The biggest problem with the likes of Saint-Just was that they did not clean out the corrupt thugs from the former InSec, they made the situation worse.
He was IIRC something of a paranoid control freak.
Rob Pierre was even sympathetic by comparison.
Actually, Saint-Just did purge the corrupt thugs of InSec. They were too loyal to the old regime, or at least not loyal to the Committee. He just went and replaced them with the stupid, uneducated, dolist thugs that CPS propaganda worked very well on and could be easily convinced to see the people the CPS wanted seen as enemies, were seen as enemies.
StateSec needed a relative handful of smart, competent, motivated people but for the vast majority of their needs; thugs too dumb to think were exactly what they wanted.
The first step for the CPS was always going to be, and had to be, purging the Navy of those loyal to the old regime. Seeing as the middle and senior ranks of the officer core were virtually
all members of the ruling families of the old regime that meant you were going to have to basically gut your military while still fighting the largest war humanity has ever seen. Morale is absolutely going to tank and a hell of a lot of critical knowledge and skills are going to be missing. The only realistic way to keep the Navy fighting in such a situation is to make them fear the consequences of not fighting more than the probable fate of fighting. The Manties will
probably kill you if you fight, StateSec will kill you, your family, your friends, and your pet dog if you don't fight the Manties to the death; suddenly the choice is so very easy.
StateSec being thugs who engender hatred is also great for ensuring that neither faction is able to make common cause with the other outside of official sanction.
The plan was for StateSec to rule by fear and keep the boot firmly on the neck of the Navy until the first generation of true believers who were enlisted/recruited post CPS rise to power, with no ties to the old regime, and who didn't personally experience the purges were ready for higher rank. You recruit for ambition as much as loyalty to provide the extra personal incentive to accept it when you purge the last of the old officers for their elitest beliefs and promote those new officiers to fill the empty spots.
Then, once you have a military that you can actually trust you use them as the support you need to purge StateSec and reform it.
What?
I mean, I stopped around At All Costs and the 2nd Shadow of Saganami novel, but the Solarian govrnment was a totally dysfunctional, corrupt mess run by the Mesans and several other big interests.
It basically gobbled up everything and cared nothing about the new systems it annexed.
The Solarian League Government was supposed to be basically totally dysfunctional and corrupt. The member systems deliberately made a government that had no taxing authority, no ability to intervene in the internal affairs of the member systems (with a bare handful of exceptions that were carefully delineated), no foreign policy beyond "don't cause problems for the SL's member systems and we don't smash you", and every member system having veto authority over basically everything.
Yes, OFS was out conquering worlds. But what was it actually doing? Creating captive markets for league corporations, with the wealth flowing into SL member systems and OFS getting enough skimmed off the top to keep the central "government" sufficiently funded without having to up taxes on any League citizens or systems.
Did you read Eric Flint's stuff in the Honorverse, btw?
Yes.
Their navy was pretty massively mismanaged and basically used as a big slushfund and a way to give favored relatives plum posts.
And despite that, it was still casually able to crush any combination of foreign powers at will right up until fundamentally new technology obsoleted everything that came before. And still, the SLN would have regained its old primacy in a few years if Mesa hadn't deliberately started the war.
Remember, Mesa wanted the League destroyed. So they used multiple centuries worth of infiltration and deep cover operatives to get the war started before the SLN could fix the problem.
Don't get me wrong, the SL was massively corrupt and in many respects a horrid government but it was generally fit for purpose and achieving what it was created to do.
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Imagine designing a government to preserve noble privilege and then calling it the worst democracy around. Its somewhat hard to make that argument credibly when the government was never intended to be an actual democracy.
The same applies to a lot of the "worst" governments in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. They were created to serve an end that is not advantaged by "good" governance. So do we judge them based on how "good" the governance they provide is or on how effectively they accomplish the ends that they were created to serve.
