Chapter 1408: Chapter 530: Differences (Part 3)

As soon as he said this, Fudin and Grune finally settled down.

Fudin sighed and said, "Makes sense. As long as we can pull off a one-hit kill and butcher Earl Red Blade, every problem stops being a problem."

Grune said, "In that case, this battle is one we absolutely cannot afford to lose."

The agent chuckled, "Not ’cannot afford to lose’, but ’bound to win’. You don’t really think His Lordship the Earl only gave you some measly combat system and didn’t throw in any solid hard gear, do you? I won’t deny it, the Red Blade Clan is indeed a cut above in technology, a full tier higher than you pirates, and even the Five Elder Clan’s heritage can’t compare to them. If you relied purely on your own methods, you might win, but you couldn’t be sure of killing Earl Red Blade outright. You’d end up letting him slip away and leave endless trouble behind."

"In fact, long before I received my orders and set out, His Lordship the Earl had already dispatched his civil and military officials to pool their wisdom, then called on the hub combat system to complete an operational assessment and formulate a meticulous and rigorous battle plan. Marshal Fudin, all you’ll need to do then is carry it out to the letter, and you’ll naturally advance step by step, securing an overwhelming advantage. In this entire set of plans, we’ve already checked for gaps and patched them, and anything you’re lacking, we’re supplying."

"When the time comes, no matter what tricks the Red Blade Star military has up its sleeve, Marshal Fudin, you just respond move by move, and I guarantee you’ll beat them till they can’t even fight back."

At this point in the conversation, Grune and Fudin immediately understood Nanxiang Marquis Liu An’s true plan.

On the surface, this was a battle between the Pirate Alliance and the Red Blade Second Expeditionary Army, but in essence it was a battle between the many Marshals, Generals, and scientific advisers in the Nanxiang Military and Political Center and the military command personnel on Red Blade Star.

Once the situation was made clear, Fudin felt no more ripples in his heart. He hurried to the side, jacked into the system, and began browsing the Empire regular army–grade intelligence and military resource lists, as well as the complete battle plan.

After a long while, Fudin burst into loud laughter, "We’ve got this!"

Unlike Red Blade Star, where the approach to command is primarily human-driven, the Empire regular army relies far more heavily on Super Network computing power.

Different objective realities shaped different styles. The Empire Super Network blankets all things, possessing an extremely powerful capacity for information analysis and integration; its control over information within its own territories is especially terrifying—if even a tiny sewing needle moves from one Star Zone to another, it can be traced back to its source.

Thanks to this sea of information, whenever the Empire regular army needs to formulate a battle plan, they can always take a lofty, top-down view, integrate every kind of intelligence, and then run exhaustive simulations down to the tiniest detail.

The primary factor that determines a Commander of a given army is not the Commander’s own ability to lead troops in battle, but rather their title, power, prestige, wealth, and other factors that ought to have been secondary.

After all, no matter how smart you are, how wild your imagination, how rigorous your logic, or how steely your will, you still can’t compare to the absolutely cold and ruthless computing power of the Empire Super Network.

Rather than making muddled decisions and then watching the whole situation collapse due to personal error, it’s better to hand authority over to the Empire Super Network’s computing power—which will never betray you or vie for power—and simply sit back and enjoy the results, without even having to bear responsibility for command mistakes in battle.

If you can win, then you can win—because your own side was better prepared, better equipped, with more Elite Soldiers.

If you can’t win, then you can’t win—because your own side’s technology is backward, your Warship functions are inadequate, the number of Elite Soldiers is too small or their specialties aren’t properly matched, or because something went wrong in logistics, or you ran into an unexpected natural disaster in space.

Over time, the personal ability of the Commander became increasingly dispensable. Even if you put a pig in the Marshal’s seat, the result would actually be more or less the same—unless the Super Network and information-flow communications collapsed first.

Even though the Empire still has military academies, the criteria those academies use to select cadets have nothing to do with talent or ability. It all depends on background and assets.

The situation on Red Blade Star is the complete opposite.

Although Ren Zhong holds the rank of Earl, as long as he hasn’t passed the review and been formally confirmed, he can’t, like Liu An, access and mobilize information across the entire Nanxiang Star Cluster. He can only rely on Sun Ai to sneak data from the public network, scraping open-source information and doing her own analysis and synthesis. Their intelligence-gathering capability is extremely poor, to the point that Ren Zhong had to rely on personal connections to get intel from Wen Yuanbo back then.

So the Red Blade Star military could not, like the Empire regular army, perform a comprehensive global analysis before every battle. They could only rely on their own scout ships to cast a wide net, collect data on-site, analyze on-site, and then adapt on the fly.

The current situation forces the Red Blade Clan’s military to develop a human-machine hybrid decision-making mechanism that relies much more on human capability.

Sun Ai can play a certain role in operational decision-making, but the value of Commanders like Zheng Tian, Vincent Fanhuoyi, and Ying Zhenshan cannot be overlooked either.

Due to practical necessity, due to their relatively shallow foundation, and due to the fact that the Red Blade Star military’s main combat experience had turned into decades of guerrilla warfare in the Shattered Star Ring, the Red Blade Military Academy was forced to adopt extremely strict talent selection. They had to pick the best of the best and drive these Commanders to undergo personal tempering on the battlefield before forming their own distinctive combat styles.

In the end, this led to an endless stream of military command talent emerging within the Red Blade Clan, as numerous as fish crossing a river, with each and every one of them a master in their own right.

The Empire regular army in the Nanxiang Star Cluster, however, currently has no way to imitate this, because they lack that training system and social atmosphere. As a result, their Commanders’ combat capabilities have atrophied.

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