Date: Wed, 17 May 1995 18:32:46 -1600 From: pd82495@wapol.gov.au (Michael Bailey) Subject: Military Generation / Path of Tears On the whole, I quite like the system presented in 'Path of Tears' to determine the size of military forces for a world/nation. However, I have one modification that I'd like to seek comment on: As technological sophistication increases, armed forces tend to become more and more expensive to equip, train, maintain and wage war with. Given the complexity of the equipment that he operates, the average soldier today would, to paraphrase Heinlein, rate a master in most other trades...well maybe not quite, but it's getting there. So, as an army/navy/air force becomes more advanced, it tends to get smaller (after all, there's only so many defense credits to go around). As an example, in the First World War, the Australian Infanty Force was able to send (very rough half-remembered guess) 12-14 divisions to the battlefields of the Dardanelles and France. The AIF was (near the end of the war), organised as a seperate field army under the Imperial Supreme Command. In the Second World War, we fielded a smaller number (I think it was 11 divisions - including the home defense units), of which only four or five divisions were trained and equipped for combat (they fought well...but that's another story). Today, the Australian Army could barely scrape together a division...including Army Reserve and Ready Reserve troops. Similarly, I read somewhere that the US Army fielded 89 divisions in WWII...I don't know how many it fields now, but I'd be surprised if it were more than a dozen. Then there were the massive combats on the Eastern Front - Germany invaded the USSR with 150 divisions....who could afford to equip that many soldiers with todays weaponry? Anyway, my idea is to take the final manpower figures produced by the Path of Tears system, and multiply them by a Tech Level modifier as follows: TL Mod. -- ---- 0-2 x2.0 3 x1.0 4 x0.8 5 x0.6 6 x0.5 7 x0.4 8 x0.3 9-10 x0.25 11+ x0.2 These are 'top of the head' figures....and don't take into account governments that may choose to equip reserve or militia units below their current tech level. At TL 11 and beyond, the rapidly falling cost of power generation offsets the increased cost of the equipment itself, leading to a 'levelling out'. Any comments/suggestions welcome. Michael Bailey (pd82495@wapol.gov.au)