened armour and beam weaponary. Even though the GTVA should be able to easily sweep aside UEA defences with a full scale invasion, they cannot afford to lose any destroyers should they come across the full force of the Shivans or Vishnans, as they would need all the firepower they can muster.

The overall tactical situation was a mess from the outset for Lopez due to the positioning of the AWACs. If she had kept a tighter formation then the UEA stealth fighters would have found it a lot more difficult to cause the damage they did. With the GTVA advanced weaponary, they should have deployed closer to the station, with the AWACs providing as much sensor coverage as possible, and massed the firepower to stop the UEA infiltrating behind and uploading the viruses.

Whereas Lopez is likeable due to her psychological profile and relentless loyalty to the people under her command, as shown in BP, it leaves her open to exploitation and therefore clouds her judgement to assess when she should cut her losses, which is something Steele has down to a tee... therefore making Steele a much better commander. In fact, Steele's prowess as a battlefield commander makes him more likeable in my opinion, as he is the kind of person that you would want to be fighting for due to his high success rate, especially if you are to be faced with an enemy like the Shivans.
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Offline qwadtep

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From a military standpoint Lopez was incorrect in disobeying the order to withdraw. The loss of her ship aside, breaking the chain of command introduces an unpredictable element that puts even more people, soldier and civilian alike, at risk.

From an ethical standpoint she, like Rear Admiral Casey and potentially the player in FS2, is disobeying orders that conflict with the GTVA's moral mission, so it's much more of a grey area.

 

Offline CT27

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I forgot who said it, but there was someone who had a good comment in a thread on a similar issue a while back:


"Whether it was more important to save the Carthage or the people on  the station is a tough decision...however the point is it wasn't Lopez's decision to make."

 

Offline SypheDMar

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I don't agree with the quote. It implies that the right decision is a superior's decision. I hate to bring the Nazis, but the Nuremberg defense/superior orders is not a useable defense on making morally wrong decisions.

Lopez certainly wasn't committing an atrocity, but she made a moral decision based on what she felt was best. Whether or not that was a correct military decision is a different story.

 

Offline CT27

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Lopez certainly wasn't committing an atrocity, but she made a moral decision based on what she felt was best. Whether or not that was a correct military decision is a different story.

Do you feel it was the correct decision militarily?

 
Obviously not, as it led to a major enemy victory.
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Offline CT27

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An Orion has 10K people IIRC.

How many people did Lopez save by staying behind and disobeying orders?

 

Offline niffiwan

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@CT27, you probably should add the crews of the rest of the battlegroup to that figure of 10k, or least the 2x Deimos that stayed with Lopez.

@SypheDMar; I don't think that the Nuremburg decision is relevant in this case. In particular which "international/interstellar" law was broken? (Unless you want to take the position that the entire GTVA war is a "War of Aggression", and that BETAC has a clause regarding "Crimes against Peace" in which case everyone in the GTVA military is all guilty already)
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Offline Luis Dias

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Nevertheless, CT's point is the exact same that came to my mind as well. But this isn't a gross problem in here. I can see a "we all stick together" thing that is actually morale inducing not just for those who are being saved but for everyone. If they abandoned them, you can imagine the morale inside that destroyer's crew, and we can imagine all the fleet men whispering ****. I mean, not everyone is able to be as cold as Steele.

And that was precisely the issue, the crack that Laporte and company detected. Steele is cold as ice, but not everyone in the fleet is like that. In the end, Lopez own humanity was the loophole that was used. They planned with that in mind. In the absence of such "humanity", the very scenario we are discussing here wouldn't even have existed in the first place (and other would have existed in its place). So, in a sense, Lopez crime was that she wasn't perfect.

It's a good paradox to ponder over.

I have way bigger problems with plots (more than character decisions) that have twenty people risking their lives (and most of them ending up losing them) to save one person... yeah maths how do they work.

 

Offline CT27

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Nevertheless, CT's point is the exact same that came to my mind as well. But this isn't a gross problem in here. I can see a "we all stick together" thing that is actually morale inducing not just for those who are being saved but for everyone. If they abandoned them, you can imagine the morale inside that destroyer's crew, and we can imagine all the fleet men whispering ****. I mean, not everyone is able to be as cold as Steele.

And that was precisely the issue, the crack that Laporte and company detected. Steele is cold as ice, but not everyone in the fleet is like that. In the end, Lopez own humanity was the loophole that was used. They planned with that in mind. In the absence of such "humanity", the very scenario we are discussing here wouldn't even have existed in the first place (and other would have existed in its place). So, in a sense, Lopez crime was that she wasn't perfect.

It's a good paradox to ponder over.

I have way bigger problems with plots (more than character decisions) that have twenty people risking their lives (and most of them ending up losing them) to save one person... yeah maths how do they work.

So what you're kind of saying is that the GTVA fleet needs people like Steele and people like Lopez?

 

Offline Gee1337

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I think morally, it was also an incorrect decision due to the mathematical value of "saving lives". People might ask whether it is correct to expend 20 lives to save one, but if that one individual is going to go on to save more lives then the twenty would have, then surely that is a gamble worth taking.

Also, I don't think that Steele's tactical prowess and knowledge of his assets have also been considered. At the end of Act II, the UEA was trying to exploit the same weakness in Lopez, but was unable to do so because Steele had the intel to lure several UEA assets into a trap*. Steele knew that his plan would be successful with minimal loss of life. In comparison to the situation where the Carthage was lost, Steele did not have the advantage of intel and he had recognised an unwinnable situation, therefore he gave the order to pull out which would have actually saved more lives (hindsight obviously) and a valuable destroyer with a high skilled crew.

As cold and calculating as Steele might appear to be, it asks the question whether this is actually true of Steele as it could be argued that he wanted to save the lives of those in the battlefield, whereas Lopez wanted to fight on and end up sacrificing her crew. In my opinion, Lopez's only saving grace was that she surrendered in order to save the crew, but how many lives did she waste before it was too late?

*I can't write that without thinking of Admiral Ackbar... or Chris Griffin in Something, Something, Something, Darkside; when he crashes the speeder and impersonates Admiral Ackbar for "snow-side" assistance.
I do not feel... I think!

 
In the mission "Her Finest Hour" from BP:  WIH, who do you think was more in the right concerning actions taken?  Was Admiral Lopez right to stick around after being ordered to leave and Steele issued a bad order...or did Admiral Steele issue the correct course of action and Lopez messed up?
What was the best choice for the GTVA militarily?

As kind of a secondary question, if Lopez survives the war and gets back to GTVA territory somehow, was what she did worthy of a court-martial?

I am a retired officer, and I can say for certain that Lopez would definitely get a court martial for what she did. As an officer/soldier/nco, you can disobey direct orders only if A) they are plainly suicidal B) they constitute a war crime. In Lopez's case, the orders were neither suicidal nor criminous. Forgetting the bigger picture, she opted to stay behind to save a few thousand lives and, in doing so, allowed the UEF to deny an incredibly powerful asset to the GTVA: the Carthage and its veteran crew and battlefleet components.

The loss of the Carthage (whether you decide to destroy it or not) should not be underestimated: in an era wherein almost all GTVA ships are glass cannons, with tremendous firepower but low survivability (just look at the quickness with which that Chimera gets pulverized in "The Plunder", or at how Serkr team has to leg it to avoid annihilation in "Aristeia"), a sturdy ship like the Carthage is likely the keystone to any serious battle plan because, contrarily to almost all the other ships employed by the GTVA, it can get in a prolonged brawl with other ships and survive.

Any other ship would have to either rely on shock jump tactics (the primary intended purpose of their design) or slowly approach a blockade of Narayanas armed with their ridiculously long-range weapons. Even in that case, the Carthage would make an excellent punching bag, capable of distracting UEF vessels for quite some time. I mean, in "Her Finest Hour" the Carthage takes A LOT of beating before her hull gets hammered seriously enough for Lopez to surrender her ship: we're talking of minutes spent soaking the strikes from two Narayanas and (provided you called them in) at least 2 wings of durga bombers armed with redeemer cannons and a squadron of custos armed to the teeth with torpedoes (and said squadron is usually capable of vaporizing a single deimos surprisingly quickly, as long as you disable the Deimos' guns).

Lopez's stubborness cost the GTVA a very valuable asset indeed, not to mention the complementary vessels (Rhadanite, Deianira, Iolanthe, McAuliffe, Gallant) with their veteran crews. The loss of the Carthage was, to the GTVA, such a felling blow that they had to recall at least three other destroyers in Sol in order to cope with the Carthage's loss. While not being a war-breaking defeat per se, it certainly complicated things for Steele and the GTVA, achieving the hilarious final resolt of costing the Alliance MORE lives than anticipated.

So...yeah, provided Lopez survives the battle (she never does during my playthroughs) and is returned to the GTVA, she's in for serious trouble.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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the UEA
The what now?

You mean the UEF, the United Earth Federation?
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