2946-10-17 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout: Admiralty Council Resignations
This morning it was announced that all three members of the Navy’s Admiralty Council have announced their resignations following recent revelations about the New Rheims Disaster. Whether this is a tacit admission that they knew all along about the project in violation of the weapons-autonomy provisions of the Treaty of Scherer, acceptance of the fact that the Navy went too far in attempting to cover up the fiasco, or the victory of one faction in the Navy over another, we may never know.
Several other high-ranking officers, including Madara Kruse, the director of the War College who happens to be the last veteran of the Terran-Rattanai War to remain in Navy service, have also announced their resignations. It is being speculated that not all the resignations are of the perpetrators and enablers of the illegal project which destroyed New Rheims; faced with the prospect of a move for Congressional oversight of more of the Navy’s activities in the wake of this scandal, this is probably seen as a good time for senior officers nearing retirement to bow out of the service.
The Naval Survey Auxiliary, reasonably kept completely in the dark about the Navy’s black projects (after all, you don’t even have to be a citizen of one of the Confederated Worlds to join the Auxiliary), has been exempted from the Congressional military funding freeze, as of a measure passed this morning, and its normal activities are resuming. This is a good thing (there are many members of the Naval Survey Auxiliary among this audience, and they provide plenty of content for both Sovanna’s Feedback Loop shows and my own Tales from the Inbox), as it means that the process of opening new Frontier worlds for colonization does not need to wait for the rest of the political process here on Planet to work itself out.
As I mentioned a few days ago, it seems likely that a minority faction within the Navy broke with their chiefs to side with the civilian government over this issue; the coming weeks will show us whether the faction responsible for the whole fiasco retains sufficient power to retaliate against the officers who defied them.
