[META] [RFC] Militarization around the 2022 period

[Rakhasa]

Yep. "Great Justice" is the NATO-equivalent; "Operation Great Justice" is another name for the Boskone War.
(Digression: And I see the Space Patrol as Fenspace's equivalent of the Mounties - they have the authority to investigate crimes anywhere in cubic claimed by any part of the Convention, but they leave misdemeanors and "minor" felonies to the local or factional police if such forces exist in the area.)

Yes, that was my point. There is already one NATO-equivalent; even if the ships and men come from the factions militaries, and so have no extra cost, they still need infraestructure -GJ's base in Arisia Station is the perfect example. So why create another NATO-equivalent, when the money for Arisia 2 is far better used in new schools, wich by the late 201's will be sorely needed, as fen have had plenty of time to breed?
  

[robkelk]

My vision is the unified command (NATTO - Not Actually Terran Treaty Organization)

I will point out that Fenspace|KJ and Fenspace|Mal voted down "Ultraterrestrial Naturalized Citizens for Law Enforcement" as the name for what became the Space Patrol, on the ground of it being too silly.

So Noah's voting against changing the name to of Great Justice to "NATTO". Pick something a bit more dignified, please...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[KJ]

Why not stick with GJ? Because, towards the end of the Boskowar, a lot of people are not trusting the GJ leadership even in a situation where there's a clear enemy. In a situation where there isn't a clear enemy (IE, peacetime) the command structure of GJ (which is to say the SOS-Dan) is even more worrying. Questions of policy regarding strategic assets should not be handled by nutjobs, issues like that.

So in no way am I talking about duplicating efforts. I'm talking about pulling forces out of GJ's chain of command before reforming as $Name_TBD (yeah, okay rob, I was in a mood to inject levity. )

[classicdrogn]

If Great Justice can be made to work for the long term, I have no problem with keeping it. I was just under the impression it was already showing stress at the seams by the end of the Boskone affair... Maybe just give it some clearer structure and so on under the terms of PEPPER?
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Ace Dreamer]

Go for some simple name like the "Solar Reserves"?

Or, "Authentic Unified Non-Terrestrial Independant Expeditionary"? [grin]
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind

[firvulag]

I have no objections to GJ being shut down and something similar, but better thought out being put in it's place.  Though, I suspect it will take a lot of wrangling among the factions and the SMOFs to get that done, between the ones who want to keep and reform GJ, the ones who want something else, and the ones who don't think it's necessary at all.

I'd always sort of seen GJ (or it's replacement) in peacetime as being fairly small, and divided (not necessarily formally) into three areas
REMFs:   Between organizing peacetime inter-factional exercises and making certain that if a mobilization is need, everything is there a fair number of GJ's "permanent" members would probably be involved in logistics and other support roles.
Intelligence: The trouble-shooters, intelligence analysts and the like.  Someone's got to keep an eye out for problems.  Probably the smallest part of GJ, and the least well liked.
Combat: Fen who aren't part of any faction, or don't want to sign up with their faction for whatever reason.  An in universe justification could be for these members to act either as cadre for the less militarized factions or as a quick reaction force, although in universe the characters who think this may be mistaken.

I think a lot of the members, especially those in combat branches, would probably be reservists of some sort.

As for the SOS-dan, as Auger mentioned in the Mystery[0] I also think there's some people in GJ that like to keep Haruhi where they can see her.

[0]  Yes, it will be updating this week.  I'm so close to the end, and the writer's block hits now?  *sigh*

[KJ]

Hm, okay. Backing up a few steps - fundamentally what I was trying to do here was move strategic command to something akin to GJ-without-the-SOS-Dan, and was anticipating removing the SOS-Dan from the top of the leadership pyramid as ... not an easy or pleasant fight. Thus the reorg under a new name. Fundamentally though that's really unnecessary if someone has a better idea.

On IRC actually, Firvulag broached the idea of "... this big complicated effort to create a new GJ that ends up just being GJ without the SOS-dan. I mean identical to it. Gives some of the SMOFs a reason to go "just as planned" while the rest facepalm." And actually, I like the idea of a huge bureaucratic shuffle that does that a lot more than my original idea.

[LynnInDenver]

Ironically, I'm sure the huge bureaucratic shuffle is less trouble than literally wresting the existing structure from Haruhi's hands. Done well enough, she'd never even notice that what she has left to command is just a shell bureaucracy, little more than a handful of paper pushers.
--

"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor

[robkelk]

PEPPER Treaty = People Everywhere Proper Preparedness Equipment Rotation? Maybe something else for the second e

People Everywhere Proper Preparedness Agreement

Thus giving us "SALT 'n' PEPPA"...

[size=smaller](And I'm showing my age there, aren't I?)[/size]
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Black Aeronaut]

Well, it won't be terribly difficult for the Roughriders to scale things back. The Peacemakers will actually be the easiest part - with the modular bays, they can just send out patrols with the larger, comfier living packages. Bigger boom sticks will simply go into storage. Extra F-EZigs can easily be sold off to new colonies. Larger ships... well, they go into mothballs on rotations... but 36 Atalante's population of ambulatory AIs is gonna jump.

And supplying all those new outposts, colonies, and even the larger factions with fighters and other ships will probably be the big reason why BAT becomes so successful in the coming years.

[HRogge]

I wonder if it would be possible to just add a "exercise/training planning layer" below the SOS component of GJ... they can still draw up all kind of crazy plans for real war, but someone below them take that input and organize the peace-time exercises and common training rules.

This way the public clash with SOSdan doesn't happen that fast (they sound like they could raise quite a lot of public support), but they still have not much to say in the coming years. *G*

[M Fnord]

How do we want to play with factional militaries? GJ kinda gets the spotlight since it's the Convention's military arm, but at the same time there's a few overly-militarized factions out there after the war, and if the Convention is going to maintain the monopoly on force then Something Must Be Done about this situation. Forcing demilitarization isn't necessarily going to work; it'd tear at the foundations of the Convention and send us right down to grimdark city. But at the same time factions with more guns than people can't really be left to just wander about willy-nilly.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[HRogge]

Maybe there can be some deals between factions like this and larger factions that they do mixed fleets and share some responsibility... as some kind of way to get the "combat ships per Fen" to a reasonable number?

(edit)

Or maybe multiple smaller factions working together like this to get a "lower average".

[KJ]

Mal: That's kind of exactly my point behind all this - get factions into making strategic crap for whatever reason signing papers legitimizing them, agreeing to some terms, and most importantly Showing Off in wargames and stuff and being useful. Peer pressure, ego stroking, etc... but people who go and build large amounts of militaryish crap are going to want some payback, and common ground to help protect everyone else...?

[M Fnord]

Wargle, I keep resisting the urge to start orgcharting this. Bad brain, no cookie! %P

Anyway, this is what I've got so far from distilling the thread. Chime in.

Space Arms Limitation Treaty (PEPPER)

* Defines 'strategic weapon.' Includes existing heavy weapons as well as theoretical designs like antimatter weapons, turbolasers, etc.

* Puts a hard limit on how many strategic weapons a faction can have, based by population (?)

* Puts soft limits on non-strategic weapons, mostly in making sure factions are not selling advanced weaponry downstairs.

* Blanket ban on individual faction ownership of weapons of mass destruction / terror. (ABC weaponry[1], exotics like nanoswarms, aerosoled biomod handwavium, etc.)

* To make sure this is all accomplished, all signatories agree to random inspections by $Great_Justice investigators. Failure to comply results in the Convention being very cross indeed, etc.

[1] Kaboomite being at the top of the list.

---

Alphacon Charter

* Establishes a unified, Convention-wide military organization to oversee cooperation between factional militaries, training of soldiers, and provide for a standing defense force for the entirety of the Solar System and outlying worlds.

* Very carefully co-opts as much of the existing Great Justice structure as possible but without including the SOS-dan in anything more than an advisory capacity.

* Establishes $Great_Justice as the official standing military of the Convention, with a core of professionals serving the Convention directly as well as units from factional military forces.

* Establishes that factional militaries must rotate units in and out of $Great_Justice on a regular basis (annual? biannual? Probably don't want to go shorter period than annual.) for cross-training.

* Establishes a 'local defense' fund for smaller nonaligned settlements; monies used from this fund go to materiel that can be used as local militia but also may be requistioned as reserves by $Great_Justice in an emergency.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[KJ]

PEPPER: The strategic stuff is fiddly - I'd want to define it in terms of output, but then there's people coming up with treaty weapons and junk. My intent was also to have the hard limit met by rotating excess capability into the $GJ TOE if people don't want to scrap or demil them; "we don't have them, they're the Convention's until they rotate out and this one is the Convention's" and in exchange maybe the requirements for demilling be a bit "harder". You could argue that some stuff is a strategic asset when loaded one way and not when it's loaded another way - I don't like the idea of that flying if it can swap between one state to the other fairly readily. Population might be a viable metric but I dunno; that's a can of worms and a half. It works for me but I'd be open to what other people have to say. Inspectors I think I had in mind before... some line being drawn between operational stuff and research stuff too.

Charter: Can't think of any objections or addendums right off the bat.

[Star Ranger4]

About the only thing I can think of is in terms of Strategic weapons. Maybe Define it as "the factions percentage of the Fen Population as a whole" defines how many strategic weapons (again as a percent of the whole) they can posses? And the convention as a whole decides how many weapons total?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[Dartz]

There are of course, some dual use technologies that're already out there. A case in point being BA's 'Cool Cuke' reactors which are explicitly nuclear and fueled by Uranium mined from wherever. (Unless this changes). Someone's going to enrich that stuff, and they aren't going to enrich it because they want to make mushroom clouds.... but because they want more power density in their asteroid racer's core to make it go faster and increasing the enrichment level helps.

That's just the first example I can think of off the top of my head. There're bound to be a whole slew of these technologies, and debating which get on the proscribed list and which don't will get especially heated when some people happen to have business interests and livelyhoods in that area.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Space Arms Limitation Treaty (PEPPER)

* Defines 'strategic weapon.' Includes existing heavy weapons as well as theoretical designs like antimatter weapons, turbolasers, etc.

Anything thats a threat to a typical "internal" asteroid habitat might be included as well.

* Puts a hard limit on how many strategic weapons a faction can have, based by population (?)

Maybe something logarithmic or at least non-linear? Otherwise either the Trekkies are over-armed or most other faction are not allowed anything.

* Puts soft limits on non-strategic weapons, mostly in making sure factions are not selling advanced weaponry downstairs.

How far down (in terms of power) will this non-strategic weapons go? Are we talking about offensive spaceship weapons, point defense guns, personal firearms?

* Blanket ban on individual faction ownership of weapons of mass destruction / terror. (ABC weaponry[1], exotics like nanoswarms, aerosoled biomod handwavium, etc.)

Sounds good.

* To make sure this is all accomplished, all signatories agree to random inspections by $Great_Justice investigators. Failure to comply results in the Convention being very cross indeed, etc.

This will be a very difficult part. Imagine trying to make A.C. to agree to random inspections (by "some foreign people") on Prometheus Forge.

It depends highly on how far the factions trusts the inspectors.

Alphacon Charter

* Establishes a unified, Convention-wide military organization to oversee cooperation between factional militaries, training of soldiers, and provide for a standing defense force for the entirety of the Solar System and outlying worlds.

Don't forget interoperability tests of military communication and command&control equipment... otherwise things will get very interesting as soon as you need a multifaction taskforce. *G*

* Very carefully co-opts as much of the existing Great Justice structure as possible but without including the SOS-dan in anything more than an advisory capacity.

Maybe it was a good thing (from meta point of view) that SOSdan does not have real divine powers? *G*

* Establishes $Great_Justice as the official standing military of the Convention, with a core of professionals serving the Convention directly as well as units from factional military forces.

Maybe also establish some transfer of resources to keep this "core" running? But who will pull the strings with this "Convention military" ?

* Establishes that factional militaries must rotate units in and out of $Great_Justice on a regular basis (annual? biannual? Probably don't want to go shorter period than annual.) for cross-training.

And maybe some voluntary options for groups which are too small to be considered a faction on their own... but most likely they will not be with $GJ for a whole year.

* Establishes a 'local defense' fund for smaller nonaligned settlements; monies used from this fund go to materiel that can be used as local militia but also may be requistioned as reserves by $Great_Justice in an emergency.

One reason of CI for building the Frigga factory was to give Jet and his neighbors some access to better defense tech...

[M Fnord]

Output's not a bad way of looking at it, I was drifting towards a more object-oriented classification but I can see output making sense. My only worry would be an ICly concern of some chucklefuck pulling the "every spaceship is a kinetic warhead bloo bloo" thing, but enh. I can see rotating excess strategic & non-strategic capability into $GJ; it'd keep the military-industrial complex at least a little happy though they may request some sort of quid-pro-quo if they keep producing (capitalists *eyeroll*). Population was pretty much the only metric that makes sense to me in terms of limits hard or soft, since we've got factions that have maybe a hundred people who've got entire air armies worth of strategic hardware. If nothing else that level of toy collecting needs to go, so forcing hoarders to scrap their stuff or rotate it into $GJ until they grow another thousand people or whatever makes sense to me.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Star Ranger4]

As far as the inspectors, I'd say each faction gets to nominate one of their own for membership, but they are vetted and approved by the whole, with x number of inspectors appointed as members at large by the members at large rather than any one faction
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children

[HRogge]

As far as the inspectors, I'd say each faction gets to nominate one of their own for membership, but they are vetted and approved by the whole, with x number of inspectors appointed as members at large by the members at large rather than any one faction

I am still skeptic... on Earth they could look for nuclear research/launch facilities from orbit, so they knew where to send inspectors.

But in Fenspace you would have to check every little lab... e.g. I am not sure CI would be very happy about a bunch of Fen from all other factions getting a good picture what they are working on at the moment.

[M Fnord]

I am not sure CI would be very happy about a bunch of Fen from all other factions getting a good picture what they are working on at the moment.

If CI intends to remain in the hurty-things business, then they're just going to have to learn to cope. Or not sign PEPPER, which provides a certain level of independence from the group at the cost of a certain level of inbuilt suspicion - and the moment CI weapons show up in the hands of unpleasant people CI will have to talk fast or face deeply unpleasant consequences.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[HRogge]

If CI intends to remain in the hurty-things business, then they're just going to have to learn to cope. Or not sign PEPPER, which provides a certain level of independence from the group at the cost of a certain level of inbuilt suspicion - and the moment CI weapons show up in the hands of unpleasant people CI will have to talk fast or face deeply unpleasant consequences.

Sounds fair... still, I see quite a lot smaller factions/groups (with or without local Mads) who would not sign PEPPER because they don't want to have "control visits" from larger factions regularly. On the other side, most small factions will not be building strategic weapons.

I think a solution where you can work out this checks with people you trust too might be better. Such thing would build a "network of trust", which would be more acceptable to most Fen than random externals demanding to look through ALL their experiments.

---

OHH... just imagine the control group visiting GLADOS factory...

"GLADOS you have visitors."
"Welcome to chamber 1 my new test subjects!"

[KJ]

The method of choosing inspectors is going to be interesting, but I imagine with having a sufficiently broad memberbase for the inspection teams and having them NDA'd out the wazzoo things might be more acceptable. Some sort of process for resolving accusations of tech theft, etc.

Also for the clarity's sake, when I talk about strategic assets I'm mostly talking about ships, bombers, etc and not just warheads. Though those too.

Some people want their own military industrial complexes... I imagine there might be some prestige that would accrue from being able to significantly contribute to the security of GJ and so on.