The GZG Digest V2 #837

> Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2002 18:18:54 -0700

<snip>

> And that expertise is where the expense starts to get near
The pilot himself is probably making less than $40K a year.
> [quoted text omitted]

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

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.

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

Thank you, Adrian, you expressed what I was trying to get at much more
eloquently than I defended myself.

Brian B2

> From: adrian.johnson@sympatico.ca
The
> pilot himself is probably making less than $40K a year.