Since Mirificus already did all the tactical stuff, I'd do the rest.
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Originally Posted by Avatar_notADV
Yeah, Vita can't die - she wouldn't die even if you killed her. ;p I figure she'll show up at a dramatic moment with a "what, this? Flesh wound" line...
The real problem is that you can't analyze RF6 with conventional military thinking because it's a ridiculous construct in conventional military terms. It's barely big enough for a commando squad - you can't manage it like an armored division. It's full of former opposition and irregular forces. Tea really is the only "normal" military member there, after all. It's got nepotism beyond anything even remotely sane. Their forces get pulled for mundane guard duty (including -disarming- the strongest mages in the unit at the most critical moment - criminy, how the hell do you justify THAT?)
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While all this is true, they are faced with a military situation, so what will determine their success, barring intervention from God (Seven Arcs), will be military standards.
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Even the idea of conventional military discipline is silly. In the modern military, men are generally considered interchangeable, outside of considerations like training and specialization - it is always the correct move to preserve command authority by removing disruptive soldiers from your command. But Hayate doesn't have, and has never had, that option. Nanoha and Fate represent priceless, irreplaceable military assets. Even if they're not unique in the world, it is absolutely the case that Hayate would not get another one if, for some reason, she kicked Nanoha out. If Nanoha decided that Hayate's orders weren't worth following, not only does Hayate have no method of stopping her, her departure would represent about a third of Hayate's firepower walking out the door with her.
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Doesn't say much for them if Hayate has to kick Nanoha / Fate out for discipline.
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(And, frankly, Nanoha has done just that before. TSAB demonstrably values end results over military discipline.)
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Beyond what Mirificus already said about Results, this is not actually wrong. Discipline is a mere means to an end - combat efficiency and victory. If the best way for a military unit to fight well is to be undisciplined, that's what should happen.
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It's been commented upon that Hayate may be a lousy officer. This is, to put it bluntly, likely true. And not really unexpected, to be honest - for all that she's a Lt. Colonel, she's also still only 19 years old. Her rank's honorary. It's not even theoretically possible that she was promoted for military merit alone; it's a reflection of the fact that she's her own integrated artillery battalion. (Nanoha and Fate being captains is a little easier to swallow, but even there, we have to assume that some of their rank is reflective of their powers and not their skills.)
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1) RF6 is a glorified squad/platoon command, not a battalion. Platoons are thrown out to very green lieutenants out of their officer training school.
2) Hayate is also a ten-year veteran of service, much of which is presumably in high-intensity situations that should allow her to mature faster than normal peacetime service which most of our officers go through.
3) Soviet officers have taken battalions as Majors (roughly 10-14 years of service) - and they aren't even elite and no it wasn't wartime. Taking one as a Captain is fast, Major is around average, and Lieutenant Colonel actually meant you are slow or about to promote to deputy regimental commander.
4) It is thus actually possible for a commander of that time in service to have gotten there through merit. In fact, it implies that she will be a blasted genius of a commander, a Rommel or Manstein or Guderian or just insert your fave general, not the inverse.
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For that matter, have we seen a single instance of competent leadership in the TSAB military?
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Actually, by anime standards, TSAB was portrayed as relatively competent right up until StrikerS.
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Ever? Once? We've had a heroic admiral who resorted to hiring a local collaborator to engage the enemy,
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She did, at that point, have an original plan, using Chrono. All evidence suggests Chrono could have beaten Fate at that point in time if it came to a fight. But there was no reason not to take advantage of an opportunity to basically double their firepower, if not quite their combat coefficient due to experience issues.
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sent her son into combat,
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Nothing wrong with that either. Heck, Army General Malinsky sent his son Anton into combat in
Red Army. His son's brigade was overrun by counterattacking Americans (and his son killed in an airstrike) because he underestimated the rate of the American advance and did not order the 49th Army Corps to shift to defense in time. But no one calls him incompetent - in fact Malinsky is probably one of the top five most competent commanders in the genre of late 1980s NATOxWP stories...
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and would have lost if the enemy they'd rescued -specifically against her orders- hadn't come in on their side.
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Well, because this is a Magical Girls show, by definition their decision was slated to be wrong in the long run. However, in terms of
process, it was actually a good decision. There is actually a ridiculously high probability that Fate will take advantage of Nanoha's generosity instead of what was shown. What actually happened was ridiculously low prob except in a Magical Girls anime. Maybe if someone told Chrono he is actually in such an anime it might have affected his calculation.
Anyway, if we assume that Chrono was evaluating a high chance he and Nanoha can suppress the Jewel Seeds after Fate gets knocked out, it is tactically a great move. It is also a very military-style move, which actually gave much hope to the TSAB as a serious organization. Too bad it was a joke.
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We've had another admiral lie his butt off, misappropriate a prototype, and engage friendly forces in order to kill off a little girl. The same admiral from the first example almost ended up turning a huge megalopolis into a bay, except that the same little girls pulled off a "this probably won't work" last minute plan.
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Won't defend Graham, but I'd point out the "last minute plan" was actually scientifically substantiated to work with calculations before they executed it, so it wasn't just a Magical Girls-fare "we hope" plan - it was actually a plan with a high probability of success, and thus definitely worth going for considering the alternative. Again makes one feel optimistic about the TSAB.
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We've had a battalion commander overwhelmed by a -fire-, and who ended up ceding command to a sixteen-year-old who happened to be passing by on vacation and her talking doll.
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Actually, Hayate was there not because of a vacation. She was undergoing commander's training. Since it is nighttime, it is likely she was serving a shift as duty officer while her commander understandably went home for the day, and thus had to assume command of ready forces in an emergency until her commander or other senior officer shows up. Her readiness to assume command actually spoke well of her.
Not that the glacial response of the Aerial units wasn't a problem...
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We've had a military high command who called in tons of high-ranking officers for a press conference, put their best people on security disarmed and out of contact, and whose killer beat-all weapons system totally wimped out.
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Well, we all agree on
that!
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It's more like, good god, where would Hayate have learned to be a good officer FROM? Who's her example? ;_;
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Earth, man, Earth! Don't you remember this wonderful land of wars, from which our little girl was born and where she lived till she was 15? There are countless good generals for her picking!
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And still, at the end of the day, the "concentrate against each force in turn" response is still too fancy. Works on paper, but if anything goes wrong, you lose and everybody dies (or whatever Jail's planning, heh.)
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Still beats a plan that won't even work on paper, and will only work in anime by the sheer intervention of Seven Arcs (God).
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Sometimes you have to send out a screening force to hold one part of the line while you go win the battle on the other part, even if that means your screen will get the hell chewed out of it.
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Wrong analogy. The problem is not that they are having a screening force as well as a Strike Sector. It is that they don't have a Strike Sector, no Schwerpunkt. All they have are inadequate screens.
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Also, take a look at the series as a whole. Has RF6 -ever- acted offensively? Not once. In each case, they've more or less stumbled into a developing situation - drones on the train, drones in the air, drones attacking the hotel, Vivio recovery, GFHQ fracas, Cradle launch. Their intelligence has been, to put it bluntly, useless, for all that they spend a lot of time investigating. The first indication of an enemy's presence, in each case, is when one of them popped up and opened fire. The only thing they know about Jail's motivations is what he TOLD them.
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This is actually one of the more realistic parts of the show. From what little I know of them, Police investigations tend to rely on human contacts that will betray the criminal. Since Scarlietti does not seem to have contacts with anybody except senior TSAB guys who were "beyond suspicion", it is realistic their investigation mostly draws blanks.
This is not to excuse their lack of a Signals Intelligence capability... with Scarlietti on Midchildra and yakking away on the radio with full high-res audio-visual links so often, it is hard to believe they won't have acquired his HQ years ago if only they had SIGINT.
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I still hold that a lot of this is due to the writers of the show not understanding the military. They don't mean to make these guys look stupid and slow, but they want one-on-one (or three-on-one, sorry Tea) action at the finale, and they don't care if they have to rip on the TSAB in order to create that scenario. I think they want to project that Nanoha and Hayate are actually competent in their jobs, but they just don't understand what being competent in those jobs entails in the first place.
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Must not fully agree. If you don't know competence, the trick is to avoid people scrutinizing your choices too closely. Since this
is a Magical Girl anime, this is actually not difficult.
1) Any plan your protagonist issues must be shown to be successful (at the very least it shouldn't look like a disaster). The audience understands that a) they probably don't know the fine details of the situation as well as the protagonists and b) that the scriptwriters aren't likely to be true tactical geniuses. Between these two factors, as long as your plan looks reasonably successful on screen, they will give your character the benefit of the doubt.
This already worked to Seven Arcs' favor in Ep7 and Ep12 of StrikerS, as well as Nanoha A's. It also works with Scarlietti - he is actually also dispersing his forces in Ep21, which may be his eventual downfall, but since so far he's shown to be relatively successful, the audience will rationalize his tactics as good use of Economy of Force through his understanding of his enemy (though we know whatever tactics he chooses he's already slated to fail).
2) Any plan that is to fail or place your protagonists in a very tough spot must be fully attributed to
someone else, because those plans will be scrutinized and most likely found wanting. Failure to do this in Ep17 and Ep21 is why they are being blasted to bits.
3) Be very careful when you have a protagonist's plan fail. It is possible to do so and make him not look like an idiot, but only if the plan is carefully laid out with his reasoning clear so no blame can reasonably be placed on the protagonist. Since this is hard, unskilled authors are best off avoiding this.
Though more focus on the 'rare skills'.
Author
[also a headshot >_<]. 
. I'd say she isn't worth as much as a research subject than Subaru or Erio, but I suppose the Numbers could learn much from someone who is utterly without mercy.
