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How Does A Military Achieve Financial Independence?

Wes

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Here's a strange but interesting question for you people with big brains. In the Kuvexian War, the Star Army of Yamatai, with assistance from the mysterious Essai Collective, successfully attacked the Glimmergold star system, a hub of banking and wealth for the Interstellar Kingdom of Kuvexia. The loss of their banking worlds, financial reserves, and market AI systems plunged the Kuvexian Economy into ruin, which rapidly led to the Kuvexian Navy becoming unpaid and inoperable and Yamatai to break the military stalemate and declare victory. In the aftermath of the Kuvexian War, leaders at the Star Army Academy and other think tank institutions have been studying the war and the question has been asked: "Can this happen to us, too? Is the Star Army of Yamatai too reliant on money from its government?"

With that in mind, I have to ask: Is there a way for a military to become financially independent? How? And what would that look like?

If the Kuvexian Navy was rebuilding its forces and wanted to insulate itself from space economics, what should it be doing?
 
TLDR; You can't.

Economics is the allocation of scarce resource which has alternative uses. Now, you can have different systems of allocating those resources, but the fundamental problem remains regardless.

I'll also note that scarcity promotes conflict, which is good for us as writers/GMs/players.

I think that the big movement would be towards decentralization and integrated production chains. So that any individual location if destroyed wouldn't end their warfighting capability. This is also true of resource collection and distribution.

I think that decentralization and that a clarification of what tge limited resources would also be good for RP.
 
One could have the military be its own provider. IE it makes everything it needs for the war effort. Unlike the Kuvexian who operate around money, with Star Army I feel a good amount are not driven by money but a cause.

As for the Kuvexian Navy, unless they have a major culture shift they will always be at the mercy of money. They are like the people on wallstreet who bet the house and hope to win it big. This rush is what drives them forward, so without there is no forward progress.
 
A military is an instrument and organ of the state. It cannot be financially independent from the government because it is part of the government.

A nation could minimize the impact of its military’s financial reliance on the state by making every citizen a militiaman who is financially responsible for the maintenance of their arms following a term of mandatory service. A more effective alternative could also be to allow citizens to purchase military officer’s commissions, as was the case in Britain from the 17th to 19th centuries as well as Europe around the same time, while making those officers also finance the initial equipment and arms costs for their fighting company. It’s a similar thing to straight feudalism wherein a noble would be responsible for the quality of their own loyal knights or samurai and were themselves bound by law or tradition to second those forces to the emperor or king above them.

The Star Army itself seems pretty well insulated from intergalactic economics already by its design. One Neko can always make more Neko for free, and ships/starbases can fabricate more ships and even raw materials from space magic technologies.
 
In terms of attempting to wrap my head around this question, I try to think of what the Star Army (and their counterpart, the Kuvexian Navy) has:
  1. Lots of manpower
  2. Access (via starships) to raw resources scattered across space
  3. Firepower to take over existing stuff by force
  4. High levels of technology and automation
If you combine 1 and 2 the military looks a lot like a EVE Online style mining corporation. If primarily rely on 1 and 3 you're conquistadors or space pirates.

The biggest drawbacks or chokepoints are:
  1. If you need money, who are you going to sell materials/products/services to? Now you're beholden to the needs of customers.
  2. Even if you achieve financial independence for the military force, now the military has so many workers doing economic activities (think how North Korean soldiers are being assigned to work farms) that it doesn't resemble a regular military but more of an armed workers corps and it not going to be as combat-effective, at least on a per-soldier average.
 
I agree with Raz, a military is a functioning part of a state/nation. A financially independent military would really no longer be a military. Once the tie to a nation is gone, said the military would just become a group of mercenaries.

I'd imagine the remnant Kuvexians would be clinging to leaders like Soon and Kordoon for direction. Possibly becoming militaries of water small nation-states they've begun to assemble. I think @Yuuki's depiction of this post-war mentality in her Sood Zadra RP. Sood Zadra has become the body any military loyal to Soon would be attached to, and it does somewhat resemble some kind of nation, even if it is run on the Kuvexian attributes we've always associated with them.

One way the Star Army could insulate itself from some kind of collapse would be probably more centered around having resource stockpiles, thus having converted that financial wealth shared with them converted into the things they use the most, keeping them afloat if some kind of major disruption occurred. I think a lot of the Star Army's wealth is allocated already to its own assets, meaning that its own value would help carry it through, not to mention the Star Army has shown in the past it can adjust to the pressures of war or tragedy. Steps have been taken as well to set up places like the Bastion Bases, to ensure survival post-collapse. Plus I'd think a military like the Star Army would become focused on rebuilding the nation, should Yamatai fall - thus it would still be a functioning arm of its nation.
 
A military is an instrument and organ of the state. It cannot be financially independent from the government because it is part of the government.

A nation could minimize the impact of its military’s financial reliance on the state by making every citizen a militiaman who is financially responsible for the maintenance of their arms following a term of mandatory service. A more effective alternative could also be to allow citizens to purchase military officer’s commissions, as was the case in Britain from the 17th to 19th centuries as well as Europe around the same time, while making those officers also finance the initial equipment and arms costs for their fighting company. It’s a similar thing to straight feudalism wherein a noble would be responsible for the quality of their own loyal knights or samurai and were themselves bound by law or tradition to second those forces to the emperor or king above them.

The Star Army itself seems pretty well insulated from intergalactic economics already by its design. One Neko can always make more Neko for free, and ships/starbases can fabricate more ships and even raw materials from space magic technologies.
Sir Henry Simmerson noises
 
Fujiko Development Corporation is kind of based off them, a corporate run government. Couldn't find much about how things were ran beyond private armies and governors running places.
 
The EIC was just an instrument of the Crown, no matter how badly they or anyone else tried to argue otherwise that they were a private entity.

Quallox Vaibal, through Soon Bardoon, tries to mae Sood Zadra a legitimate state. As a colonial government run by a company that made materiel for the actual military forces, who still retains both the means of production as well as significant inventory of product, they defaulted to also being a military simply by being an organized group in charge of a place with weapons and ships at their call.
 
The EIC and its Dutch counterparts are oddities. There were many times that the British government was at ends with the EIC because of the latitude it had been given. The EIC had a lot of internal corruption that the Crown couldn't address and was a constant threat. The EIC was only really bound to its own officers and shareholders - it had a larger army than the UK at one point and only national pride really kept them superficially loyal at their height, which isn't a good place to be nationally. If memory serves, they strongarmed into messing with UK politics directly, which nobody liked. Eventually they were ordered to dissolve by the Crown after being whittled down for a very long time. I believe that was due to them doing very shady stuff by holding that level of autonomy above standard governmental oversight. I wouldn't be keen to follow their example personally, it's just an example of kinda anarcho-capitalism. One of the most important things in running a country is oversight and checks, otherwise you get corruption. You don't want corruption in a military because that's how you get coups and juntas once the military decide they don't like the civilian government. Even if they don't start a coup or declare independence, nepotism and perceived corruption can easily turn citizens against them and then you have civil unrest. A perfect example of why the Falklands got invaded was that the citizens of Argentina were about to overthrow their corrupt government/military and the government needed to buy time. You don't wanna be in that position.

In any case, others have already covered the original question. Basically, if you're extracting, refining or creating any warfighting resource, you need people inside the process. It has to have the perks, rights and protections roughly equivalent to the civilian world or nobody would voluntarily do it, and then you get into the realms of slavery. The overhead for doing all that isn't really what a military should be focusing on anyways, obviously. Additionally, unless you somehow have an operation that gathers enough of every possible resource, including rare and regional ones, and every manufactured one that is used throughout the whole process, you'll need to trade externally at some point, defeating the entire exercise. Having just one component that you don't have copyright to, or one gram of a highly rare mineral you can't source, the entire exercise is pointless effectively. You can never have true autarky, in my opinion. There's always some way your supply chain is open or vunerable.
 
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The EIC was just an instrument of the Crown, no matter how badly they or anyone else tried to argue otherwise that they were a private entity.

It existed at the pleasure of the inbred psychopaths (chartered and revoked by the inbred-psychopath-in-chief), for the benefit of the inbred psychopaths.
 
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Sir Henry Simmerson noises
As fun as Sharpe is, that’s a very anachronistic representation of the commission purchase system. During the Napoleonic Wars, combat attrition of officers was very high and resulted in the system working as intended to produce fine leaders. It was only during periods of long peace that brought about corruption and incompetence wherein ranks would be sold or auctioned at inflated rates to men who had no prospect of seeing active service, which is why it was abolished following the Crimean War that itself followed a long period of peace.

Yamatai doesn’t need anything like that because its officer corps is either born and bred for leadership as created Neko, or they’re longtime veterans who decide to go further through the Star Army’s various commissioning channels. But I could see it being useful for the scattered Kuvexians, who likely have many war-hardened and wealthy soldiers that could be convinced into buying commissions (and thus financing a new Kuvexian war machine) from someone who claims to be Kalapom’s heir. After all, why would a rebuilding Kuvexian remnant spend their stretched resources on mercenaries when they can have those same mercenaries buy-in to rearmament and flaunt their prestige?
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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