"Yes," Kuralski agreed, "but we don't know if that would be feeding them what they like. I suspect feeding a good local diet will be a little cheaper."
"Enough cheaper to make a difference?" Carrera asked.
"Not really. Might save a hundred D per man for the year. Not even half a million drachma, overall."
"Okay, continue."
"Ammunition and personal and crew-served arms are so tightly interwoven that we really need to talk about them together," Kuralski said. "And we never could come to an agreement among us as to which to go with. It makes a pretty whopping difference in cost, at one end, and battle performance on the other, with proficiency in the middle. The short version is that if you buy Volgan, you can afford a war gun, a training gun, and ammunition to the tune of fifty or sixty thousand rounds of training ammunition per man. If you buy Tauran or FS, you can afford one rifle and maybe four thousand rounds per man. Of course, the Volgan arms are simple, reliable, and none too accurate. The best compromise we could come up with was to buy Volgan and add three Draco sniper rifles to each section."
"What's that save us over buying FS or Tauran with, say, fifteen thousand rounds per man?"
"About nine million," Kuralski answered. "That's an estimate, we haven't worked out any deals yet."
"Works. Do it: Volgan, if we can get them. Besides, they're more accurate than they get credit for if they're properly zeroed."
"We can get them, surely. There are also a lot of Volgan equipment clones out there," Kuralski reminded, "so it's probably fairly safe to plan that way. And Sachsen is allegedly sitting on hundreds of thousands of unusually high quality Samsonov rifles and machine guns, too."
He went on, "The next largest element of expense is aviation equipment. That isn't counting training on that equipment."
"Dan and I have worked on that one together, mostly by e-mail and phone," Abogado interjected. "I don't know all that much about training for pilots and such, though I can deal with maintenance training well enough. Most of what he's talking about using is Volgan or really, really simple Tauran and FS birds. I think that, rather than set up an aviation subdivision of the FMTG, we ought to send pilots and maintenance personnel overseas. I've looked into the prices and, in the short term anyway, that would be cheaper… a little. Maybe later, once we've got enough local pilots trained and a larger scale organization, it might be worth it to bring the aviation training base home."
Carrera looked over the screen showing cost factors. Aviation stood out above everything but personnel and training costs. The figure, "FSD 115,000,000," was a little shocking.
"How do we save some money there?" he asked.
"I don't think we can cut numbers, Pat," Dan answered. "What we have listed-eight converted crop dusters for attack birds, twelve medium and four heavy lift helicopters, eight cargo, six recon and twelve remote-piloted vehicles-is about the minimum to do the job. The basis was to be able to lift the critical elements of an infantry cohort and the Cazador cohort in two lifts, assuming an eighty-five percent serviceable rate for the transport helos. Almost everything else was based on that. Oh… and we'll need two more helicopters for medical evacuation. We can save something if you're willing to go with used, rebuilt helicopters and to substitute short takeoff recon birds for choppers for the medevac."
"And save how much?"
"About eighteen million. Note, here, that this is a bad bargain, unless you find more money at some point to buy newer aircraft. Older and cheaper also means sooner to wear out."
"All right. Buy used. You have a line on used?"
"For a lot of it, we do. For some we're still looking. IM-71 medium lift helicopters, for example, can be had for about one point six million FSD, each, used. IM-62 heavy lifters run about two point six. New they run over twice that, by the way. We've found nine IM-71s for sale. We're still looking for three. IM-62s are available."
"Okay, let's talk armor."
Kuralski laughed slightly. "If you think we fought over small arms, that was nothing compared to the fight over armor. If we thought you could afford it, we'd mutiny before letting you buy anything but Zion-built Chariots. Too damned expensive, even used. Sixty of those would cost two hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty million. It would break the bank, in other words.
"Instead, what you've got there under that sum of 'FSD 84,000,000' is our best guess of what it will cost for a mix of Volgan T-38s and PBM-23s. Until I can go over there-"
"You?" Carrera asked.
"I'm the only one who speaks Russian. Until I can go over there, that amount remains an educated guess. We do have fairly hard numbers and figures for some much less capable equipment, T-27s and the like. But that stuff is truly shit, well designed but what's available is so badly made it would be almost as criminal to use it as to not have anything."
Carrera looked like he had a very sour taste in his mouth. He mulled the prospect of losing his chief of staff for anywhere from weeks to months and clearly didn't like it. After perhaps a minute of looking sour, he went along. "All right. You go to Saint Nicholasberg as soon as possible to hunt arms. Moving right along, who do we have among the Civil Force competent to command the mechanized troops?"
Kuralski shook his head. "Xavier says there's no one."
Carrera thought about that for a minute. Harrington or Brown and I need Harrington as a loggie. He then said, "Brown?"
"Sir."
"I dub thee, 'Sancho Panzer.' You'll command the mech and tanks. You're going to go spend about a month and a half somewhere where nobody speaks a word of English to immerse you in Spanish."
"Sir!" The single word meant: I won't let you down, Boss. Promise.
The brief moved along, covering artillery and ground transportation
"Twenty-four 105mm guns and six multiple rocket launchers will cost WHAT?"
"We have an alternate plan to substitute twelve 122mm guns and twelve 160mm mortars, plus six Volgan… "
By the time they got to individual equipment beyond small arms…
"Twenty-two hundred FSD per man for body armor, Pat. Unless you want to go with something Terry Johnson has come up with."
Johnson stood up. "I knew that figure would floor you. It floored me. So, off duty, I started nosing around the Globalnet. There are two developments I think you ought to consider. By the way, Harrington let me dip into discretionary funds to get this stuff."
Johnson bent over and pulled what looked like a thick vest from under his chair. This he passed to Carrera.
"What the fuck is this?" Carrera asked. "It's light."
"It's silk, Pat, regular old silk. Well, not regular. It's specially woven and encased in polytetrafluoroethane cloth. That model is what this company in Rajamangala had available to send us. It's thirty-four layers of heavy duty silk and, yes, at about four and a half pounds, it's pretty light. It will stop anything up to. 45 caliber but not. 44. It will stop damned near all shrapnel. Though both. 45 and heavy shrapnel will hurt. It will definitely not stop high powered rifle ammunition. Neither will the twenty-two hundred drachma vest the FSC makes which is also, by the way, a shitpot heavier."
"Cost?"
"One fifty to five hundred, depending. I say depending because there are some modifications we can make that would make it lighter and make it more effective. Some mods would lower the price but one modification also raises it substantially.
"That modification is this." Johnson again reached down and handed over a four inch by twelve inch metal plate, about a tenth of an inch thick. The plate was deformed in five spots.
"This is what is called 'glassy metal' or 'liquid metal.' It's an alloy of five metals-titanium, copper, nickel, zirconium and beryllium- that really don't like each other. It's cooled very quickly so that the metals can't form crystals. What they do form is an alloy about seven- eighths as dense as steel and two and a half times stronger. It's also precision castable. What that means to us is that we can make a plate a tenth of an inch thick out of this shit and have it be as strong as a quarter of an inch of good steel. We might also consider using it for some other things; bayonets come to mind, and maybe helmets.