[Spaceships] The Military Budget

[Langy]

I’ve been curious as to how powerful a given society’s military is likely to be, given that society’s population and average GURPS starting wealth. I have come up with a very rough method of figuring this out, given certain assumptions.

The first assumption is that productivity increases with TL roughly according to the Medical Help Table on page 425 of the Basic Set – that is, productivity doubles every TL. The Medical Help Table assumes doctors are 20x as productive at TL12 than at TL8, but to keep it consistent with the rest of the table I’m just reducing that to 16x.

The second assumption is that Starting Wealth corresponds to half of post-tax yearly income. In the United States, this amounts to roughly $20,000, with pre-tax yearly income being roughly $50,000. This yields a tax rate of 20%. With these two assumptions, we can figure out the tax income per capita at every TL, given average starting wealth.

TL    Wealth    GDP P.C.    Tax %      Collected Taxes
8     20,000    50,000      20.00%     10,000
9     30,000    100,000     40.00%     40,000
10    50,000    200,000     50.00%     100,000
11    75,000    400,000     62.50%     250,000
12    100,000   800,000     75.00%     600,000

The rest of these figures are highly dependent on the increased tax rate at higher TLs. If we assume tax rates stay unchanged – that is, they remain at 20% from TL8 up to TL12 – then will not only productivity only go up to 5x TL8 productivity at TL12 but it will be uneconomical to field significantly large space ships and, for example, at TL12 the total fleet tonnage will be around one tenth that of the current assumptions.

With this, we can calculate the size of a given society’s budget. The United States currently spends 20% of its budget on defense-related issues. We’re also going to be assuming a population of 100 million as the baseline.

The next assumption we need to make is how much of this defense budget is going to the Space Navy. It might be all of it, it might be a very small fraction of it – it depends on the circumstances of the navy’s nation. I think a decent assumption is at least 50% of the budget going to the navy with the other 50% going to the planetary defense forces, which might include an army and fixed defenses. A nation without internal strife that controls the full extent of its own worlds might have as much as 100% of the defense budget going to the navy and allow the navy to run all planetary defenses and not operate a standing army at all.

TL     Total Budget     Defense Budget     Naval Budget
8      $1,000           $200               $100
9      $4,000           $800               $400
10     $10,000          $2,000             $1,000
11     $25,000          $5,000             $2,500
12     $60,000          $12,000            $6,000

Societies with a higher or lower average wealth level will have proportionally higher or lower budgets – unless the society’s wealth level is due to different tax rates than is normal for that TL. For example, if the society is TL10 and has a wealth level of ‘Poor’ due to higher taxes, it has a $10,000 average starting wealth but productivity might remain unchanged, increasing the tax burden to $140,000 per person and increasing taxation percentage to 90%. Obviously, that isn’t particularly realistic – a society with 90% taxation is unlikely to maintain the same level of productivity, but its serves its purpose as a demonstration. Your society doesn’t need to hold to these assumptions, but they give a general idea of how an average society of that TL might operate.

We can make the assumption that all ships cost $200,000 per ton – this is the most common system price in Spaceships. It over-charges freighters, but is likely to under-charge warships. Spaceships 2 makes the assumption that operating costs, financing, and personnel costs are 1.5% of ship cost per month or 18% per year. If we use that assumption, we get an average cost of $36,000 per ton of ship per year.

A current 100,000 ton Nimitz-class carrier is $4.5 billion dollars and has a yearly operating cost of $160 million – if we assume paying off 6% of that carrier’s construction bill every year, after including interest charges and the like, we get a yearly cost of roughly $4,500 per ton. This makes space ships roughly eight times as expensive as sea-going ships.

Using that $4,500 per ton figure and the roughly ten million tons of shipping in the current United States Navy, coupled with the Naval budget of approximately $150 billion, we find that the US Navy spends roughly 30% of its budget on actual ships. The other 70% I’m assuming goes towards bases, airplanes, research and development, intelligence, and other things that we aren’t particularly interested in right now.

Another useful bit is how large the largest ship in the fleet likely is. If we assume they have around three of these ships per hundred million people and that in total these ships consist of 1/5 of the fleet’s entire tonnage, we can easily find out how large that ship will be once we know how much the total fleet tonnage is. This 1/10 of total fleet tonnage is roughly equivalent to the proportion of tonnage in the current US Navy of aircraft carriers to the whole fleet, as is the proportion of carriers to population. It’s definitely not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a decent guideline.

With all these assumptions in play, we can finally figure out the total tonnage available to this fleet, depending on TL, in a society of average wealth. These figures are per 100 million citizens.

TL      Total Tonnage     Max Ship Size    Ship Size (SM)
8       833,333           27,778           +11
9       3,333,333         111,111          +12
10      8,333,333         277,778          +13
11      20,833,333        694,444          +13
12      50,000,000        1,666,667        +14

I would assume that Naval Space Stations would follow roughly the same Total Tonnage guidelines, with them being a further 30% of the naval budget, though it is likely that maximum station size will be about the same as the Total Tonnage figure for 100 million people or be even higher. The other 40% of the Navy’s budget can go to other operational costs.

If we change one of the earlier base assumptions –that tax rate increases as TL increases – to the assumption that tax rates remain at 20% at all TLs, we get the following breakdown of total tonnage:

TL      Total Tonnage     Max Ship Size    Ship Size (SM)
8       833,333           27,778           +11
9       1,250,000         41,667           +11
10      2,083,333         69,444           +12
11      3,125,000         104,167          +12
12      4,166,667         138,889          +12

Either assumption is valid, but the low productivity increase as TLs increase in the second assumption doesn’t seem all that realistic – unless you assume that the majority of people either do not work or otherwise do not pay taxes. This might actually be realistic, but not very many settings use that assumption. Most military sci-fi also tends to include large fleets of large vessels, and the first assumption seems to work much better for that.

[guardian]

I'm just going to throw up some food for thought on the subject...as military expenses, navy budgets, and evaluating military power are all rather complex and frankly beyond the 'fun' level of most gaming groups.

First, as a resource, I'll direct you to the following working paper on Canadian Military Spending:
http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries...pers/wp031.pdf
I only briefly reviewed it, but it has some good charts to illistrate spending treads post-WWII to pre-911.

A few things that can be taken from this paper, and other sources:
a. A quick and easy figure for miltary spending can be figured by taking a percentage of GDP, which would not only be subject to population, but also the society's wealth level. Not all cultures have the same starting wealth. If they did, and population was the only other factor, then China would be the miltary & economic juggernaut of the world right now...instead of the US.

b. Miltary spending varies according to foriegn policy of the state. Nations at war spend more...in WWII for example, the US spending was somewhere around 37% vice 2% in around 2000, or the 4% in recent years. Canada currently still spends 1-1.5% but spent close to 8% during Korea. (Wartime spending isn't actually money taxed...wartime spending often runs up huge deficits!) WRT foriegn policy...the US spends a lot more money keeping a large armed force which it sends world-wide to actively pursue it's policies. Canada maintains some capabilty for expiditionary work...but not nearly to the same level. If you look at most other nations though (other than the surviving colonial powers)...most only maintain enough to deal with their neighbors, or the region.

c. Expenses vary...size, technology, need, etc. There has been a huge transition in the last 50 years from the large standing armies pre-WWI, to large mechanized armies that were formed from smaller standing corps during WWII, to the very small, powerful, and expensive hardware that provides capabilities to modern military forces.


Most sci-fi material seems to treat space navies like the WWI & II era navies...why? Cause it's cool....lots of ships, explosions...endless fodder for the outgunned hero's. Also since nuclear arrmagedon is somewhat less signifigant when you have a dozen extra planets to fall back to instead of just the little corner of one, the political environments tend to fall back to the classic emperial or competing great powers model. The space nations can fight for the odd planet here and there without seriously jepordizing their own survival...and if they do, the other guy better have a navy to defend. Lots of ships, explosions...endless fodder for the outgunned hero's.

The good news is that in this kind of environment, the decisions about each nations policy and spending habits will become more uniform...since they'll all be looking for their own survival against similar neighbors...Europe for most of the 1600-1800's.

ok...last point. I know spaceships 2 put in operating costs at 1.5%...it was for merchant ships. Modern Merchant ships are built cheap, to run for 10 years, and make maximum profit. They need paint, oil changes, crews, and gas, and try not to use much of anything.
Military ships are EXPENSIVE....to build, buy, maintain, etc. Specialty training, large crews, weapon systems. They're generally built for power and speed...not economy. They need to last...usually about 20 years. (Some navies...30 or 40!) And the navy likes training. A merchantman will gas up, and travel for weeks, deliver cargo, turn a profit. A military ship will gas up, go train & shoot for a couple days, gas up more, train more, burn more, shoot more, wash rinse repeat. Oh, and then they'll go home take half the ship apart for fun, and paint everything whether it needs it or not...Navy's are held together with paint.


Ok...chew away on all that, and enjoy.

Cheers.

[Pragmatic]

Doesn't Space 4E have some assumption about the available income of a planet, based on TL, average wealth, and population?

With that, you could possibly base it off of GDP. For instance, the United States spends about 4% of GDP on the military. Other countries, more "butter" than "guns," spend a heck of a lot less of their economy on the military.

Be sure to mix in the cost of the crews of the ships. And don't skimp on the support ships. And especially don't forget the "poor bloody infantry" (i.e. the Army, with all their toys).

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Be sure to mix in the cost of the crews of the ships. And don't skimp on the support ships. And especially don't forget the "poor bloody infantry" (i.e. the Army, with all their toys).

In an interstellar context everyone who has a unified stable planet is biased in favour of the British model. Skimp on the PBIs and spend your money on the fleet unless and until you get into an actual shooting war.

[Anaraxes]

Other countries, more "butter" than "guns," spend a heck of a lot less

As a percentage of GDP, the US ranks about 28th in military spending, surpassed by such warmongers as Singapore, Burundi, or #1 Oman (11.4%). A lot of rich oil states have the US beat in terms of percentage. It's hard to spend "a heck of a lot" less than 4%, depending on what you mean by "a heck of a lot", as long as we're talking percentages. Iceland comes in at 0%, so that's naturally hard to beat. The median (rank 86 or 87) are both 1.9% (Mali and Norway). (Numbers from the CIA World Factbook.)

Absolute numbers are a completely different story, of course.

During WWII, US government spending, mostly military, was 35-40% of GDP.

[Pragmatic]

Sorry, "PBIs"?

And yeah, there are a lot of countries that spend a higher percentage of their GDP on the military. They also don't have much of a GDP. The United States, alone, accounts for approximately 50% of the WORLD'S military budget.

I'm assuming that, if we averaged it over the whole unified world, the percentage would probably drop to 1 to 2%...

[Langy]

Ah - completely forgot about the economic bits in GURPS Space. It looks like they roughly agree with the figures I came up with for a universe where taxes stay around 20% of income. I'm not really sure that makes much sense - I just can't see how five TL8 workers should be able to make as much as one TL12 worker when you take into account other rules. Manufacturing alone is twenty times as productive at TL11 as it is at TL8, and doctoring is twenty times as productive at TL12 as it is at TL8. I guess the default assumption is that most people don't work and just live off welfare *shrug*

The tonnage figures I worked out include support ships as well as actual combat ships. I also left 50% of the military budget available for planetary defense, which would include the 'poor bloody infantry' as well as, say, planetary defense satellites.

The US doesn't spend too much more on the military than other countries when it's compared as a percentage of GDP. Yeah, the UK only spend about 2.4% of GDP on the military, but Israel (for example) spends 7.3%. The US is only ranked 27th on military spending by percentage of GDP. The entire world average is about 2% of GDP on military spending - so I guess the US spends about twice as much on the military compared to the average.

EDIT:

ok...last point. I know spaceships 2 put in operating costs at 1.5%...it was for merchant ships. Modern Merchant ships are built cheap, to run for 10 years, and make maximum profit. They need paint, oil changes, crews, and gas, and try not to use much of anything.

All true. Mind, the majority of that 1.5% was for purely financial reasons and won't change no matter if its a warship or not. The 0.5% of ship cost per month for operating costs might fit for a military spaceship or not. It does, however, roughly fit for a modern Naval warship. Operating costs for a space ship might be higher - but probably not enough to drive it above 1 or 2% of ship cost per month. This would increase costs from $36,000 per ton per year to $48,000 or probably a maximum of around $72,000. Just halve the tonnage figures I put out earlier in that case.

Of course, this depends on the fuel your ships use. If you use antimatter-boosted hydrogen, for example, your operating costs are going to skyrocket.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Doesn't Space 4E have some assumption about the available income of a planet, based on TL, average wealth, and population?

Space provides rules for calculating the "economic volume" of a planet as a function of population, tech level, and resources (in the shape of "Affinity"). The table is on p.95.

It is not clear how "economic volume" relates to GDP. For a start, it seems from the figures given for very low TL that economic volume includes domestic production, which GDP does not. Also, from the way it is calculated I would guess that depreciation and amortisation of capital (ie. investment costs) are not included in "economic volume" though they are in GDP, and that net foreign income is included.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Sorry, "PBIs"?

English English for US "Eleven Bush" or Australian/NZ "digger". It stands for "poor bloody infantry".

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Langy

Ah - completely forgot about the economic bits in GURPS Space. It looks like they roughly agree with the figures I came up with for a universe where taxes stay around 20% of income.

"Stay"?

In the USA the total of federal, state, and local taxes is 28.3% of GDP (2008 figures), on top of which the governments are running a deficit of 13.2% of GDP. Which puts total government consumption at 41.5% of GDP.