Re: [GZG] Interesting mercenary idea

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e thoughts:

1) The UN and every other nation, to one extent or another, employs
mercenaries. If we define a mercenary as a soldier who works for pay,
then
pretty much every army fits that bill. Try to not pay your first world
army
for any length of time and see just how well that goes over...

2) The UN has studied the use of PMCs and some advocates have suggested
the
use of PMCs. One of the big problem in UN deployments is national
governments imposing secondary ROEs and terms-of-use restrictions.
Another
one is nations having an election and a sudden change in policy,
possibly
resulting in pulling out their troops. This makes the idea of a unit of
professionals, beholden only to their paymaster (conjecturally the UN),
potentially a more stable and effective way to do many of the sorts of
stabilization missions the UN may wish to do. (Note: I'm totally
ignoring
the obvious issue of corruption and incompetence.)

3) The UN in our world draws from nations around the globe. But it
suffers
from this in terms of interoperability, communication, mutual support -
all
of which aren't anywhere near what you'd like. Even competent forces
that
don't work together all that often may not do such a good job. And many
UN
missions are not exactly what conventional warfighters train for. So to
be a
good UN soldier, you may have to retrain into new processes (and then
train
back to return to a more conventional warfighting role).

4) The UN as it stands today has no tax base and no population to draw
soldiers from. It cannot recruit from any nation (because it has no tax
base
and it would have to ask permission anyway). This point is short, but it
means the UN in the GZGverse could not exist with this same support
mechanism. That's a profound truth.

5) The UN often goes into places (like many internationalist efforts)
and
tries to do some good and does a bad job of it (troops that don't speak
the
language, cultural clashes, poorly trained troops in some cases) and/or
leaves too soon. This is one of the challenges of only being able to
mount
missions if and when member countries allow it and with whatever
resources
they give you when you show up cap in hand.

6) The UN in the GZGverse actually has enough capability to enforce its
will
upon uber-powers (bigger than hyper) like the ESU and NAC. Do the
demographics for these states, even with pessimistic assumptions, and
you
get *huge* tax bases and manpower bases. They've got a lot of real
estate to
protect, but their amount of political and economic influence would be
quite
terrifying. And yet the UNSC gets them to play ball in the Core and at
Homeworld. Mostly. The UNSC also has a cool fleet of (presumably
expensive)
ships of its own design with crews that one presumes, in a universe of
regular large scale conflict, actually get something accomplished, so I
can't see them being loyal to various nations whose factional loyalties
change regularly.

Studying what the UN can do in the GZGverse tells me several things:

1) It has its own tax base. It probably is not as big as the ESU or NAC,
but
it has its own tax base. Probably it owns scientific patents, it gets
some
funding from the member nations, and it probably has acquired some other
funding methods like (just making these up) a tax on each colonist
outbound
from the core or a tax on each FTL drive or whatever. But ultimately, it
needs a revenue source sufficient to give it credibility, make it a
professional force, remove the worst risks of corruption (otherwise this
guts the other two previous aspects mentioned), and sufficient to pay
for
large ships and well armoured Marines, even if they are fewer in number
than
the forces of the larger nations. It is an entity in its own right with
its
own sources of cash and can't be directly hobbled by any one member
nation.

2) It has its own manpower base. Tax base must mean a manpower base. I
assume it actually does recruit from veterans of other national fleets
and
armies. It may also have basically opened UN citizenship to a lot of the
smaller spots on the world (small island nations, and so on) to drum up
a
base population - if sea levels rise, maybe the UN helped them get setup
off
world and thus gets something which evolves into its own population
base. I
assume UN manpower base is not as large as its tax/financial base (which
could be driven largely by scientific patents), but it has to be enough
to
provide some decent number of recruits for a small UNSC Marine force and
a
UNSC Navy.

Sure, UN missions still need national forces in support. Big fleets will
have some UNSC ships and a bunch of national ones. But the national ones
will always operate under double ROE and with possibly differing
agendas, so
the UN has its own smaller navy and ground forces, enough to ensure that
the
NAC or ESU not supporting a particular action will still let the UN's
agenda
go forward.

I think the UN of the GZGverse has the equivalent financial base of a
second
tier power. I think it has the technological base of a first tier power
and
the population base of a lower second or upper third tier power. This
lets
it do the kind of things the canon history shows it doing. It also means
that the UNSC still needs the support from some of the other major
players
to get very large scale stuff done. The UNSC won't be investing planets
on
its own. It won't be running huge spaceborne campaigns by itself. But it
has
enough strength, professionalism, income and manpower to be a credible
coordinating authority and to not be as corrupt as the current day
version.

I'm working backwards from miniatures and from canon history and trying
to
provide an understanding of the UN that justifies the things they've
accomplished and the miniatures produced. The UN of today would not work
in
the era of large scale bloc-type conflicts across space and with the
feeble
budgets of today and the corruption and ineffectiveness. Since this is
not
what canon gives us, we must imagine some scenario that makes canon
possible
and it is a fairly different flavour of UN that this suggests.

And mercenaries figure in this if the UN runs the Bonding Authority.
They
insure factions stick to the Mercenary Charter (and so do PMCs), they
get a
cut of every transaction, and they have available small groups of
professional soldiers to use to supplement their own limited forces when
crises arise and where member nation support is either slow to rally or
politically problematic. The UN would use mercenaries as stiffeners and
fire-brigades, whereas most of the other powers would use them to give
isolation from actions (proxies) and to not require the nation to deploy
its
troops into whatever situation or conflict.

TomB

-- 
http://ante-aurorum-tenebrae.blogspot.com/
http://www.stargrunt.ca

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from
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will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine

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