You know how much Hess countries spend on defense? The US could buy enough bullets to kill everyone in the world 10 times over and miss 50% of the time.
An army is a tool for accomplishing goals in defence from and enactment of violence on actors of significant capability. Personnel are just one of the few raw resources said tool consumes. Conveniently said personnel can be used in place of other resources in this calculus but usually at significant inefficiencies. This can even mean that militaries with inflated personnel may even indicate that said military is lacking in other critical areas which must be plugged with disposable personel ie look at the Russian military and its meat wave attacks.
You can’t use numbers of people to make comparisons between countries because they are misleading. Some countries use their soldiers for construction work (China) or have whole industries owned by the military (Iran). A person working on a defense industry assembly line isn’t a member of the military in most countries.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards were put in charge of creating what is today known as the Iranian military industry. Under their command, Iran’s military industry was enormously expanded
Using numbers of personnel to compare China or Iran to a country like Belgium would make Belgium look like a pushover. Belgium has a tiny military but uses it’s location in Europe to ensure security through diplomacy and membership in NATO.
I promise you would be harder to invade the headquarters of NATO than either of those countries.
But the US doesn’t literally use soldiers as construction workers to build random roads and bridges. They use private contractors for most things like that. The groups you mentioned just help out a little to practice for wartime. Most construction is done privately.
Size of the “military” on paper is meaningless from a defense perspective, which is the main purpose of a military. What matters is the amount and quality of troops that you can deploy and support in the field, and the speed at which that happens. Someone paving a road in Hunan or building drones for export in Tehran shouldn’t be counted as a “soldier” because they are not able to be deployed.
The US doesn’t count it’s construction workers or factory workers as “soldiers”.
The list is just incorrect, and I explained why. South Korea has only 51 million people. Do you really think that 7.5% of all people are in the military? No, that includes “reserves” who actually do not work as soldiers.
In that sense, every male in the US signs up for selective service at 18. Should every male aged 18 to 40 be counted as a member of the military?
Now, this is based on slightly outdated statistics but let’s roll with it for a second.
Vietnam’s Reserve, according to this chart, is 5M give or take.
Vietnam’s 2018 Defense Budget was 5.5B USD, give or take.
If somehow we spent that entire budget on the Reserve, we would end up with an expenditure of $1,100USD per Reserve Soldier.
Counting Uniforms, Food, Weapons, and Ammunition for training, how much quality training do you think you can accomplish for $1,100USD per Soldier per year? Even taking into account currency conversion, $2.3M VND per month isn’t a lot when you’re talking military budgets. At that point, we should just count draft card holders as “Reserves” for the US.
This feels wrong. And doing by personnel is also a shit metric.
Doing by personel is another way of stating we got more men than you got bullets
That’s why artillery was invented.
You know how much Hess countries spend on defense? The US could buy enough bullets to kill everyone in the world 10 times over and miss 50% of the time.
I thought it was interesting. Strange to see some ofnyge much larger armies like Vietnam and Koreas.
Both Japans and the USA were larger than I expected.
I don’t think anyone will be confused to think this metric is the most important for the might or usefulness of the force.
I think there are lots of people who will confuse this for the might of a force u can see this exact thing in this comment chain.
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An army is a tool for accomplishing goals in defence from and enactment of violence on actors of significant capability. Personnel are just one of the few raw resources said tool consumes. Conveniently said personnel can be used in place of other resources in this calculus but usually at significant inefficiencies. This can even mean that militaries with inflated personnel may even indicate that said military is lacking in other critical areas which must be plugged with disposable personel ie look at the Russian military and its meat wave attacks.
You can’t use numbers of people to make comparisons between countries because they are misleading. Some countries use their soldiers for construction work (China) or have whole industries owned by the military (Iran). A person working on a defense industry assembly line isn’t a member of the military in most countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed_Forces
Using numbers of personnel to compare China or Iran to a country like Belgium would make Belgium look like a pushover. Belgium has a tiny military but uses it’s location in Europe to ensure security through diplomacy and membership in NATO.
I promise you would be harder to invade the headquarters of NATO than either of those countries.
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Sir what is the primary purpose of a military?
But the US doesn’t literally use soldiers as construction workers to build random roads and bridges. They use private contractors for most things like that. The groups you mentioned just help out a little to practice for wartime. Most construction is done privately.
Size of the “military” on paper is meaningless from a defense perspective, which is the main purpose of a military. What matters is the amount and quality of troops that you can deploy and support in the field, and the speed at which that happens. Someone paving a road in Hunan or building drones for export in Tehran shouldn’t be counted as a “soldier” because they are not able to be deployed.
The US doesn’t count it’s construction workers or factory workers as “soldiers”.
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I’m just explaining to you that all the “largest armies” on there are outliers. Wikipedia lists Iran as having only 600K active personnel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed_Forces
The list is just incorrect, and I explained why. South Korea has only 51 million people. Do you really think that 7.5% of all people are in the military? No, that includes “reserves” who actually do not work as soldiers.
In that sense, every male in the US signs up for selective service at 18. Should every male aged 18 to 40 be counted as a member of the military?
Sir facts and logic have no place pointing out cherry picked data on propagandised infographics.
Now, this is based on slightly outdated statistics but let’s roll with it for a second.
Vietnam’s Reserve, according to this chart, is 5M give or take.
Vietnam’s 2018 Defense Budget was 5.5B USD, give or take.
If somehow we spent that entire budget on the Reserve, we would end up with an expenditure of $1,100USD per Reserve Soldier.
Counting Uniforms, Food, Weapons, and Ammunition for training, how much quality training do you think you can accomplish for $1,100USD per Soldier per year? Even taking into account currency conversion, $2.3M VND per month isn’t a lot when you’re talking military budgets. At that point, we should just count draft card holders as “Reserves” for the US.