Departments of an Uplifted Galactic Government

Question

One of the gods in the universe stumbled across an species with potential and decided to uplift it. Instead of uplifting over the course of a couple thousand years, the god decided to do it in one year. A couple million individuals were plucked from their lives and mentally and physically enhanced using divine powers. The god taught them how the universe works and other fundamental concepts in the STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields and military science. The god explained that they were not alone in the universe and the uplifted species will eventually encounter another space civilization. Satisfied with its work, the god moved on, leaving the newly founded civilization with a single goal, explore the galaxy.

While this civilization is forming a government, they decided to have a single executive and a group of department heads who also act as advisors.

What kind of departments would be formed/ required to maintain a science driven, militaristic space civilization?

So far, I have a department of planetary administration, Technology, space fleet, army, air force, navy and external affairs.

Edit : The species was at max tribal when they got uplifted and the god has a secret agenda for purposely making the civilization militaristic.

Answer 1

While this civilization is forming a government, they decided to have a single executive and a group of department heads who also act as advisors.

What kind of departments would be formed/ required to maintain a science driven, militaristic space civilization?

By sheer luck, I have here a document that answers this very same question. Welcome to

Liquid 101 guide to make your galactic civilization more interesting than Space Nazis

Everybody loves a good, all-conquering, militaristic while science-loving space civilization. But what kind of deparments would you need to make it work? What kind of people do you want as advisors for your single dictator chief? Here's my selection. In some departments, I have proposed smaller sub-section called branches; each branch oversees a particular area of interest. The idea behind branches is to minimize the total number of departments, improve cooperation, and expand each deparments core concepts.

Defense

As part of an expansionist, militaristic society you'll be probably attacking, but it's generally better to keep appearances

This department will be in charge of the military. The suggested branches are:

• Space Forces, for all your 0 gravity needs,
• Planetary Forces, aka when things get down to earth,
• Logistics, possibly the tiresome job of keeping them all together.

Of course, they are supposed to work closely with each other. Space forces will train its own personell for manning the fleets, but ground troops from Planetary are expected to be on board too - mainly to get from mission A to mission B. Needless to say, the Logistic branch is vital to every operation, while being the less gun-populated one. It's expected to work closely with the science and exploration departments.

Administration

Aka the mind-numbing tasks nobody wants to do

Your administration department should ensure that everything in your empire runs as intended in the daily lives of your fellow citizens. I'll point out some area of interests:

• Security: Law enforcement, internal security, and policing. While this could do jointly with your army, it's usually better to keep police under a different power structure.
• Public Services: Not to be mistaken with the public toilets. Public Services should manage everything from waste disposal to healthcare, with welfare in between.
• Rules and Regulations: a branch tasked with ensuring that the law code is followed and in good health. This branch could have judiciary power - running tribunals - and a light legislative power - as it could suggest new laws or law edits to your chief.

Exploration and Commerce

There's money to be made in space!

The best suited department for navigators, explorers and merchants.

• Trade would be the branch tasked with estabilishing routes, deals, both internal to your civilization and external (toward other uplift or not uplift species).
• the Scouting branch would tasking with exploring the vast nothingness of space, both with manned missions, space probes, and telescopes.
• Colonization would be responsible for setting and mantaining new colonies, and make sure they succeed.

The emphasis here is knowing what's out there, putting foot on it, make it profitable, rinse and repeat. The goal of your civilization is to expand, so it makes sense having some of your staff getting really specialized at that. Of course, a close cooperation with the science department for all the technology needs is to be expected.

Science

Putting it all together

Well, what can I say about science? It would cover a lot of topics, to be sure; and unless your uplifted society has discovery a theory of everything, you will be probably stuck with all the various fields of scientific knowledge banded together. It would make sense to have different branches for , lets say, Medicine, Physics, Computer science, Biology and so on. This would also give your scientist a very familiar academic feel. If you'd like to be more general, you could distinguish a branch for Academic and Applied sciences, and maybe a branch devoted to Research and Development projects.

Culture

Wait, do I even need this?

Short answer, yes, you do. Even in a militaristic, science based society you still need to cultivate your culture - exspecially when your people, recently uplifted, will spiritually struggle in finding their place in the universe. And remember - you could always use it to make propaganda, in the worst case.

• Humanities (?) assuming, of course, your people call themselves humans. Anyway, this is the branch of literature and the other fine arts; but also the study of languages.
• Foreign Studies your civilization will meet other uplifted people. When that happens, you'll need scientists able to study and assimilate as much as possible about the other civilization; their language, their habits, their social norms ...
• Medias and Communication - either is about news, or getting out your propaganda.

Development

That gets the gears running

Ideally, this would be the department tasked with industries, farms and factories. Your society may work as a state-running machine or like a capitalist utopia, but in either case you'll need some way to ensure that the components for your ships are getting built, and bread is being baked, somewhere. So, I'd consider

• Life support for food, water and other vital resources (which may extend to breathable gases and whatnot)
• Industry with specific focus on the needs of your growing civilization,
• Automaton to deal, eventually, with those pesky robots.

Answer 2

First of all, you don't seem to be describing a government at all; you're describing an administration. Most national governments follow a simple pattern.

1) An executive branch, usually ceremonial in nature that becomes the head of state
2) A legislative branch, usually elected (or at least gives that appearance), where the real power is held
3) An administrative branch (including a judiciary), that actually interprets and enacts the edicts of the legislative branch and runs the country in a (hopefully) stable manner

Your government (as you describe it) is not a democracy; it's a theocracy. That is to say, your God has presented himself, uplifted the people, given them a task to do and moved on. The God is your executive branch in that regard and the only doubt that will remain to your race is whether or not he/she plans to come back and check up on progress against the goal. If it was me, I'd assume yes and just get to work, just in case.

As for legislation, well it would appear that your God has set a bunch of rules as part of the uplift procedure. That said, interpretation of those rules and their application in a rapidly changing society (adapting to all this new knowledge) will require a judiciary and possibly a legislature so as to provide a clear tactical direction against the God's strategic statements of intent. So, it may exist, but my guess is that you could almost do that with a judiciary alone, reducing the intercession between the mandates of the God and the people.

Which leaves the administration. Public Services across the world are generally structured according to the needs of the state at a given time; there where very few Departments of the Environment 100 years ago, for instance, but almost every country has had a Customs service for as long as they've existed. For all their newly gained knowledge, you still need food, you actually have a greater need for resources like metal and fuel given your divine brief, and there will still be crime, illness, and a need for educating the young.

So; You'll still have departments for police, schools, hospitals, emergency services, public welfare, etc. In the short term you can probably dispense with the armed forces; your people are now united behind their God in their new mission. Worry about a new military structure when you get into space and start the explorations in earnest. In point of fact, that's the first budget you pillage to make a mega-NASA.

In short, I'd expect that many of the departments you form would be similar to those that are already in place. Your people still have the same needs they had before and at least some of the same problems. The sense of common purpose instilled by your God means that things like customs, immigration and defence are much lower priorities for the short to medium term, until some first contacts start coming along. But, you may end up with some departments you wouldn't have first considered, like a Department of Extraterrestrial Terraforming and Colonisation. Others, like Department of Environment, may be expanded to include the environments of colonial planets. Education will certainly receive a boost to support the massive amount of higher education research that must now be conducted.

The most practical answer is that the only difference between the departments of 'before' and the departments of 'after' will be the differences implied by new priorities set by divine contact.

Answer 3

All departments would have sub departments within them but these would be the main groups.

Armed Services - Space/air force/army/navy would all be one department. Only humanity would be stupid enough to have separate departments for the groups essentially doing the same job.

Research - All the sciences would be here

Exploration - This department would map out the galaxy and send out automated drones to search for signs of life and/or interesting planets and resources.

Governance - This branch handles and oversees the direction of the executive and distribution of resources, the legal system and general bureaucracy.

Support - This department handles the production of resources such as mining, farming and manufacturing. It's the largest group. Also handles health and education.

Answer 4

If these species are given only technological knowledge, without any history and political science, they would have to go through a period of chaos before settling on a government style and structure.

At first, they don't have any organization larger than a tribe, and while their knowledge would tell them that they need to combine their efforts in order to build a civilization, they would have no idea how to do that.

Ideally, they would elect a leader who would assign different type of work to different tribes. Those tribes will get specialized in things like agriculture, mining, metallurgy, construction, transportation and scientific research. Military occupation would naturally be reserved for leader's own tribe.

Realistically, tribes would engage in all-out civil war with each other. There would be little time to do actual technological development. A tribe armed with composite bows would wipe out (or enslave) the other tribe which chose a path to make iron tools. Only after some time (and many deaths) one tribe would become victorious and settle on a government type.