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Hello eUK to yet another Policy Giveaway! These giveaways are policy ideas put forward by TRS for any government or candidate to adopt/implement. We won’t be fussy if you take these ideas! This time we are again discussing how to get the most out of our Training wars, and specifically how to make sure we don’t just build the TW stack, but we build capacity.

Last time we talked about improving TW management it stimulated some discussion, with various members of non-TRS Congress describing their view that 9 was a good number of TW’s to maintain in our stack, and that more than that may not be necessary.

TRS has consistently stood on a platform of having as many TW’s as can be sensibly managed, and optimising how they are run. Since then the stack has grown ever higher and higher, and including battles available to us via MPP, stands at 24! That is why we are happy to add to our policy giveaways, the Smart Stack Initiative!


Smart Stack Initiative

In essence the SSI is a series of principles to help decide which nations offer good value when setting up training wars, and how to make help guarantee two things:

TW Capability is optimised, with partners chosen to ensure the max capacity can be reached.

Our stack size reflects demand ensuring as many medals as possible go to UK or allied fighters.

As such the SSI has two aims - firstly to establish a profile of the optimal TW and TW partner. This will be centred around the impact on the country accounts, very much following from Mr Woldy’s analysis of TW related income. Secondly it aims to encourage, via Congress discussion and reasonable debate, an active MoD and MoFA. We need to be talking to allies when things go wonky, and seeking out partners who are right for the eUK. This requires an active Cabinet. Waiting for offers and saying yes on a first come first served basis is not a long term solution to TW management and does not tailor our stack to the eUK’s needs.

One ceiling for TW capacity is to do with cash. Specifically how much income the eUK takes from regions it holds overseas that has to be returned. If this makes our total income top over 400k a day, then it exceeds what we can donate out of the treasury. This is not good. We are in a great position where this should be easy to avoid - but only by picking the right TW partners.

The Profile

The UK should identify partners who don’t have very large incomes, and a consistent GDP. This will mean the money that we have to pay back won’t fluctuate wildly, and will be of a more manageable size. In other words, we can avoid this:


The eUK’s income - 76% is returned to TW partners, factoring in concessions this rises to 80%

These massive spikes in income come from one nation - North Korea. They make it hard to manage repayments to NK (currently the Gov just lets the debt pile up rather than repaying) but even worse they move our average income dangerously close to over 400k a day, at which point we will struggle to get the cash out at all.

As such the eUK should change its TW arrangement with NK, either we should host them on cores so we don’t generate this income, we close the TW and MPP them, or we close the TW and find a new partner.

To reiterate - if we earn more than 400k a day, we can’t withdraw it all from the treasury, and that impacts paying back all partners, funding programs, etc. We have reserves to mediate this for a while, but that is a poor use of those reserves. That is also on the assumption we could run donations every day for 30 days a month - and we cannot.

The current arrangement for this particular war has an impact on our TW capacity too. Because it pushes us so close to that limit, it means we are nearing a point where we cannot be hosted overseas for training without risking cashflow. If we did not hold an NK region our average income would hardly exceed 200k and we would have capacity for numerous more training wars.

This is why a profile of the optimum TW partner is needed. We should avoid signing up to owning a region of nations with huge and volatile incomes! The North Korea TW saw over 13 times the income of the Egypt TW enter the UK’s accounts yesterday. In a financial sense, it took up the same fiscal headroom as 13 other potential TWs! We should prioritise bordering nations and utilising cores before deploying overseas, and then carefully pick those nations who will compliment our financial position.


Stop him!

The active Foreign Office

Secondly, we need an active foreign office. We’ll reward 50Q5 food if you can comment the name of the MoFA without checking! The eUK is choosing to make things harder for itself by being insular, and waiting for offers to come to us. With a good profile in place, an active MoFA could go out and identify potential partners and bring options back to Congress. This would compliment an active ministry of defence who could be assessing how many UK medals are going to UK and allied fighters, as a further metric to evaluating the optimum number of TW’s we run. Guesswork needn’t factor into our foreign policy!

The other thing an active foreign office would assist with is coordination, and proactively identifying when hiccups may occur - resistance war, regions swaps, and of course helping plan our own region swaps. Apathy at cabinet level has led to some minor disruption over the past months, which is easily mediated by proactive communication. We should set ourselves higher standards.

Summary

In short, we think we can apply some rigour to our decisions around which TW’s to take on. We have to have an active Foreign Office and seek the partners that suit us, rather than wait to be approached and then accepting every offer without due consideration. This can start with some basic principles as to what a good TW partner looks like. That should involve looking at their income, battlefield etiquette, whilst ensuring our cores are utilised as efficiently as possible.

This will boost capacity and opportunity when it comes to TW’s, rather than limiting the number of wars we can have. More medal opportunities, more training, more happy citizens.

Feel free to share your thoughts!