By Daniel Djouder.
In the post World War II era, the military power of a nation has assumed different traits than those from all the previous periods in history. The invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons has forever changed the forces at work, shaping up a scenario where a direct conventional confrontation between atomic powers is not a viable option anymore. And, hopefully, nuclear warfare shouldn’t be one either.
Nevertheless, non-atomic military superiority remains a leading element of geopolitical power, and, even if it is somewhat an oversimplification, it is true that a big military machine is a crucial asset if a country intends to dictate the rules on the international scene.
There are no cut-and-dry methods to define how military power should be measured, but there are many proxies at our disposal, that can contribute to forming an intelligible picture of the reality.
Defense budget is probably the most widely used, followed by the composition and magnitude of the armed forces, which could be broken down even further to explore the terrestrial, naval, and air military potential.
Focusing on the first indicator for year 2013, it is remarkable that the United States come up the first in placement, allocating a whopping 640 billion dollars to their defense budget. This is even more remarkable when considering that the runner-up, namely China, comes far behind with a spending of approximately $188 billions.
Moreover, and this is a fact extremely worth noting, the American military investment alone is greater than the summation of the allocations of the ten countries coming next on the list. Those figures may fluctuate according to different sources, but the gap between the United States and anybody else remains unaffected.
Other interesting mentions are the Russian Federation, which owns the largest fleet of tanks in the world with numbers in excess of 15,000. Then there is China again, which has at its disposal the largest human force, with about 4.5 million military personnel, including the reserves. Another country to keep an eye on is the fastly growing India, which currently runs the forth largest air force with 1080 combat aircrafts, and it is expanding its defense budget.
However, there is more than meet the eye to all these facts and figures that so aseptically outline the status and proliferation of conventional military power. Especially in the case of the United States, the huge gap between their budget and that of every other country in the world, even those which are comparable or even larger in size, is the key point to understand what is really going on under the surface.
There are two main reasons that explain the Pentagon’s massive budget. For instance, the U.S. earmark massive investments for military intangible assets, such as research and development, but also in the training of personnel, either belonging to allied forces or other countries in theaters, where the U.S. are not directly involved.
Then there is the hardware component of the American war machine, whose acquisition and running costs are constantly rising, due to a trend that pushes weapon systems into getting increasingly sophisticated, with high technology being employed in almost every single piece of equipment.
The story does not end here tough. The U.S. are the only nation on the planet that can rely upon the direct control of an estimated 700 to 800 military installations on foreign soil, widely diffused around the globe, with over 300,000 personnel permanently deployed, and allegedly covering a surface of more than 800,000 acres. For comparison, this equals approximately the size of all of Samoa’s territory.
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Of course, managing so many facilities greatly contributes to inflating the bill. But, more importantly, this fact alone represents an unparalleled instrument of geopolitical power, because it allows the support of special operations virtually worldwide, and also a limited although significant capability of direct military projection before needing the cooperation of local allies.
Then combine this with the largest fleet of carriers and supercarriers on the planet, which are effectively deployable air bases whose inland operational capability is mainly limited by the aircrafts’ range.
For all these reasons the United States can rely upon a military system that is currently unmatched by any other country in the world, both for its ramified network and its economic resources, which represents an incredible advantage as a means of geopolitical pressure, or intervention.
