A senior IEN Admiral lead a multi-polity force in the largest anti-Exterminator exercise since the last of the alien super-battleships were destroyed at Tuskan under the command of IEN Admiral Tryon.

The IEN in co-operation with the Combined Human Fleet in Q5 recently conducted a readiness exercise, 'Charging Bull', simulating an Exterminator attack on Quadrant 5 to gain experience of responding to such events and to look for ways that our practice and standing orders can be improved.

The exercise was designed to present a slightly out of the ordinary Exterminator attack while staying within some of the observed parameters of the original attack. Therefore, as with the real attack on Q5, six ESBs were used as OPFOR, and they operated by clearing a planet, using 1 ESB to establish a base, and then moving out in ESB pairs.

All ESBs arrived at Vorlon initially, on day 001 of the exercise. We allowed a 'standard' observed 50 days for the ESBs to destroy each major colony. The response of the exercise team was interesting. The force sent to Vorlon (consisting of the IEN, MSN and GFAN contingents) was much smaller than the enemy force.

The Vorlon contingent quickly realised it was outmatched and awaited the ESBs' move. When the ESB pairs and Viking 'scouts' left the system, a force under Admiral Allen IEN was sent to destroy the remaining ESB in-system (which was disassebling itself to form a planetary base) and the others moved to Trucker.

Admiral Allen's force, meanwhile, took on the remaining enemy at Vorlon, and suffered heavy casualties (including the Admiral himself) in so doing. And of course, had the ESB not been part-disassembled at the time that the Earther fleet burned in-system, it would probably have noted that it was outmatched and left, illustrating the difficulty of bringing exterminators to battle at a time and place of our choosing.

However, on a more positive note, the Supreme Human Commander was pleased to see action being quickly taken to look ahead and gather Starguard and STUFT merchant vessels at Marti and Over to attempt to form a fleet containing an impressive enough number of large burns to possibly deter an ESB attack, and channel them towards pre-positioned ambush fleets (the 'Tiger Hunt' strategy as it has been described elsewhere), which may well be our only viable strategy for handling Exterminators before they can attack a colony world.

Many valuable lessons have been learnt from this exercise and all QDF standing instructions are being updated.

~~DISCUSSION~~