Comparative price of military expenses to overall economy.

kzt wrote:

Relax wrote:Manufacturing, even Specialized manufacturing takes at best a year to train personnel on a crash basis. Second class 2 years out from initiation of decision. They may not be well rounded manufacturing specialists, but on an individual process specialty, they will be proficient. This is not a problem when massive manufacturing is initiated.

If you are training the entire crew from scratch I can see pretty serious problems, in that you have nobody who understands what needs to be trained or how to QC and debug the processes used.

There is always someone around. If not, no other solution for it other than On the job training. Not the end of the world. So, it will be slower manufacturing at the beginning and there will be lots of screw ups with the mass manufacturing, but any tweak will go through the line asap. Of course this is not the case for Haven or Manticore in the 1st Havenite war.

I've been reading this with several assumptions that seem to have gone away in the "fictional economy" of the Honorverse, the idea that anyone should be able to build scads of ships and crewing them just by doing so for a while just by assigning a percentage of the populace to the problem.

I think folks are forgetting something here... The first ship we are introduced to in OBS is the HMS Fearless, "light cruiser" CL-56.... which is about 75% the size of the U.S.S. Nimitz.

The top economy in the world now has what, 10-12 of these? and we gripe and moan about sustaining a military effort at that level. Obviously on a wartime footing the US would shift to doing more, but that wouldn't happen quickly, and five years later we'd have maybe two more bases capable of building said ships and what, five more carriers?

An SD hull is supposed to be about 100x the size of the CL-56... So go figure, a single system with less people than Earth can't build and man thousands upon thousands of these super-jumbo size craft to military spec in wartime in twenty years...

...especially when RFC/MWW has said that all along that there's enough political opposition in Manticore to keep much more from happening that quickly, and hey, somebody' gotta pay the miners, assemblers, wages, etc. in a capitalistic universe.

*edit: fixed the carrier numbers up above...

Relax wrote:In a war for survival, the spacer population should have exploded in regards to building new ship building slips. Instead we barely see a building program increase at all. There should have been tens of millions of people building ship building centers along with the smelters to create the basic materials infrastructure to build the ships in question along with the training of new ships crew.

Erm... the wave of construction laid down in the build up for Buttercup was of fairly similar scale to the post-Thunderbolt Python Lump. It's just that most of that construction didn't have much impact on the first war as the first few dozen SD(P)s and carriers to come out of that program were decisive. But there were another hundred twenty or so RMN SD(P)s (twenty-ish were completed before High Ridge froze construction, thirty-ish when after construction resumed in the run-up to the second war, and seventy-ish were destroyed in their building slips at Grendelsbane) and a few dozen CLACs were in the pipeline at the time of the truce.

Off-hand, the elements that control how large and effective a military you have are:

Your population size - You obviously can't have 50 million people in your military if you only have 40 million people.

You resources available to provide raw material to build stuff - in the honorverse this is pretty much not an issue.

The size of your economy - military expenditures are a drain on the economy, and huge economies can tolerate larger military spending in absolute terms (more money, not a higher %) than smaller economies without pain.

Your industrial capability - if you can't build jet engines at all your jets are either going to have some issues or you need to buy at least engines from someone else.

What percentage of your population are you willing to have in the military at any given point in time: People in the military are not contributing to your economy - they are a cost. You can argue that the Chinese military owning huge amounts of the economy is a counterexample, but if your military is focusing on (for example) running gadget plants I suspect it will punch far under its weight class. This changes, like the military budget, with how safe everyone feels. This also feeds into your economy - the more people in the military the less people there are doing productive things. Plus the ideal military personnel are the same people you'd like doing productive stuff.

How much of your economy you are willing to dedicate to the military. Europe fights to get 1.3%, the US does 3.8%. This really is controlled by politics and how secure everyone feels. In times of war the percentage tends to expand dramatically. See above, as the personnel decision is tied to this.

How expensive your equipment is. The US tends to gold plate everything, so we have very, very expensive ships and aircraft that are usually pretty capable (other then disasters like the LCS) There are other approaches, which yield different scales and types of military.

How expensive your military personnel are - large conscript militaries can be pretty effective, but are not normally as effective on a per person basis as a long-service professional force. But quantity has a quality all of it's own.

Professionalism and training - can the military actually fight effectively and is that the real objective? If the real purpose of a military as seen by the leadership is to serve as a source of graft for the leadership everything else is kind of meaningless. See the disasters of the Nigerian army facing Boko Haram.

Willingness to fund training - good training burns out equipment, gets people hurt and costs a lot of money. Many militaries simply don't do this.

I'll add one more, kzt--degree of political resistance and support. It is sort of included in some of your points, such as how much of your economy you are willing to dedicate, but political action can redirect some of that funding in ways that do not effectively increase your military power.

Apologies for all the real world examples coming, wasn´t quite intended at start.
This became one very haphazardly written and overly random looking post for some reason...

How much of your economy you are willing to dedicate to the military. Europe fights to get 1.3%, the US does 3.8%.

Though USA is pretty much bankrupting itself with that despite exploiting the petrodollar to massprint money that in any normal economy would cause hyper inflation.

A decently functional economy can usually handle 2% without much trouble.

You resources available to provide raw material to build stuff - in the honorverse this is pretty much not an issue.

Mostly isn´t. It can be. The basic fact that raw materials tends to be taken where it´s easy, means it´s often easy to raid against such operations, and if a nation looses a lot of mining operations, no matter how insignificant each one is, it´s going to hurt eventually. Of course, a sane nation will have mining ops outside of just outsystem asteroid fields and such.

How expensive your equipment is. The US tends to gold plate everything, so we have very, very expensive ships and aircraft that are usually pretty capable (other then disasters like the LCS)

And the F-35. Last joke i heard about it was that it´s going to cost as much as the F-22, at a quarter of the capability.

Moreover, it´s the degree of corruption and political porkbarrelling that adds much of those "gold plates".
And a handful of idiots who seems intent on making the specs for anything requisitioned to get bent beyond silly.

Anyway, you might say this is part of the "overhead" costs for items, and this adjusts what is possible quite a lot.

You find almost none of that kind of corruption here... Which gives:

Comparison, SAAB-39 Gripen, cost per flighthour ~4700$ peacetime nonoptimised, F-16 7500$ optimised, F-35 >32000$ wishful thinking.
Groundtime per flight:
Gripen, 10 hours with 2 technicians, can cut turnaround with full service to less than 2 hours, mostly by merely using unskilled assistants.
F-16, 19 hours with 6(?) technicians, can cut fullservice groundtime to less than half that.
F-35, 20 hours claimed, 23 hours apparently for real, with 17 technicians and "assistants", theoretically able to get full service in 12 hours, but that seems to be with at least 4 full service crews working on it.

How expensive your military personnel are - large conscript militaries can be pretty effective, but are not normally as effective on a per person basis as a long-service professional force.

That depends completely on HOW the force is trained and maintained.
Conscription has the huge advantage of being able to pick, choose and pidgeonhole all recruits towards they are hopefully best suited for.
A military recruiting small numbers over time has less leeway, they simply don´t have enough of a selection to be able to put people where they seem best suited, they have to put them where they currently have room.

Example, my friend who is insanely good at organising? He became a logistics specialist. Another friend with good kinestethic sense, pilot. My cousin good with animals and superb physique, a dog handler with the airbase rangers(the folks trained to find and hunt down special forces), my dad and brother communications and cryptologist, again things they already did before(anyone who knows the term DX-ing will understand why), my older brother a mortar battery commander as he is a natural with trajectories(never ever play Ballistics against him!)...
Compare that to people i know from "professional" armies in other countries, at least 1/2 of them end up somewhere they´re not suited for.

Willingness to fund training - good training burns out equipment, gets people hurt and costs a lot of money. Many militaries simply don't do this.

And more the woes to them!

Money spent now is lives NOT spent once fighting happens.

Even if this isn´t 100% comparable with Honorverse because of how good and available their simulations are, there´s still a million things to teach just about everyone.


Anyway, as already noted, the biggest baddest bottleneck pre-war for Manticore certainly seems to have been political. OTOH, would they have fared as well as they did with a larger less well trained force? Maybe.

But i very much doubt that they would have been able to reach their technoligical heights if starting with that larger, less trained force, as the total force size would increase cost of ownership, while political restraints would keep total expenses from rising too much, hence reducing the ability for training.

SharkHunter wrote:I've been reading this with several assumptions that seem to have gone away in the "fictional economy" of the Honorverse, the idea that anyone should be able to build scads of ships and crewing them just by doing so for a while just by assigning a percentage of the populace to the problem.

I think folks are forgetting something here... The first ship we are introduced to in OBS is the HMS Fearless, "light cruiser" CL-56.... which is about 75% the size of the U.S.S. Nimitz.

The top economy in the world now has what, 10-21 of these? and we gripe and moan about sustaining a military effort at that level. Obviously on a wartime footing the US would shift to doing more, but that wouldn't happen quickly, and five years later we'd have maybe two more bases capable of building said ships and what, five more carriers?

An SD hull is supposed to be about 100x the size of the CL-56... So go figure, a single system with less people than Earth can't build and man thousands upon thousands of these super-jumbo size craft to military spec in wartime in twenty years...

...especially when RFC/MWW has said that all along that there's enough political opposition in Manticore to keep much more from happening that quickly, and hey, somebody' gotta pay the miners, assemblers, wages, etc. in a capitalistic universe.

Construction of carriers is a hard thing to gauge against. US Carrier production is paced to keep construction capacity and building knowledge (hmmm, sounds like the SLN....), and to replace ships with a 50+ year lifespan. To do this, construction is slowed to a significant degree, which costs substancially more per unit, and keep any economy of costs off the table. Even "identical" parts like the reactors are built 1 every 2.5 years or so, so there is no economy there.

Honestly, it would be a minor cost overall to ramp up US Carrier production to the rate of that of the Burke program (2 completing/year), and that cost to upgrade the facilities necessary to produce said ships would easily disappear in the cost savings per unit. Currently The design and R&D costs are largely paid for in the initial ship, but the long lead time s mean each ship has some added R&D costs as well for upgraded (or replacing outdated) equipment, so you would see those savings as well.

- but what are we going to do with 60 Ford carriers, and the (now enlarged) shipyards will subsequentially shut down because we won't need to replace the fleet for 40 years.

So we do it this way, even though it costs more.

On the other hand, you have programs like the mentioned F-22 and F-35 programs - increasing design and research costs(because of insane design and construction requirements), cause the price per bird to increase. People want to decrease costs, but with a fixed (or growing) design base cost, the fewer you buy, the more each one costs in a spiraling waste. Next thing you know, you have only 21 B-2 bombers that each cost as much as one of the aircraft carriers, because you had to pay back 40 years of R&D.

Theemile, great post, fits alot of what I was thinking perfectly.

"Pre-war" Manticore is sort of like the USN now, until King Roger started the buildup needed to eventually stand up to the "Havenite threat".

During war, and ramping up to full production, obviously the yards would reach a capacity, then expanded, then new yards built, etc. to the greatest extent possible. Fold in the loss rate of wartime, and those yards would stay busier longer, of course, and expand faster. But there would still be a limit based on economics that would cause a top production limit that some of the posters seem to think "more possible for Manticore" than it would be for "Sol: Earth prime" circa 2015, with ships 100x the size of a supercarrier. Granted, we're assuming mechanization using technology that includes "gravitic" thrust vs. reaction thrust.

I like the fact that David has chosen to use a pattern based on military vs. economic growth here on Planet Earth: "if it were easy, everyone would be doing it". AKA something along the lines of asking "why isn't Venezuala (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter) building super-carriers and jets, gee whiz the knowledge about how to do so has been out there for fifty years?" or "why didn't the Soviet Union restructure and outbuild the US into oblivion?" "Why doesn't China get into the supercarrier game big-time instead of building bigger and more modern cities and infrastructure? Also known as: launching and recovering jets just isn't as easy to engineer as trucks, highways, and buildings.

AKA something along the lines of asking "why isn't Venezuala (or Saudi Arabia, for that matter) building super-carriers and jets, gee whiz the knowledge about how to do so has been out there for fifty years?"

Well, Venezuela aint building CVs because upkeep would eat up waayy too much of their military budget. Saudi´s aint building CVs because they don´t need to, they just shout loud enough until USA comes cruising.

Consider though the fact that Japan has built pseudocarriers(helicopter destroyer, could easily handle VTOL and probably STOL), Italy and Spain have their own homemade baby carriers.
And most people probably don´t know it, but there´s 13 nations with carriers currently in comission, with Turkey 1 planned making it 14.

Spain has 1 and 1 in reserve, Italy has 2, South Korea has a helicopter carrier, India has 2 in operation 1 under construction and 5 on order(mix of fixed wing carriers(now that the Harriers are getting too old ) and some amphibious ships on order), Brazil has had at least 1 carrier operational since 1960(bought Vengeance from UK then to replace that, Foch from France), China has 1 to play with and 1 under construction, Japan has 2 Hyuga baby/heli CV operational and 1 Izumo undergoing trials and 1 under construction, Russia has 1 fullsized and 2+ planned, Thailand has 1(which is just barely kept operational though), France has 1 fullsize and 3 Mistral heli carriers/amphibious ship, Australia has 1 amphibious ship and another under construction though the ship is big enough to act as a fullsize carrier with STOL aircraft.
And of course there´s UK with their marvellous waste of money that is the new bigassed CV class that COULD have been built with catapult launch, but now instead is restricted to F-35s and helis just because some idiots tried(and failed ) to save money.
And USA with 20.

So, basically if someone really wants to own a "big toy", it can usually be done, like how Thailand keeps its CV operational to a very questionable degree, but it has still been highly useful several times. But building on your own isn´t entirely easy(and can get really expensive), but can still usually be done as long as someone wants it enough.




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Construction of carriers is a hard thing to gauge against. US Carrier production is paced to keep construction capacity and building knowledge (hmmm, sounds like the SLN....), and to replace ships with a 50+ year lifespan. To do this, construction is slowed to a significant degree, which costs substancially more per unit, and keep any economy of costs off the table. Even "identical" parts like the reactors are built 1 every 2.5 years or so, so there is no economy there.

Honestly, it would be a minor cost overall to ramp up US Carrier production to the rate of that of the Burke program (2 completing/year), and that cost to upgrade the facilities necessary to produce said ships would easily disappear in the cost savings per unit. Currently The design and R&D costs are largely paid for in the initial ship, but the long lead time s mean each ship has some added R&D costs as well for upgraded (or replacing outdated) equipment, so you would see those savings as well.

Indeed. This is clearly shown by the UK just keeping their old CVs for a long time and then suddenly building two brand new, highly advanced and modern ships, after pretty much loosing most of their local experience in building carriers. And boy did that get expensive.

Tenshinai wrote:Indeed. This is clearly shown by the UK just keeping their old CVs for a long time and then suddenly building two brand new, highly advanced and modern ships, after pretty much loosing most of their local experience in building carriers. And boy did that get expensive.

To be fair, we haven't built a full up Carrier since the 50's, with Hermes. We did build the through-deck cruisers in the 70's, but the idiot politicians listened to the RAF lying that they could range to any country in the world and decided we didn't need a full up carrier.

That decision cost us a war, several ships and a lot of lives. Even then, it took another 30 years to accept that we needed a fleet carrier...