Actually unless the Houses decided to drastically reduce their military budgets I see the reverse happening, where they once had, say, 150 'Mech regiments that constantly need replacements for units lost in battle they now have only 100 that aren't getting beat up all the time that means that you can spend more money on those fewer 'Mechs.
Straight-up economic logic (not to mention the experience of this century) tells me that when there are arms limitations in effect, that spending-per-unit goes up. So in this case that means smaller militaries with larger, higher-tech battlemechs and better-trained mechwarriors. That's just how things work. That dovetails nicely with my understanding of the scramble for quantity-over-quality post-blackout.
Yes that money could go into the economy, but there's a limit to how much could be spent that way and outside of the Davion Families financial network I don't know if the Houses have the ability to do that, at least on that sort of scale
Well, really there isn't. There's three broad ways to spend a so-called peace dividend. A) Channel it into bread-and-circuses, that is, direct payments to favored constituencies; B) infrastructure spending, in all its myriad forms, and/or C) rather than spending it, simply fail to tax that revenue in the first place (which some economists see as a form of "spending" as well). Rather than break Rule 4, let's just stipulate that any way you spend, you do eventually have diminishing returns on that expenditure. Most indifference curves favor balanced spending on many things rather than plowing increased income into one area. Most political systems (including aristocracies) favor spreading out the goodies to many interest groups rather than favoring one and leaving the rest out in the cold.
And more importantly, military planners won't want their budgets cut
at all, especially when centuries of war have given them great influence, and especially when the Great Houses themselves justify their existence, authority, and budgets based on guaranteeing the security of their worlds. So one way to square the circle is to build civilian infrastructure for military purposes.
Roads are a classic example that stretches from Rome to the US superhighway system; or their naval analogs like the Panama and Suez canals. In BT, that means more JumpShips, more recharge stations, and more naval construction/repair facilities. The latter is also nice because the Army of the Future is made of endosteel, which has to be made in orbit. Certainly the Ghost Bears long ago learned the value of asteroid mining. I'd be very surprised not to see an updated Mule, Jumbo, or other civilian hauler.
Updated electronics and IT would be another. Conveniently, this can happen off-camera and then be ruined when the HPGs break down. But not knowing that the crash is coming, the investment makes a great deal of sense. Especially since the security of the HPG network is compromised by the fact that it was built and operated for centuries by a company that eventually splintered off the WoB. Surely a lot will be spent to re-secure the network. It's also convenient because out-of-game, we have 30 years of computing history to account for, and updated IT is an excuse to update the setting to account for real-world changes.
Still another is updating all your factories to 3050 standards. The military has already done this, but you still have vast swaths of the civilian economy that's in the mad max 3025 era. In the rush to fight the Clans and later the Word of Blake, they've been left behind. Plus, there are vast stores of second-line, garrison and militia forces that are still 3025-era. Updating all that is hideously expensive, so why not do it when your front-line forces are in fine shape and not being used?
You can also plow your work into R&D. You build a small number of highly advanced and expensive super-mechs just to keep the scientists busy and the production lines open. In a war, you don't build the super-mechs, but you do use the infrastructure and selected newtech to build workhorse designs. Like a cadre system for R&D.
All those LoaderMechs and ConstructionMechs-- the so-called peace-tech -- have strong military applications as well. That logistics is an integral part of warfare is cliche because it's so true. You can dump spending into that and have the ability to construct forward operating bases and quick-resupply networks for your front-line forces and still call it PeaceTech. One tried and true technique is to combine heavy subsidies from the Houses for private manufacture of IndustrialMechs and merchant dropships with stipulations that they can be nationalized in wartime. The US does that with both its civilian air and merchant marine fleets; many countries do the same. That the Foxes can sell the Great Houses tech they can't produce domestically is an interesting problem; do you buy from the Foxes or spend oodles of money trying to reinvent it yourselves? (England and Spain ran into this problem with higher-tech Flemish/Dutch/Italian cannon; the two nations addressed the challenge in very different ways and with very different outcomes. It's a famous case study in tech policy circles.)
You might also see in the early post-Jihad years a move to swap out weapons for cargo hoists on certain obsolete designs (a kind of MWDA-in-reverse). It's a cliche in diplomatic circles that when you negotiate a disarmament that the crap your generals have been trying to eliminate but have to keep in their inventory for political reasons is the first stuff that lands on the negotiating table.
So there's plenty of game-relevant ways that military spending can be channeled into that is "civilian infrastructure reconstruction" for diplomatic and PR purposes but still has an impact on the tabletop and in TROs.
To me, the interesting question isn't "What are the Shark/Foxes selling?" Though the above should provide some suggestions. But they have a variety of sources and it's tough to untangle whether they're producers or middlemen. They like to play things close to the vest, so no doubt they aren't forthcoming about where the goodies are coming from anyway. So the really interesting question to me is "What are the Shark/Foxes
buying?" That tells me much more about their own economy and those of the Great Houses and IS Clans.
I'm also curious about whether the WarShip-mounted HPGs, especially the ones the Foxes use, are affected by the blackout. If so, it's a major threat. If not, it's a major opportunity. A hostile takeover of ComStar would be a very interesting move, but even competing with them as a boutique provider and skimming the cream off the communications market would net the Foxes vast profit.
