Re: The GZG Digest V2 #837

>Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 18:18:54 -0700
>From: "B Lin" <lin@rxkinetix.com>
>Subject: RE: Merc Guild
>

<snip>

>> And that expertise is where the expense starts to get near 
>> that of buying 
>> the equipment.  Remember, my premise is that Mercs will be 
>> hired by nations 
>> with few men but plenty of money.
>
>I'm not sure I agree with the part where expertise is the bulk of the
expense.  In most cases today, the operator of the equipment is the
cheapest part - i.e. F-16 pilots probably only cost a few million to
train,
while their planes are 25-40 million each, cost $500,000- 1 million to
fire
a missile and probably a few hundred thousand dollars in maintenance. 
The
pilot himself is probably making less than $40K a year.
>

This is, in a way, misleading.	Sure, if you add up the cost of training
a
pilot and paying him, it is less expensive than buying an F16.	But it
takes *five years* to train a good fighter pilot, and a whole airforce
to
create the environment in which you can train him...  How much does it
cost
for an airforce?

If you need pilots *now*, then you pay what you have to pay.  And at
that
point, the pro pilot can charge whatever he likes, because there is *no
way* that you can grow your own without a HUGE investment.  If the
*real*
costs of a professional fighter pilot were so inexpensive, we wouldn't
see
the growth of organizations like the NFTC (Nato Flight Training in
Canada)
- where a whole bunch of countries share the costs of good training...

If we're talking mercs, lets look at riflemen.	How much does an AK
cost?
$50 maybe, in the right places.  How much for a couple of thousand
rounds
of ammo?  $couple of hundred??	How much for a skilled soldier to use
that
$50 rifle with the $100 worth of ammo?

$ Thousands and thousands...

And that's TODAY.  Real pro mercs make a lot of money (thousands per
month)
- they wouldn't do it otherwise.  Why would things change in the future?

Executive Outcomes working in Sierra Leone charged huge sums of money
(well, actually, they charged a diamond mine...), but it was still WAY
worth it for the government.  Those soldiers were the best in Africa
(some
of the best and most experienced in the world, really), but they were
using
Land Rovers and AK's and RPG's.  Ok, they did bring in a couple of their
own Hinds, but even those aren't really very expensive.

The Sierra Leone gov't wasn't paying for the gear, they were paying for
the
*best* people.	EO went in and sorted out the country in a short period
of
time, at a cost that was vastly lower than that needed to build an army
capable of doing the job.  As soon as EO left (when the politics
changed)
the country fell to bits, and the NGO's were screaming for someone to
bring
EO back.  The UN force that went in later with *thousands* of soldiers
was
completely incapable of doing what the few hundred EO guys did.  And the
equipment EO used was not complex, nor expensive, stuff...

As other people have pointed out, there may be lots of reasons why you
don't have a good army on hand right now, but unless you need a heavy
mechanized force with billions worth of zoomie high-tech tanks, etc,
your
biggest costs are going to be for the best people.  Guns are cheap.

My view of the GZGverse is that in most conflicts, the forces involved
will
be quite small - because of the costs of moving big armies and all their
equipment around space.  Like in the (really good) Dirigent Mercenary
Corps
series by (damn it, forget his name again... Perry?), the forces are
often
a battalion or two per side, on a whole world.	For sparsely settled
colony
planets, this is all that makes sense.	No armoured divisions rolling
around - unless it becomes an important battleground between the ESU and
the NAC or something.  I see the *big* fights as relatively rare events,
and so small "Light" forces much more the norm.

And that's where the Merc makes sense.	Unless it's the ESU or the
Indonesians hiring whole Brigades of the LLAR because there is a BIG war
going on, I envision merc participation as mostly being of the "light
infantry" sort.  And the LLAR example isn't merc companies - that's one
country hiring the ARMY of another country, wholesale. 

Anyway, as I said, unless you're trying to get an Armoured Regiment
going
fast, where the equipment costs are huge, then it seems to me that most
merc stuff will be primarily infantry and support stuff.

So, other than the costs for mortars/MLRS/arty/sensors/etc., which the
merc
companies will arrive with and take away again, the big cost is the
*people*.

The final point made in the previous message, though, is still valid:

>Assuming as similar ratio in the future, the personnel cost for high
tech
equipment will be low compared the cost of purchasing the unit.  So if
you
can rent the unit for 1/10 or 1/3 of the purchase cost, you come out way
ahead.

I agree with the last bit.  Just not the sentance before.  The purchase
cost you're paying 1/10 of is the cost of creating professional
soldiers,
not the cost of their guns...

It is, however, still cheaper to pay this price than to either do
without
and lose, or build the infrastructure necessary to create a good
soldier.

**********************************

adrian.johnson@sympatico.co
adrian@stargrunt.ca

http://www.stargrunt.ca

**********************************