|
What you quoted says "autonomous." That just means they self-govern, not that they are independent. Compare it to "patient autonomy" in medicine. That means a patient has control over what treatment he receives, instead of going to a hospital and letting it just take over his life until they let him out. He is still dependent on doctors to actually perform the treatment, so it is not "patient independence." If it were patient independence, he'd have to do all of the treatment to himself.
That's what it means. Shadow captains can do what they want to, but they still need, you know, ships. It would be a huge hassle for each company captain to have to staff and provision his own ships instead of having a centralized Master of the Fleet.
By that principle it would be way worse if companies had their own scouts. In a chapter that did not rely on scouts, that would be fine, because moderate-quality scouts would not ruin entire operations, but the Raven Guard need to have professionalized scout sergeants. Company scouts would be like starting the Navy Seals from scratch with a couple guys from your neighborhood. You might actually have a Navy Seal in your neighborhood who would have some idea of how to do everything, but it would still be better to have an enormous institution like the actual navy in on the plan.
|