Official: The Military Committee

[Whaleboy]

A good idea, however:

The stronger the sector, the more cheaply they could produce

And presumably the better quality and quantity too. But on the other hand, much of arms development, i.e. small arms, artillery, even tanks and ships to a degree, are comparable to civilian industries. For example, one can build a warship in a civilian shipyard, or a sub-machine gun in a private workshop. IMO when they refer to the arms producing sector, they are meaning the more expensive side, such as aircraft manufacture, high-tech weapons and armour, etc etc.

On a side note, how would you categorise the LF, all the nations of whom have lowish to average (but increasing) military spending, but the military is a federal institution, separate from the constituent nationstate. Presumably you'd just add each nations military stats to each other, unless the report is size per capita, in which case you'd want to multiply by population and find the average of those four positions?

[Archaic]

I think we have to ignore the taxation issue beyond what people actually declare as their tax rates. Given that we only know about income tax and not the various other methods one could use to raise funds (Such as in Alecrast, where the national armed forces are more like a group of private armies belonging to the council members, and some corporations, unions, etc, who fund their own troops themselves from their own pocket [which is often filled from hiring out these troops as mercenaries to likeminded nations], who've intertwined their command structures under the Monarch).

[Drogue]

Archaic: True, although there is only so much you can do with other taxes. I think they work where people ghaven't declared, as most that are different will declare, since most do not know enough about economics to bother trying to argue differently, and so would accept what it says. All those measures I suggested are just guidelines, nothing exact, but it does give a guideline. Somewhere with a 100% tax rate has a lot of their GDP for gov't projects, someone with 0% income tax doesn't have so much. Yes these are not exact, but they can tell us about that nations style, and availability of funds.

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by Drogue
I agree completely with UR, we must look at economy and what that nation spends it on, but also on how much of that money is tax to be spent on defence. I am in the process of coming up with a formula for it, but the best I can think of is using the UN Report on it, "Military spending per capita". Take everyone's position in the region and the world and work from that. We can simply use that to give everyone a military budget, and then let eqipment and troop sizes follow from that and population. However we must also account that prices will not be the same in each nation. For that, I believe we must look at the size of that nations arms industry. The stronger the sector, the more cheaply they could produce. Also we could look at inflation, since higher inflation will mean more expensive arms, although it is hard to measure how large inflation is, usually an economy that grows more and performs better has higher inflation. Rising prosperity = rising average income = rising prices. These is obviously not perfect, but as a rule of thumb. However it does help to account for the amount of arms the USSR had compared to the much more prosperous USA.

A few ideas, what do people think?

One also has to account for countries that buy their millitrary hardware from other countries. On nationstates forums there are lots of nations willing to sell hightech weapons to people who have the money. Also dont forget natons have allies and allies can sell that nation millitary hardware or give to them in the from of millitary aid(US giving Isreal millitary aid every year.)

As for the Soviet Union and the United States. The part of the Soviet millitary doctrine was to realy on mass and superior numbers to win battles. They also kept lots of outdated tanks and other millitary equipment, anther reason why they had so much millitary hardware. The United States focused a lot of their efforts on building better weapons and spent a lot of money on R and D. That is what mainly acounted for the high cost of US arms. Inflation does not alone do it. The US could start building massive amount of cheap arms like old tanks and such or come up with a low tech tank and other arms.

[Whaleboy]

Thats true. Perhaps its easiest to assume no technical advantage, unless one nation makes a specific development and refuses to export it, which to my knowledge is only the case with Akiria.

[Drogue]

Jack: They could have, but inflation was still a factor. Teh Soviets had near 0% inflation for 30 odd years, and it meant that cars and arms cost much less. Indeed, the fact that nominal GDP was much lower than when meaures by the purchasing power parity method shows this. The PPP measures what you can buy with the average GDP, rather than at the exchange rate.

Also with regards to tech, yes you can buy high tech weaponry from some nations, however with the 2nd highest arms industry, and a ban on arms exports to any nations that we do not have formal agreements with (and top secret tech may not be shared with them even) we do possess something of an advantage in some ways, with regards to tech and price. I think we have to look at a whole nation when deciding.

[Whaleboy]

The thing with secret tech is that development tends to be limited only by science, thus should be more related to education. Actually implimenting something that is barely more than theoretical, like the Manhattan project, is actually relatively cheap, when compared to other efforts, for example, that examples contemporary drive to produce B29's.

In terms of quality of arms therefore, for the most part, I think we should assume that for nations of a large size (>100 million imo), the ceiling is identical. We are also limited by such things as what is physically possible, which is something I am more qualified to talk about . Secret tech again, I think all nations with a tolerable economy and a large size can certainly manage it. There is a misconception that such things require massive investment, but we are dealing with largely engineering and chemical problems in weaponry, not precision microbiology as pharmaceuticals. Only implimenting it on a massive scale requires such investment, but that goes with everything.

And with regards to secret tech, if you dont RP it, it doesn't exist . RP'ing it will of course render it a non-secret, as presumably we assume a verification mechanism that will provide at least some assessment of how such a hypothetical tech will work. Assuming that is not the case leaves us with a situation where claims can easily be regarded as spurious, for example, warships armed with ..extreme weaponry that can travel 4 times light speed .

[Whaleboy]

Being an OOC thread, I presume we refer to our nations in the third person Drogue

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by Drogue
Jack: They could have, but inflation was still a factor. Teh Soviets had near 0% inflation for 30 odd years, and it meant that cars and arms cost much less. Indeed, the fact that nominal GDP was much lower than when meaures by the purchasing power parity method shows this. The PPP measures what you can buy with the average GDP, rather than at the exchange rate.

Also with regards to tech, yes you can buy high tech weaponry from some nations, however with the 2nd highest arms industry, and a ban on arms exports to any nations that we do not have formal agreements with (and top secret tech may not be shared with them even) we do possess something of an advantage in some ways, with regards to tech and price. I think we have to look at a whole nation when deciding.

One thing I would like to point out is that with inflation in countries with Good economies you also have rising wages as well. In fact it is a theory of economics were rising wages causes rising inflation since business have to raise prices in order to make money and pay workers more. Also rising inflation cause wages to go up as workers demand more pay due to rising cost, thus a sprial effect.

[Drogue]

elijah: This is not an OOC thread. this is a committee elected by the national delegates to discuss military sizes. We still refer to ourselves as the leader of that/those particular countries.

Jack: That was exactly the point I made above. Better economy = higher incomes = higher inflation, usually.

[Whaleboy]

This is not an OOC thread

It was, thats how I proposed it. Its designed so that us players can keep an eye and a realistic approach on the game of other players, namely in this case, what they state to be their militaries. There would be no need for this in RL obviously because the laws of physics and economics prevent unrealistic militaries.

Such a thing in RP would simply either fail, or just not be realistic.

[Drogue]

Hmmm.... I didn't think we had OOC threads here. The occasional point yes, but a thread out of character? Welcome to if you wish I suppose. Nothing against it. I will still post as Drogue, since that is my character in game and out.

[Jack_www]

Originally posted by Drogue
elijah: This is not an OOC thread. this is a committee elected by the national delegates to discuss military sizes. We still refer to ourselves as the leader of that/those particular countries.

Jack: That was exactly the point I made above. Better economy = higher incomes = higher inflation, usually.

Forgot to metion too with Higher incomes means higher tax income for the government of the country as well. That is what I was trying to say but forgot to put it into the post. Thus the rising wages would mean a government would have more money to spend. ALso even with inflation prices for many things have actually fallen. Also the high cost of modern weapons also comes from the fact that they are high tech, and require skilled workers to put them togather and highly educated people to design them.

[Whaleboy]

So do we want to get some guidelines down? I think the economists should start...