Clan Pre-Invasion Intelligence on the Inner Sphere

[Sigil]

How did the Clans gather intelligence on the Inner Sphere in preparation for their initial invasion?

I am familiar with Intelstar, in early attempt to gather information from the Periphery, and the Wolf's Dragoons, who apparently stopped submitting intelligence reports to the Grand Council in 3019. 

In particular, how did the Clans know of the Fourth Succession War and the War of 3039, both of which were used as reasons to delay in Invasion.

Was all of the intelligence going through Clan Wolf?  Wouldn't the Crusaders have some of kind of intelligence gathering operation of their own?

[marauder648]

It was a mix of the Dragoon Compromise and the interrogation of the Outbound Light's crew who gave them information about the 4th Succession war and the union of Houses Davion and Steiner.

But otherwise they went in pretty much blind, and as the Clan's view of intelligence gathering was basically "Ask the guys you're attacking" there was no real effort to scout the routes otherwise.  Basically they went in dumb, and with NO logistics support either. Well..a year long Logistics chain to bring stuff from the Homeworlds, then have your ships go back.

[Sigil]

It was a mix of the Dragoon Compromise and the interrogation of the Outbound Light's crew who gave them information about the 4th Succession war and the union of Houses Davion and Steiner.

It is my understanding the Wardens cited both the Fourth Succession War and the War of 3039 in Grand Council as a way of delaying the Invasion.  I took this to mean the Grand Council knew of these conflicts within a year or so their beginning, in 3028 and 3039.

[Firesprocket]

The time period of who knew what and where between 3019 and 3048 is a bit spotty.  Smoke Jaguar interrogations lead to the vote approving the invasions and they seemed to have only shared what they needed to in order to support a winning vote.

[Phalanx]

It is my understanding the Wardens cited both the Fourth Succession War and the War of 3039 in Grand Council as a way of delaying the Invasion.  I took this to mean the Grand Council knew of these conflicts within a year or so their beginning, in 3028 and 3039.

The last report from the Dragoons was in 3020.  We know the Watch of each of the Clans operates in the Deep and Near Coreward Periphery. The logistics issue of Communication means that what the Clans knew was years out of date(reason why they sent  the Dragoons in the first place).

I do not take what was written in The Clans:Warriors of Kerensky as authoritative bevause it assumes the Clan intel is better than we know it to be(or why send the Dragoons?). Any information would be at least a year old and fragmented by the fact that each Clan has its own Watch and that the Dragoons have stopped sending reports.

Also consider the possibility of the Watch's for each of the Warden Clans.

What if they are enacting a disinformation campaign to discourage invasion?
That sounds extreme, but remember that Kerlin Ward took extreme action.

Finally, Outbound Light shows up, the Crusaders freak out, and the rest is history.

[Nightlord01]

It was a mix of the Dragoon Compromise and the interrogation of the Outbound Light's crew who gave them information about the 4th Succession war and the union of Houses Davion and Steiner.

But otherwise they went in pretty much blind, and as the Clan's view of intelligence gathering was basically "Ask the guys you're attacking" there was no real effort to scout the routes otherwise.  Basically they went in dumb, and with NO logistics support either. Well..a year long Logistics chain to bring stuff from the Homeworlds, then have your ships go back.

To be fair, they didn't need to get a lot of intelligence out of the crew of the Outbound Light, the simple arrival of the jump ship, and word of an amalgamation of two Successor States would have stoked the fires of Clan fears. A single massive military, which had reversed the trend of the last 200 years, yeah, that'd be pretty terrifying for both Wardens and Crusaders alike. Previously the Clans had all the time in the world, a totally hidden empire, with no fears at all. Kerlin Ward had an easy enough time calling for delay, as the Clans considered themselves to be getting better every generation.

Along comes the Outbound Light, and that security blanket is yanked off them, the Inner Sphere has found them! All that hard fought patience evaporates in an instant, replaced by fear. Leo Showers had no difficulty at all convincing the Grand Council to vote for Operation Revival. Of course, Kerlin Ward pointed out that the Outbound Light hadn't reported their position back home before being captured, but that didn't matter, the Crusaders claimed that if one Inner Sphere ship had found them, others would too, it was only a matter of time.

The Watch is a bit of a retcon, but makes a lot of sense, even if it only started out collecting news clippings, sure, they'd be 50 years out of date, but you'd get a fairly complete picture of the Inner Sphere as it fell into ruins. And, of course, news of the formation of the Federated Commonwealth would have been slow to reach the outposts, but would have gotten there eventually.

I just thought, what would be nice is an acknowledged factual account of the universe incorporating a lot of the Dev notes after the fact. Kind of like the releasing of old classified documents from government archives after say 50-100 years.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

How did the Clans gather intelligence on the Inner Sphere in preparation for their initial invasion?

For the most part?  Poorly.

[JadedFalcon]

Didn't Intelstar get info filtered through via Nueva Castile? Dated, vague, and/or of questionable accuracy, but bits and pieces got to the homeworlds.

[JadeHellbringer]

For the most part?  Poorly.

This. The Clans kind of seem to have assumed that they'd sweep aside any opposition, be welcomed as the heirs of the Star League, that opposing forces would fight by Clan rules, and all kinds of other hogwash that there should never have been any inkling of from them. That they still ran roughshod over a quarter of the Inner Sphere despite all that speaks volumes of their warrior's skill and tech advantage- because what should have happened is that they got their teeth kicked in by mid-'50 at the latest.

If information really is ammunition, the Clans came in with some very Clan-like low ammo loadouts. And as happens so often with Omnimech configurations, they really deserved to pay the price for those poor choices. It really took until Wolcott for that to happen (Twycross being more of a bizarre occurrence than an intel failure).

[anastrace]

Looking at Revival itself, the military caste of the clans doesn't really seem to have any grasp of strategy, logistics, intelligence, or even tactics beyond "we've got superior tech so full speed ahead". Is it any wonder the science caste rebelled?

[Nightlord01]

Looking at Revival itself, the military caste of the clans doesn't really seem to have any grasp of strategy, logistics, intelligence, or even tactics beyond "we've got superior tech so full speed ahead". Is it any wonder the science caste rebelled?

If you look at some of their actions, sure, you can reach that conclusion. However Ulric Kerensky, Leo Showers, hell even Elias Critchell were all pretty damned good at strategy. While they did indeed bring ammo heavy builds, they also brought a lot of ammunition! They stockpiled in the Periphery and moved on, the greatest weakness of their strategy was the competitive nature of it, had the Clans cooperated rather than competed, they would have walked all over the Inner Sphere.

Mind you, a lot of how the Clans got so far is due to the incredibly small nature of the Inner Sphere's military, not just battlemechs, but also vehicle and ASF. The Clans could achieve near total superiority wherever they dropped due to the disproportionately large military forces.

[marauder648]

Mind you, a lot of how the Clans got so far is due to the incredibly small nature of the Inner Sphere's military, not just battlemechs, but also vehicle and ASF. The Clans could achieve near total superiority wherever they dropped due to the disproportionately large military forces.

This is a very true thing.  Still the Clans did for the most part go in dumb, but they could bring whilst not overwhelming numbers, they would 9/10 times have a firepower advantage and even if outnumbered, their faster, more powerful Mechs and weapons advantages were often enough to win through.

Their information though was still basically out of date and heavily edited by one source or another. 

[Nightlord01]

This is a very true thing.  Still the Clans did for the most part go in dumb, but they could bring whilst not overwhelming numbers, they would 9/10 times have a firepower advantage and even if outnumbered, their faster, more powerful Mechs and weapons advantages were often enough to win through.

Their information though was still basically out of date and heavily edited by one source or another.

Absolutely! The lack of fresh intelligence would have been a mission failure had they been facing a parity opponent, but where they his was lightly defended for the most part, either bandits, small periphery nations, or periphery areas of the successor states. What ever way you cut it, there were no front line units there, and nothing in great numbers. This makes their "go in blind" approach not totally unfeasible, but not ideal. As was noted in BoK, all of the previous simply convinced the Clans that they were correct in their belief that the successor states were techno-savages. They were quite surprised by the increasing difficulty they faced as they dug further in.

[massey]

As I understand the situation, the Clans had very little info on the Inner Sphere pre-Dragoons.  They had a pretty good guess as far as what was happening, but no firm evidence.  When the Dragoons went in, they confirmed everything the Clans already thought.  The Succession Wars had been absolutely brutal, and the Inner Sphere was close to falling apart.

What the Clans didn't know is that the 3rd SW acted as one long break for the IS powers to catch their breath.  Very slowly, factories were starting to come back online.  Jumpship numbers were starting to crawl back up.  Trade routes were being re-established.  The recovery was moving so slowly that you almost wouldn't notice it, even if you were paying close attention.  But gradually the Inner Sphere made it back to the level where they could actually benefit from finding the Helm Memory Core.

The Dragoons stop communicating (can't count on those lazy Freebirths to do anything right), but the last time they checked in, the Inner Sphere appeared to be in an unchanging, idle state.  So the Clans aren't particularly concerned about any of it.  Their previous predictions regarding the state of the Inner Sphere had proven correct, and there's nothing to indicate that this is going to change over the course of a mere 25 years.  Fast forward 25 years from the end of the Mad Max movies, where do you think those people will be?  Then you get the Outbound Light, and they just show up above the Smoke Jaguar homeworld.  Bad timing there.

The Jaguars (who always wanted to invade) reveal a bunch of partial truths.  In reality, the Outbound Light was way off course.  But the Jags insinuate that the Inner Sphere knows the route they took, and so it's only a simple process to figure out where they disappeared.  They also have news that the #1 and #3 most powerful states have joined together, and nearly absorbed the #5 state.  The botched War of 3039 is downplayed (it doesn't benefit your argument to show that they aren't moments away from re-establishing the Star League).  But the Helm Memory Core would be a prime piece of information to release.  They're rediscovering Star League tech!

The Invasion basically starts right then.  Now the Clans know that the IS still hasn't fully upgraded from 3025 tech.  How much they've upgraded depends on which version of the canon you want to pay attention to, but either way the Clans basically know that most IS forces are using primitive old tech.  And while the leadership knows that the IS doesn't follow Clan honor, they don't really bother to tell their soldiers that.  It's more like "pack your stuff, we're invading the Inner Sphere tomorrow".  The average Clan warrior probably has the (non-combat) education of a 7th grader.  They don't know what to expect from the Inner Sphere at all, because they've never been taught anything like sociology or the history of other cultures.

The Clans have the info in the Outbound Light's computers, so they know that the FRR exists, and they have a general idea of which planets in the invasion corridor are still inhabited.  But they basically just show up and start shooting, and then ask their newly conquered subjects about what is going on in the area.  They were pretty information-blind, but then so were the Inner Sphere powers.  The Clans marauded through early opponents, and then mauled a ton of really elite regiments that were sent to try and stop them.  Until Jaime Wolf's big reveal, the IS had no idea what they were facing.  In game terms, their players didn't get to look at the Clan players' record sheets, or get to read the Tech Readout info on what their weapons could do.  Imagine fighting a Black Hawk, and thinking "I'm at 10 hexes, I'm out of range of all those medium lasers he's carrying.  I'm going to remain stationary and fire my PPC."  And as IS units got wiped out, they didn't get to go back to their comrades and tell them what stupid mistakes to not make.

The Clans had what they considered to be "enough" information to attack.  Their normal method of intelligence gathering is to just show up and ask what forces you have, so this was totally in keeping with how they had always behaved.  It worked well enough because they so overmatched the people they initially fought.  By the time the Inner Sphere and the Clans had figured out that the other side worked differently, the Clans were getting info from ComStar (and the IS from the Dragoons) and so they didn't have to worry about it.

[Nightlord01]

To be fair to the Clans, they did realise that they could get better intel off captives from the IS or Periphery than they ever would while they remained in the Kerensky Cluster.

They did interrogate everyone they could get their hands on, so weren't ignorant of the requirement, it was simply secondary to getting something done. Their information cycle was more than two years in the Cluster, they cut that to less than a month in the periphery.

In many ways, the way the Clans did things was best practice. They just receive flak for it because of the odd poor decision, which can come from the most informed battle space commander. I don't think the Clan Leadership deliberately kept their warriors in the dark about the warfare practices of the Inner Sphere, Revival was predicated on the Clans proving their way was superior to the Inner Sphere's way, you can't do this if you don't fight your way.

[SCC]

This. The Clans kind of seem to have assumed that they'd sweep aside any opposition, be welcomed as the heirs of the Star League, that opposing forces would fight by Clan rules, and all kinds of other hogwash that there should never have been any inkling of from them. That they still ran roughshod over a quarter of the Inner Sphere despite all that speaks volumes of their warrior's skill and tech advantage- because what should have happened is that they got their teeth kicked in by mid-'50 at the latest.

Really it probably speaks of fiat. While a cluster could probably defeat an entire 'Mech regiment, if it had back-up in the form the rest of an RCT (This ignores planetary militia) then the cluster is probably beyond easy rebuild. Each clan brought 3 galaxy's to begin with, so that's 9 worlds each.

[Frabby]

But there's a grain of truth in that.
If the entire Inner Sphere had been a lostech desert then the Clans would indeed have been the saviors they saw themselves as - fixing broken terraforming equipment, water purification, basic education. They wouldn't have needed garrison forces as they would have been (and in the periphery probably were) friends and liberators, not conquerors. Just like Klondike. Just like the SLDF against Amaris or even (according to self-portrayal) in the Reunification War. The SLDF had always been welcomed with open arms, quiaff?

Their encounters in the deep periphery and even the near periphery (Oberon Confederation, Elysian Fields, Greater Valkyrate, Butte Hold) only reinforced that false impression. They realized too late that they were judging the entire Inner Sphere by its neglected fringes.

There was also some cultural bias involved. Clan garrisons are meant for defending against bandits, not for garrisoning hostile worlds that you've conquered. National pride or civil unrest seems nonexistent in the Clans where you can be taken as isorla and live, fight and die for a different Clan at the bat of an eye as a warrior, and where the caste system, reinforced by some atrocities long ago, means the lower castes won't ever revolt or object to being another Clan's isorla.
From this standpoint it is understandable that the Clans didn't initially realize they would have to consolidate or garrison the worlds they gained.
The Smoke Jaguar bombing of Edo/Turtle Bay and the Jade Falcon bombing of, uh, some Somerset Strikers holdout speak volumes about their difficulties adapting to the IS mindset on the matter of conquest.

[SCC]

fixing broken terraforming equipment, water purification,

Things the Clans themselves of accomplishing in the Homeworlds, otherwise they'd be a LOT nicer places to live.

basic education.

They wouldn't have done this either, because it goes against their world-view, otherwise they'd have realized they were on a fools errand to begin with.

[massey]

Really it probably speaks of fiat. While a cluster could probably defeat an entire 'Mech regiment, if it had back-up in the form the rest of an RCT (This ignores planetary militia) then the cluster is probably beyond easy rebuild. Each clan brought 3 galaxy's to begin with, so that's 9 worlds each.

You're running into the problem that the nature of the Battletech universe has undergone several quiet retcons over the years.

--Inner Sphere planets have had their population numbers increased dramatically.
--Correspondingly, non-mech forces have had their numbers increased dramatically.
--Non-mech forces have also had their effectiveness increased by quite a bit.
--The tech level of the Inner Sphere at the time of the Invasion has been raised significantly.
--The power of the Clan war machine has been toned down a bit, with no changes to their population levels.

The Battletech setting went from something that wasn't trying to mimic real world numbers at all, to something that tries to bear some kind of resemblance to some info you could find on Wikipedia.  There's been an attempt to make it "realistic", but it hasn't been universally applied.  And because a lot of hard numbers were supplied with the Jade Falcon and Wolf sourcebooks, nobody has tried to apply these retcons to the Clans themselves.

So you can either accept that that's what happened (because it is), or not.  (Edited to be more polite).