This story is set in Susan R. Matthews’ award winning Under Jurisdiction universe, which includes January 2019 entry in the series, Crimes Against Humanity. Matthews was raised in a military family and spent her younger years living around the globe in a myriad of places including Germany, both coasts of the U.S., and India. Matthews' debut novel, An Exchange of Hostages, the first entry in her Under Jurisdiction series, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Matthews was also a finalist for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer. Crimes Against Humanity is the sequel to Blood Enemies. Earlier novels and tales of the Under Jurisdiction series are collected in three omnibus editions from Baen Books: Fleet Inquisitor, Fleet Renegade, and Fleet Insurgent. Matthews lives in Seattle with her wife, Maggie, and two delightful dogs. She is a veteran of the U.S. Army, where she served as operations and security officer of a combat support hospital. She is also an avid HAM radio operator.

Into each well-regulated novel some material may fall that must be excised, in the end, as a non-load-bearing plot element (how I wish I’d made up that phrase!). My upcoming novel Crimes Against Humanity, as first drafted, originally spent more time noodling around in the capital city of Haspirzak Judiciary than was maybe strictly necessary before getting on with the business of the novel, but I had great fun with it.

The following self-contained story is one of Bench Specialists—Jils Ivers, Karol Vogel, and Irenja Rafenkel, top-level operatives with powers of “extraordinary discretion” Jurisdiction-wide, answerable to eight Judges and eight Judges only—putting their long-term schemes for Gonebeyond Space forward, and coincidentally shaping a significant element of the story to come in Crimes Against Humanity.

Cutting the material from the to-be-published novel forced a minor change in one detail, so when you read Crimes Against Humanity you may notice a single, minor continuity glitch. I hope you won’t mind!

Bench Intelligence Specialist Jils Ivers stood at the tall clearwalls running the length of one of the Third Judge’s best conference rooms, hands clasped behind her back, gazing out across the great Gelisar Gardens—the pride of the capital of Haspirzak Judiciary, famous throughout Jurisdiction space for their beauty and the ever-changing delights of their green lanes and grand vistas. Admiring the view.

Behind her she could hear Karol Vogel and Irenja Rafenkel, he enjoying a moment of modest satisfaction in his accomplishment, she apparently unable to stem a spontaneous response to a plate of traditional Aznir pastries. “Holy Mother,” Rafenkel was saying. “These sloeplum knots, Vogel, they almost fall apart if you just breathe on them, and where did you learn to make the filling in these buns? How did you even get the fruit to travel?”

This is the third of four entries in this series. Part 1 and Part 2 are now available. Part 4 will be available next month. Tom Kratman’s latest entry in the Carerra series is November’s A Pillar of Fire by Night. Tom Kratman was a Regular Army infantryman much of his adult life. After the Gulf War, and with the bottom dropping completely out of the anti-communist market, Tom decided to become a lawyer. Every now and again, when the frustrations of legal life and having to deal with other lawyers got to be too much, Tom would rejoin the Army (or a somewhat similar group, say) for fun and frolic in other climes. He no longer practices law, but instead writes full time. His novels for Baen include A State of Disobedience, Caliphate, and the series consisting of A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, The Lotus Eaters, The Amazon Legion, Come and Take Them, The Rods and the Axe, and A Pillar of Fire by Night, as well as three collaborations with John Ringo, Watch on the Rhine, Yellow Eyes, and The Tuloriad. Also for Baen, he has written the first three volumes of the modern-day military fiction Countdown series.

1. Attrition: Organize for anti-fragility and ability to endure losses.

Equipment and men are destroyed or damaged, wounded or killed. Men and equipment wear out and break. We’ve already touched on organizing personnel and logistic systems to provide replacements; this principle is different. This is about organizing in such a way that a unit doesn’t collapse from losses before replacement men and equipment can be delivered.

The prejudice here is in favor of larger units. That must be balanced, though, against the need for flexibility in action, and of having sufficient units to allow rotation from the front, with the opportunity for rest and retraining, as well as assimilation and integration of new men. Too, it is unfortunate but true, commanders, historically, are sometimes more profligate with lives when their commands are bigger. Conversely, though, commanders of small and weak units will often lack boldness and decisiveness.

An aspect of attrition, mentioned above under “social cohesion,” is that small units’ morale can be much more hurt by losses than larger ones. Yes, that means that attrition is also about non-material matters.

Note, too, that imaginary combined arms formations where everything is pushed down to the smallest possible level—one infantry squad, one mech infantry squad, one tank, one engineer, etc.—would be vulnerable to being turned into non-combined arms teams by the loss of a single squad or vehicle.

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