If your going to be blamed for it, be fully in charge or not at all!

(This is a story on the drone wars in 2012-2013 that saw the Drone Coalition / Solar Alliance being evicted out of the drone regions by PL and NCDOT.  I posted this a while back on Reddit, but felt it made a good blog post and life lesson).

If your going to be blamed for it, be fully in charge or not at all!

So this is a very interesting story on why you shouldn't let politicians and armchair quarterbacks run strategic fleet operations.

Here is a spreadsheet of most of the fleets I either personally fc'ed or was there for. I left out most of the Armageddon fleets for reasons I explain below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ate_vz0fcMsfdDhlSXVsaUxGVXp6M0VEWS01WTRWY3c&usp=docslist_api (I only tracked participation in mainline doctrine ships, and only tried logging kills and losses based on the same method.)

In the 1st few battles of the drone wars the ragtag fleets of the English speaking alliances were actually doing very well. Solar Fleet was at full strength back then and on the English side we were fielding 250 in fleets regularly.

Maelstroms were doing great, alpha was and still is king and I was pretty confident we could at least make PL / NCDOT bleed heavily for the region.

However it was a Coalition of like 6 plus alliances who all felt they deserved to comment on fleets. Nevermind most of these people never attended operations or even PVP, but there biggest complaint was that T1 maelstroms were too expensive and we should switch to a cheaper ship.

I shit you not the consensus was T2 Zealots. I flat out argued, yelled and eventually gave up, nothing I said mattered .... I was only the guy who was told to FC this mess, but really never allowed to pick the right tools for the job.

So we switched to Zealots and as you can see our k/d ratio dropped dramatically and we started to lose the war.

Solar, then seeing that combat by democracy was a horrible idea, hired Black Legion to come bail out the USTZ. This is how I found out that the famous Elo Knight's entire war plan was to be as risk adverse as possible while padding his own killboard.

He ordered all of us to fly Drakes and Hurricanes while Black Legion would sit at range sniping. Complete disaster and after a few fights he either quit or got fired by Solar.

Now at this point the wheels are coming off the bus. Alliances are in a panic, major systems are starting to fall and political hacks are scrambling to find a solution.

So, I'm like "hey guys remember Alpha" and promptly told to shut up. We are instead going to listen to Lord Ravhin (another FC back then) and fly.... Wait for it...

Pulse Armageddon's (pre-neut / drone change).

So at best we could field 100-150 of these. We flew them maybe 3-4 fleets. WE NEVER GOT A SINGLE KILL. All that PL had to do was bring in a few triage Chimeras and use Target Spectrum Breaker modules, it made Geddons in the number we could field completely ineffective and finally broke the will of the English alliances after losing probably 400 of them. 

This was also before Micro Jump Drives were in game yet, so extracting battleship fleets was pretty hard once bubbled.

Solar continued to fight for another month? after the collapse of the USTZ but even with fielding close to 900 pilot's solo on major timers, you had all of N3 and PL attending in Slowcats, proving to be too much for Solar alone to hold back.

And that children is why you don't let your alliances political hacks dictate fleet management, if your going to be tasked with being the FC you tell them what will be run, not the other way around.