Build a Fleet!

Relax wrote:Ok, Historical data for number of US soldiers in uniform from 1950 through 2005.

http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... -1950-2003

Download the Excel file.
Add population
Graph percentage.

Over those years, the average is well over 1%. Only after 1990 did it drop down to 0.5% of the population from which this number has remained stable since then.

USA was playing global peace enforcer and a step in big kid. The proposed scenario is Manticore and friends whose population dwarfs Manticore by the way, is now the galaxy peace enforcer. USA's Economy was and still is the envy of the world, so why is this number(1% of pop) "impossible" in the Honorverse where the total population drain in basic infrastructure employment is vastly lower than it is today? IE internal GSP consumption to keep the machine running smoothly is vastly lower than it is today.

They also do not need to garrison planets, rather just hold the high orbitals and the locals can't do jack about it.

Check those nations, in the last 50 or so years the large deployments were in Germany(US ally), Japan(US Ally), South Korea(US Ally), Vietnam(WAR), UK(US Ally)… Unless you are proposing that the RMN is deployed in Beowulf, Haven and Grayson the comparison is lost otherwise.

Their Largest deployments were in war zones and in allied countries, if you would notice US Troop Deployment by Region in the Excel spreadsheet you would see that the Area's where the most "peacekeeping" has been done are generally not where the US deployed its forces. In other area's those forces are on exchange. training exercise or as instructors.


As for the 1% in military….During the 1950's there was the Korean War and the Cold War, during the 1960 and 70s there was the Vietnam War and the Cold War, during the 80's there was the cold war with a bunch of small wars… Look at the numbers in 1989 and 1990-1994 and tell me what you see… between 1989 and 1995 there was a drop of roughly 600,000 troops.

The Us military size was proportional to the threat that the people felt, as I said it is rather easier to convince people to support a large military when their lives and the lives of their family and livelihood are in danger than convincing them to support a large military because some 800,000 in Rwanda face death.

Relax wrote:France in WWII was ultimately conquered by the allies in WWII. There is a reason USA had so many troops stationed in France for so long post WWII(20 years)

Or it could be something to do with France being in NATO until de Gaulle pulled the French out of the NATO CoC...

Theemile wrote:
Masada can't do jack about it. What about a planet with Core-level technological capabilities? I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some planets building facilities underground in order to produce ground-to-space missiles and their launchers.

Not ideal, because it effectively opts the planet out of the Eridani Edict(any attacker must strike its surface and probably repeatedly). But a 4-drive missile would still have at least 30 million km of powered range even if it spends two of them pushing out of the atmosphere - more than enough to swat flies in orbit.

Here's where the rules of warfare come in. You just attacked - i.e. resisted - when someone else held the orbitals. Sure, you just blew him away - you won the day - Hurray!

But by doing so - you turned the surface of your planet into an active combatant, giving the opposition, by every convention of warfare, the right to rain holy hellfire down on your civilian population - from whatever range they deem necessary.

Unless you have a secret fleet that you can call to rush back to protect you before the opposition's reinforcements come back OR you just destroyed the entire opposition fleet, striking out directly from the surface is probably a bad idea. Building a ship or missile there - yes, firing the missile or Graser from there- NOOOooooooo......[/quote]


The problem would not be someone attacking the RMN ships in orbit, it would be explaining to the Galactic public why Manticore is watching billions of people on dozens if not hundreds of planets kill each other without so much as lifting a finger. Controlling the space around a planet sort of gives you the obligation to protect that planet.

SWM wrote:
Here's where the rules of warfare come in. You just attacked - i.e. resisted - when someone else held the orbitals. Sure, you just blew him away - you won the day - Hurray!

But by doing so - you turned the surface of your planet into an active combatant, giving the opposition, by every convention of warfare, the right to rain holy hellfire down on your civilian population - from whatever range they deem necessary.

Unless you have a secret fleet that you can call to rush back to protect you before the opposition's reinforcements come back OR you just destroyed the entire opposition fleet, striking out directly from the surface is probably a bad idea. Building a ship or missile there - yes, firing the missile or Graser from there- NOOOooooooo......

It's not quite that bad. Resistance does not turn the entire surface and civilian population into targets. Only military targets are legitimate. So, you can strike against the resistance. You can even strike military targets if they are in a civilian zone. But you cannot target purely civilian zones, nor can you use more force than necessary. So, if the leader of the resistance is in a city of a million people, you cannot drop a fifty megaton bomb on the city just to take out the one target.

The Edict requires a measured response. Resistance does not open the target to unlimited civilian strikes.[/quote]

Who enforces the Edict? Basically once the SLN is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they cannot enforce nap time on a 2 year old let alone enforce the Edict basically the gloves come off unless the GA or Manticore wants to step in to their shoes and commit to destroying any government that commits actions against the Edict which sounds like a lot of wars and occupations.

Sigs wrote:And Trade and Military assistance means what? Because that is assuming that there would be many successor states which would mean that they would not require any patrolling. What I got from that is that they would want to do the exact opposite of "space patrol"

You and I have different ideas of what constitutes a "space patrol" and what its make-up would be.

Miltary Assistance in Manticoran Terms can be seen illustrated in textev references to Zanzibar and Alizon; i.e. RMN task forces under Local Military command, and/or Warship construction yards up to Battlecruiser capacity, etc.

Sigs wrote:

Storm From the Shadows
Chapter Forty-four
Honor Harrington speaking: wrote:In other words, once we break the League militarily, once we splinter it into multiple, mutually independent star nations, we have to see to it that none of those star nations have any motive to fuse themselves back together and gang up on us all over again."

How do you do that by forcing your down everyone throat? for those nations that come out of the League, Manticore will make treaties with it doesn't say anything about peacekeeping and pacification.

No, there is nothing in what Honor states -- or in what I have extrapolated from the "Harrington Doctrine" -- that mentions "peacekeeping and pacification."

What is mentioned is "Mutual Defense Treaties" and a requirement that Manticore (and by extension the GA) live up to the spirit of those treaties as well as paying them lip-service.

In order to honor the spirit as well as paying lip-service, The GA logically has to keep significant military force in position to respond to treaty partners in need of mutual defense -- probably no more than a couple of weeks response time.

As you have argued, the level of naval forces required is more than Manticore or the GA can sustain unilaterally for long. That means they MUST form some multi-national Mutual Defense Force equipped and trained to "modern" standards.

Again, textev of Manticoran (and by extension GA,) policy and practice can be found in references to Grayson, Alizon, Zanzibar, and Marsh. Personnel from those Allies attend Saganami Island Academy, serve on RMN ships and/or in mixed formations -- like Eighth Fleet -- and command Mixed Force SDFs in their home systems.

Since Honor's tenure as Commandant, Saganami Island's curriculum incorporates scenarios from Allied Naval Traditions and featuring Allied Commanders of mixed force scenarios. I would expect that policy to continue and expand to satellite campuses and the Honorverse equivalent of correspondence courses -- similar to the CDC (Career Development Course) training the USAF employed during my career.

In order to fulfill the policy Honor outlines in that oft-quoted paragraph (and the surrounding texev) Manticore (and by extension the GA) MUST organize and participate in a "Space Patrol" or "Mutual Defense Force" encompassing all, or at least most, of the Successor States of the Solarian League.

Theemile wrote:

Sigs wrote:By well educated workforce I meant the 3 billion or Manticoreans not the industry specific workers…besides what about the once Haven returned? And the whole advantage of having a well educated workforce in general is to be able to make training people for some jobs easier.

The workers that Haven captured at Grendlesbane specifically had the least specialized knowledge - the 10,000 "knowledge experts" with the most experience and specialized knowledge were saved by Higgens as he left. It was the generalists, apprentices and the laborers that got left behind. So while useful, they actually are not the optimal group needed to lead the education of the next high-tech workforce.

Still significantly better than not having them.

Theemile wrote:

By your logic it people would be safer without doctors… they make a lot of mistakes… that all fine and good but if we don't have the alternative that doesn't help us much, and if we have an alternative that still requires humans that kind of defeats the purpose.

Relax wrote:Mechanics? No. We need far FEWER mechanics than we used to why? The aviation industry is mature now. Engines that used to last hundreds of hours before replacement now last thousands. Hydraulic actuators that used to require complete replacement on a D check now go multiple times as long. Sensors that used to need replacing every 10,000 actuations have now been replaced by soft film capacitors with MTBF of 500,000 actuations! Number of mechanics hours has drastically dropped on airplanes cars etc etc etc. The technology has matured.

Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

The average airplane engine in WWII was designed to be completely overhauled/replaced in less than 500 hours of use. The jet engines in the Me-262 were replaced in less than 100 hours. Modern Jet engines get multiple thousands of hours between engine overhauls. The Average Car sold today doesn't need it's spark plugs replaced (and a major engine service) for 80-100 thousand miles - where a car from the 80's usually required a replacement every 25,000 miles or so.[/quote]


How many hours of maintenance to flight hours per say transport plane?


If a plane is well made but proportionally is requires similar number of technicians as a similar plane from 20 or 30 years ago the, so how much total man-hours of maintenance on a C-130 made in 1970 compared to a C-130 made in 2010? So in 1971 how many man-hours of maintenance for the C-130 was required and how many technicians were needed Compared to one in 2011? Basically after 1 year of use comparing the two, do we see that the modern aircraft needs 50% of the technicians? 25%?.000001% of the technicians?

Weird Harold wrote:

Sigs wrote:Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

Such numbers are all over the internet; usually tagged as "man-hour/Flying hour" or something similar. One example I'm familiar with is the F-4G vs F-16C aircraft -- I don't recall exact numbers, but the F-16 required about half as much maintenance as the F-4G. The was 25 years ago when I retired (in 1989.)

Is that because the aircraft is better build, or because it is cheaper and faster to pop out the damaged component and ship it to third line maintenance?

Relax wrote:Ok, Historical data for number of US soldiers in uniform from 1950 through 2005.

http://www.heritage.org/research/report ... -1950-2003

Download the Excel file.
Add population
Graph percentage.

Over those years, the average is well over 1%. Only after 1990 did it drop down to 0.5% of the population from which this number has remained stable since then.

USA was playing global peace enforcer and a step in big kid. The proposed scenario is Manticore and friends whose population dwarfs Manticore by the way, is now the galaxy peace enforcer. USA's Economy was and still is the envy of the world, so why is this number(1% of pop) "impossible" in the Honorverse where the total population drain in basic infrastructure employment is vastly lower than it is today? IE internal GSP consumption to keep the machine running smoothly is vastly lower than it is today.

They also do not need to garrison planets, rather just hold the high orbitals and the locals can't do jack about it.

Sigs wrote:Check those nations, in the last 50 or so years the large deployments were in Germany(US ally), Japan(US Ally), South Korea(US Ally), Vietnam(WAR), UK(US Ally)… Unless you are proposing that the RMN is deployed in Beowulf, Haven and Grayson the comparison is lost otherwise.

Their Largest deployments were in war zones and in allied countries, if you would notice US Troop Deployment by Region in the Excel spreadsheet you would see that the Area's where the most "peacekeeping" has been done are generally not where the US deployed its forces. In other area's those forces are on exchange. training exercise or as instructors.


As for the 1% in military….During the 1950's there was the Korean War and the Cold War, during the 1960 and 70s there was the Vietnam War and the Cold War, during the 80's there was the cold war with a bunch of small wars… Look at the numbers in 1989 and 1990-1994 and tell me what you see… between 1989 and 1995 there was a drop of roughly 600,000 troops.

The Us military size was proportional to the threat that the people felt, as I said it is rather easier to convince people to support a large military when their lives and the lives of their family and livelihood are in danger than convincing them to support a large military because some 800,000 in Rwanda face death.

Don't let's get hung up on the real world; this is fiction. The size of the US military depends on what the government can afford to spend at any given time, and the political situation at home and abroad.

SIG, you are not including the political reality in the US of the base closings and RIF begun under Pres. GHW Bush.

Bipartisan committees during the Reagan Administration took up the task of "downsizing" the military and reducing the defense budget. This was, in effect, a belated attempt to do what had been the desired policy since Rumsfeld was Pres. Ford's defense secretary in 1973. Carter continued it by canceling a number of new weapons systems' development and deployment, then (political suicide) reversing himself in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and concurrent overthrow of the Shah of Iran (and Iraq's immediate invasion of Iran). Starting iirc in 1989 or so, there was a major RIF (reduction in force), meaning a drop in manning, coupled directly to the base closings negotiated earlier, under Reagan.

Our actual military activities then (1990-91) included a major deployment of forces to the middle east; it didn't affect any of the RIF or base closings at all.

I spent 1982-84, and 1986-88 deployed to FRG. Deployments to allied nations were not "peacekeeping," or even intended to be sufficient to delay being overrun. I think the intel estimates then suggested we'd have at best a week before the Soviets reached the Bay of Bisquay, or Rota. We were there because we'd do some damage to the Soviets, and because we'd be the martyr's to mobilize support for a war with the public. We had troops in Japan/Korea to forestall China politically; not because they could have stopped the Chinese.

But in order to take us out, they'd have to go to all out war, no holds barred; MAD was the real life deterrent.

For the wars in Korea (two of my uncles were drafted) and Vietnam, you have to look politically to the Truman Doctrine. Taking over the security of SE Asia in the former French Indo-China wasn't necessary for us militarily at all. Even so, "proxy wars" weren't restricted to Asia (Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Suez, &&&&&)

Relax, we have never been a "global policeman" except in our internal domestic propaganda, but this is a real life issue, and I try to mostly avoid real life politics. We intervene when we have economic issues at stake; moral issues get dithered over and buried in propaganda.

But that isn't for this forum, anyway. Your point about whether Manticore could put enough bodies in uniform is valid, and I think, supported by text (recruitment of Naval Personnel in Talbot; several "divisions" of ground troops).

Rob

Snip

Relax wrote:Mechanics? No. We need far FEWER mechanics than we used to why? The aviation industry is mature now. Engines that used to last hundreds of hours before replacement now last thousands. Hydraulic actuators that used to require complete replacement on a D check now go multiple times as long. Sensors that used to need replacing every 10,000 actuations have now been replaced by soft film capacitors with MTBF of 500,000 actuations! Number of mechanics hours has drastically dropped on airplanes cars etc etc etc. The technology has matured.

Theemile wrote:Do you have any numbers to back up your claim that aircraft and cars of today require less maintenance than vehicles of 20,30 or 40 years ago?

The average airplane engine in WWII was designed to be completely overhauled/replaced in less than 500 hours of use. The jet engines in the Me-262 were replaced in less than 100 hours. Modern Jet engines get multiple thousands of hours between engine overhauls. The Average Car sold today doesn't need it's spark plugs replaced (and a major engine service) for 80-100 thousand miles - where a car from the 80's usually required a replacement every 25,000 miles or so.[/quote]

Sigs wrote:
How many hours of maintenance to flight hours per say transport plane?


If a plane is well made but proportionally is requires similar number of technicians as a similar plane from 20 or 30 years ago the, so how much total man-hours of maintenance on a C-130 made in 1970 compared to a C-130 made in 2010? So in 1971 how many man-hours of maintenance for the C-130 was required and how many technicians were needed Compared to one in 2011? Basically after 1 year of use comparing the two, do we see that the modern aircraft needs 50% of the technicians? 25%?.000001% of the technicians?

What I remember from driving around in the 1960's (as a child) were all the vehicles on the side of the road, with either a flat tire or a blown radiator hose. . . . hood up, as an indicator you've had a breakdown. Today's cars require a lot less work than those old Ramblers, Darts, Bel Aires, and such.

Rob