How big is my navy?

The US is the only country that operates the sort of navy that is used in NationStates. It has the following:

11 supercarriers - 1,100,000t approx
9 assault carriers - 360,000t approx
21 landing ships - 380,000t approx
22 cruisers - 220,000t approx
52 destroyers - 470,000t approx
30 frigates - 123,000t approx
18 SSBNs - 325,000t approx
53 SSNs - 370,000t approx

for a total of 3.35m tonnes of blue water warships.

It has 332,000 active personnel and a budget of $130bn/year. This excludes joint service spending but includes the marine corps, so we'll call it even for a decent estimate to within plus/minus 10%.

The US navy costs $38,000 per tonne of blue water warship. $130bn is $430 per capita. Total costs are $0.0000276 per capita per tonne of blue water shipping.

Assuming your navy is roughly comparable in quality to the US navy, use the following procedure to calculate its rough size:

Tonnage = GDP per capita * population * % of GDP spending on the navy (Must be in decimal form) * 0.0000276

PAY ATTENTION: Since everyone gets this wrong, decimal form means that 100% of GDP spending on navy = 1.00, 1% = 0.01, etc.

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Caveats:

- The formula only gives an estimate, assuming costs scale proportionally. It will tend to break down the further you move from the USN size. I would guess it overestimates how much a small navy can have in particular. It will also overestimate if your equipment is better than that of the USN.

- It only works well if you keep the composition the same. Tonnage of submarines, escorts and carriers doesn't cost the same. Submarines tend to be the most expensive ships per tonne, but carriers may be even more so if you include the full cost of aircraft, pilots, etc. Deleting the OHPs, for instance, and adding an equal tonnage of SSNs will certainly result in the formula overestimating your naval strength. Don't try to min-max it, and if you vary the composition a lot try to find out what the effects would be.

- Like I say at the start, there's a bit of fudge because some spending that is necessary to the USN isn't assigned to the USN budget. Similarly, the marine corps is paid for out of the same budget, and their ships are counted here while troops are not.

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Old argument between TWSP and Clan no one cares about anymore:

TWSP was complaining on IRC earlier about clan's navy size. Well, let's see how reasonable it is. He claims 12,200 ships and a further 2,200 submarines. Using the figures above, the US navy's ships displace approximately 15,300t each. The USN has a greater proportion of subs to surface ships however which skews this down. Subs are more expensive per tonne than surface ships, but to give the benefit of the doubt to TWSP we will use the tonnage per ship figure excluding subs of 18,000. Clan is claiming an approx 256mt navy.

He has a population of ~6bn and a GDPPC of ~45k, so in order to support this he would need to spend 256,000,000/(6,000,000,000*45,000*0.0000276) = 3.4% of GDP to do so. This is about 3x what the US spends, but still less than the US military budget. It is towards the upper bounds of reasonableness, but still plausible assuming that the army and the airforce receive proportionally less funding.

And he has to maintain the air force, army and nation running at the same time.

By the way, this ship-count does not include logistics nor logistics vessels.

Yea, USA is completely devoid of an army or an air force.

Slight error due to my buggered keyboard scrolling one of the numbers into the wrong excel cell. New constant of proportionality, that gives 3.4% spending. This is higher, but still plausible.

I don't know if you're just deliberately being obtuse, but he has made it fairly clear he spends preferentially on the navy. The US has fairly balanced spending. All three services are within a couple of % of one another, and the navy is in the middle. Clan clearly doesn't do that.

It doesn't matter that logistics ships, shore establishments, salaries etc. haven't been explicitly included - provided they're not significantly more costly than those of the US their budgets will simply scale in line with the rest of it. While some thing possibly will experience diseconomies of scale, others, such as procurement, will experience the opposite.

Yea, USA is completely devoid of an army or an air force.

Damn right. All you need is the Marine Corps and the Navy. Oorahs all around?

Yea, USA is completely devoid of an army or an air force.

Damn right. All you need is the Marine Corps and the Navy. Oorahs all around?

Nope, just these guys:


o> o> o>

So, I can use this to finally figure out a total warship tonnage of my navy, and plan accordingly in my ships? Because I'm lost when it comes to realistically planning my navy.

SO if I understood that I can(at 1.8% of GDP being Naval spending) support 18,699,714,568.8576 tons of blue water war vessels.
This cant be correct- I mustve have done that wrong.

The formula should probably be clarified as tonnage = GDP * % of GDP spent on navy in decimal * 0.0000276 for 186,997,129 tons with a $376,403,238,354,124.81 GDP and 1.8% or 0.018 spent on the navy.

So what you're explaining to me is that Clan spends a higher % of his GDP on his Navy than the US does in total.

I can see why TWSP might find cause to complain.

So what you're explaining to me is that Clan spends a higher % of his GDP on his Navy than the US does in total.

I can see why TWSP might find cause to complain.

The US spends about 1.2% of GDP on its navy, and 4.1% on military expenditures overall. Clan's naval budget is less than the US military budget. Even if he spent the same as the US proportionally on his airforce and army, which he has already said he does not, his budget would still only come out at around 5.5% of GDP. This is high, but not implausibly so. The US, for instance, spent 6-9% during the cold war, a situation more analogous to modern haven than the comparatively peaceful post-1990 world. If he spends half as much proportionally a the US on his army and airforce, this would come out at around 4.5% - slightly less than the projected peak of war on terror spending.

Maybe the problem is with this, not with the rest. Maybe people on Nationstates should be a little more reasonable. Maybe you should lead by example.



Oh, wait, this is *Clan*. Forget that I ever said anything.

Maybe the problem is with this, not with the rest. Maybe people on Nationstates should be a little more reasonable. Maybe you should lead by example.

People on nationstates are reasonable. Every country that aspires to be a world power with maritime interests wants a US style navy. They are only stymied by cost. Pretty much all nationstate nations have a greater GDP than the US. THe present state of affairs with a de-facto US thirteen power standard is utterly unprecedented. For most of modern history there have been a number of naval powers with naval spending of the same order of magnitude and of a level <5% GDP.

Maybe the problem is with this, not with the rest. Maybe people on Nationstates should be a little more reasonable. Maybe you should lead by example.

People on nationstates are reasonable.

orly?

yarly



You misunderstand my point. The very fact you're arguing about feasibility when everyone seems to be a first-world, perfect, everybody-is-happy, everybody-pays-taxes-happily, everyone-always-supports-"the-crown" nations is not only ironic, but also belies the pointlessness of such an argument. If you're starting from the assumption that almost every nation is first-world, high-tech, and people almost universally agree with the government, then naturally you'll run into problems with feasibility.

That's not exactly unprecedented either. NS more closely resembles the world from 1800-1918 than anything after that. At the end of that period, pretty much everywhere was either a great power or formally or informally controlled by a great power, of which there were several and of which none was clearly dominant. If someone on NS RPed as a third world nation they would be quickly made subordinate to one of the great powers, and so nothing would actually change... except someone would be stuck 'RPing' a country with almost no control over its own fate, which is no fun. It's neither particularly suprising that no one does this, nor does it change the game very much.

More particularly to the subject of this thread, even a country with a GDPPC of only a few thousand would still be able to afford a US style navy if it had multiple billions of people.