tbeard1999
SOC-14 1K
A point that referees might want to bear in mind -- high tech military operations are hideously expensive. And it gets worse when a power has to maintain an extended supply line.
The implication of this is that there is almost no way that the economic benefit of seizing resources will offset the cost of using serious military force.
As an illustration, consider the Allied occupation of Iraq. Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of invading Iraq, it was *never* an economic proposition. Anyone with access to Excel can verify that siezing all of the Iraqi oil production wouldn't cover the interest on the expense of conquering and garrisoning Iraq. And that's using the estimated costs before the invasion, which were a bit low. So anyone who alleges that the invasion was merely to sieze oil resources is showing a staggering degree of economic illiteracy. In raw economic terms, it would have been infinitely cheaper to simply buy the oil from Saddam.
This fact has interesting implications for a referee who wants to run realistic campaigns. Governments and (especially) megacorporations will seldom (if ever) resort to outright invasions of attractive worlds. Such operations are just too expensive to ever turn a profit.
Rather, they will probably resort to "conquest by proxy". They'll prop up friendly regimes and undermine unfriendly ones. Military support will generally be limited to supplying weapons and some training to native forces. Special ops units would probably be able to produce benefits exceeding their costs from time to time, but such units are expensive to raise, train and equip. They'd only be committed to very high value operations.
To see this in action in the real world, look at France's activities in Africa and the Middle East. Their Iraqi activities are a textbook on this technique. The French sold Saddam billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry, with easy credit terms. They sold him a breeder reactor capable of producing weapons grade plutonium. They negotiated sweetheart deals to buy oil at lower than market rates (after the UN embargo lifted). They used the political influence to keep the friendly regime in power. But they *never* contemplated providing overt military support to Saddam. Even if military support would have been effective against the US/UK coalition, and even if was politically feasible, the cost of committing French troops would have dwarfed the economic benefits.
On rare occasions, the French *will* intervene in some minor African nation to protect French economic interests. But even there, the interventions are extremely modest.
The "Dream Ticket" in Mercenary is, I'm afraid, exactly that.
The implication of this is that there is almost no way that the economic benefit of seizing resources will offset the cost of using serious military force.
As an illustration, consider the Allied occupation of Iraq. Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of invading Iraq, it was *never* an economic proposition. Anyone with access to Excel can verify that siezing all of the Iraqi oil production wouldn't cover the interest on the expense of conquering and garrisoning Iraq. And that's using the estimated costs before the invasion, which were a bit low. So anyone who alleges that the invasion was merely to sieze oil resources is showing a staggering degree of economic illiteracy. In raw economic terms, it would have been infinitely cheaper to simply buy the oil from Saddam.
This fact has interesting implications for a referee who wants to run realistic campaigns. Governments and (especially) megacorporations will seldom (if ever) resort to outright invasions of attractive worlds. Such operations are just too expensive to ever turn a profit.
Rather, they will probably resort to "conquest by proxy". They'll prop up friendly regimes and undermine unfriendly ones. Military support will generally be limited to supplying weapons and some training to native forces. Special ops units would probably be able to produce benefits exceeding their costs from time to time, but such units are expensive to raise, train and equip. They'd only be committed to very high value operations.
To see this in action in the real world, look at France's activities in Africa and the Middle East. Their Iraqi activities are a textbook on this technique. The French sold Saddam billions of dollars of sophisticated weaponry, with easy credit terms. They sold him a breeder reactor capable of producing weapons grade plutonium. They negotiated sweetheart deals to buy oil at lower than market rates (after the UN embargo lifted). They used the political influence to keep the friendly regime in power. But they *never* contemplated providing overt military support to Saddam. Even if military support would have been effective against the US/UK coalition, and even if was politically feasible, the cost of committing French troops would have dwarfed the economic benefits.
On rare occasions, the French *will* intervene in some minor African nation to protect French economic interests. But even there, the interventions are extremely modest.
The "Dream Ticket" in Mercenary is, I'm afraid, exactly that.
