NationStates Jolt Archive

In order to compete in the international arena to the best of my abilities, I would like to better understand how to set up an army for protection and invasions

For actual number of troops, use a military calculator. Here is a simple one:

http://www.bananadine.co.uk/dine.php?pagetype=useful&pagefile=nationstates

OOC: that thing is crap...my nation could not support 55 million people in its army...

The numbers are waay to low on that thing. My nation has way more troops than 1 Million. Anyways, a good way to calculate your army is to take your population, then divide it by either 2%, 5%, or 7%. 5% & 7% seem to be most popular, and I've recently adopted that method.

ummm...no nation can support 7% of its people in the military, 5% is max DURING WAR TIME 1% is about what you should have when not in a war

Oh. I mentioned it because some nations say that. OK, disregard the 7% method. Only 2% or 5%.

Most nations use 5% when they are at war - this basically means calling up all reserves, maybe conscripting people, and heavily increasing recruitment...

During peace/not war, most nations use 2%-2.5% of their population.

Also about 66% of your military is going to be support/logistics troops so actual combatants is more like a little less than 1% of your population

heh, i tried that and i have soldiers 860,000 and 103,200,000 reservists.

heh, i tried that and i have soldiers 860,000 and 103,200,000 reservists.

that is because if you use conscription - technically every single citizen can be part of your military...

1-3% peace time (the higher is if your a Insane person who likes his army)

3-5% Full on war (eg in a world war or in a war you need as much of your forces as you can muster)

6-10% Milita, poor training if any. (eg your being invaded or in a world war loseing badly and need to pall in all the people you can. 6-10% is normal the people who has been given a gun told how to shoot it and thrown into combat)


thats how ive always seen it, never needed to use a military of 6-10% of my pop tho i rarely need to use more then 3-5 these days

The actual composition of your forces should be determined by the terrain of your country. I hope this helps

Defensive Armed Forces:
---Island Nation
---------Navy! (Very Important)
---------Costal Defense Force (Artillary, MBT's, support tanks, Infantry with Machene guns, Anti-Aircraft guns)
---------Air Force
---Landlocked Nation
---------Defenses similer to the Maginot Line in WWII France (but make sure it covers your ENTIRE border :rolleyes: )
---------Air Force
---------MBT's to mop up anything that gets through/around your Maginot line type defenses
---Mixed Nation
---------See Island defenses for your coast and Landlocked for your borders with other countries

Offensive Armed Forces
---Attacking a country right next to yours
---------Army (infantry, artillary, MBT's, APC's, you know, the works)
---------Air Force (To blast their static defenses from above)
---------IF and ONLY IF that nation has a shoreline, build a navy to blockade their shore. Actually, invading a country you have a land border with from the sea would probably be a good supprise tactic :)
---Attacking a country overseas
---------Same as a country right next to yours, but an Air Force is less important while a Navy is all-important.

ummm...no nation can support 7% of its people in the military, 5% is max DURING WAR TIME 1% is about what you should have when not in a war

Surely more than 7% of the population served in the millitary during WWII in the uk, or germany.

The actual composition of your forces should be determined by the terrain of your country. I hope this helps

Defensive Armed Forces:
---Island Nation
---------Navy! (Very Important)
---------Costal Defense Force (Artillary, MBT's, support tanks, Infantry with Machene guns, Anti-Aircraft guns)
---------Air Force
---Landlocked Nation
---------Defenses similer to the Maginot Line in WWII France (but make sure it covers your ENTIRE border :rolleyes: )
---------Air Force
---------MBT's to mop up anything that gets through/around your Maginot line type defenses
---Mixed Nation
---------See Island defenses for your coast and Landlocked for your borders with other countries

Offensive Armed Forces
---Attacking a country right next to yours
---------Army (infantry, artillary, MBT's, APC's, you know, the works)
---------Air Force (To blast their static defenses from above)
---------IF and ONLY IF that nation has a shoreline, build a navy to blockade their shore. Actually, invading a country you have a land border with from the sea would probably be a good supprise tactic :)
---Attacking a country overseas
---------Same as a country right next to yours, but an Air Force is less important while a Navy is all-important.
You'll need an army, land-locked or not. Your navy can't stop an invasion by itself, unless you're Sarzonia or Preatonia. (^.^)

Surely more than 7% of the population served in the millitary during WWII in the uk, or germany.

Well Russia certainly did, however... that is because they conscripted their citizens... They aren't real soldiers, but merely untrained citizens with guns... you could do this if you wanted however your nation would probably become unhappy and revolt

(Also conscripts < trained soldiers)

(Also conscripts < trained soldiers)

Depends on the numbers. In some cases, an angry mob armed with guns can be very effective.

Depends on the numbers. In some cases, an angry mob armed with guns can be very effective.

what I actually meant was

1 conscript < 1 soldier


althuogh yes an angry mob can be good for the moment - you certainly can not invade with them or fortify a position or anything like that... they are what they are - an angry mob and eventually they will disperse or die

yeh that calc said my nation had 50,000,000.
I only use 0.84% of my population for my peacetime military and even that is 21,000,000.

yeh that calc said my nation had 50,000,000.
I only use 0.84% of my population for my peacetime military and even that is 21,000,000.

not quite sure what your point is...

not quite sure what your point is...
that a 5% military too big to be operational at peacetimes. The logistics of it would be impossible to keep up with.
and also the calc is out of place.

You'll need an army, land-locked or not. Your navy can't stop an invasion by itself, unless you're Sarzonia or Preatonia. (^.^)

That's my goal, to stop an invasion with a navy. But what you say is true. You do need an Army.

PS: Thanks buying stuff from my storefront. You are the only nation to do that so far :confused:

If you have more specific questions, you'll probably get more help. Here are some 'general-purpose' sites that might help you out:
http://www.geocities.com/dominantlogistics/
http://www.angelfire.com/art/enchanter/title1.html
http://www.g2mil.com/
http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/Quarters/2116/index.htm

Re % of pop in the military:
I think the Red Army reached its peak in WWII at about 10% of the population, but a quality modern army will be a lot more expensive, so numbers like that should be used only if the alternative is such a horrible defeat that sinking your economy isn't such a horrible idea.

In a modern military, the active-duty part of the whole military should be less than ONE percent of the population; with reserves it should still be less than 3% (see here (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=297064) for more info).
Your navy can't stop an invasion by itself, unless you're Sarzonia or Preatonia.Do you have any samples of what makes their navies great? I hear a lot about them, but all I've actually seen indicates their navies aren't all that great...

Check out Portland Iorn Works. That's Sarzonia's naval storefront. His (?) ships are some of the best designed ships out there in NS. Preatonia is one of Sarzonia's contemporaries. The two of them are generally regarded as two of the best naval tacticians in the NS universe.

Where does this 5% in wartime come from? 10%, or even 12% percent can be easily reached without even stretching it too much. That's the above persentage of men in shape for military service, and if you use full power of women labout and add some ladies in your military, 15% seems to be the max.
In the days of WW's, 10% was the average but the women potential wasn't even fully used.

why not code it so it get the nations population from nation states and then lets the people agree on the percentage like a drop down list (2% - 10%) of popultaion depending on the type of conflict and era the war is taking place in...my ns battle generator will let you do that very soon.

right now the ns battle uses 2 - 2.5% of population..but it will have a drop down list by the end of the day (this is to end arguments)

link:
http://secretp.ath.cx/ns/test1.html

tg me for the pass

I use a peactime military of only 0.15% my population, which can be increased via a draft to 1% of my total population. It's conservitive, but it affords a reasonable level of defensive strength to deter any attacks. It also fits in with what Nianacio states.

Do you have any samples of what makes their navies great? I hear a lot about them, but all I've actually seen indicates their navies aren't all that great...

Just the quality of the equipment they use, the quality at which they RP, the quality of their seamen's training, the quality of the tactics used, and the sheer number of ships they can field. They might not be the biggest or most technologically advance navies around, but they're close, and the RPing skill makes up the difference.

Check your TGs, Xenose ;)

[snip]I quickly looked through their storefronts, and most what I saw didn't look particularly noteworthy (good or bad). (I haven't posted the stuff I've 'made', so they may have lots of unposted details on their ships, though.) Some of it did, but that was in a bad way. I guess their reputations come from great RPing; if there are any particular RPs of theirs that are really good, I'd be interested in reading them. I don't want to hijack this thread, but my TG box has some free space.

could you look at my ships to see if they are any good, because no one seems to be buying them :(

Where does this 5% in wartime come from? 10%, or even 12% percent can be easily reached without even stretching it too much. That's the above persentage of men in shape for military service, and if you use full power of women labout and add some ladies in your military, 15% seems to be the max.
In the days of WW's, 10% was the average but the women potential wasn't even fully used.

Just because you have the manpower doesn't mean you can support it...

Soldiers cost a lot more now than they did in the WW times. Also if you started putting in 15% of your population - your economy would collapse and you couldn't support them. You would also need the food, uniforms, and all necessities for your soldiers... its not like it is free...

Just because you have the manpower doesn't mean you can support it...

Soldiers cost a lot more now than they did in the WW times. Also if you started putting in 15% of your population - your economy would collapse and you couldn't support them. You would also need the food, uniforms, and all necessities for your soldiers... its not like it is free...
this guy has a point!

this guy has a point!

why thank you.

ummm...no nation can support 7% of its people in the military, 5% is max DURING WAR TIME 1% is about what you should have when not in a war
7% of my population is roughly 300 million. Interestingly enough, my Ministry of Defence employs over 300 million citizens in all branches in all sectors (not including manufacture). Are you calling me a godmodder?

Just because you have the manpower doesn't mean you can support it...

Soldiers cost a lot more now than they did in the WW times. Also if you started putting in 15% of your population - your economy would collapse and you couldn't support them. You would also need the food, uniforms, and all necessities for your soldiers... its not like it is free...

I'm aware of that, propably at least as well as you are. What I'm talking here is a situation of a REAL WAR. Not something like war in Iraq or any conflict of that volume. A war about life and death. If you want to run your economy like in normal conditions, produce all the luxuries and shit, then the limits are way much tigher than in the situation in which everything, all resources and all industrial and economical power of the nation is beeing used to support the military.

The reason for the fact that armies of the size/% of pop. of World Wars haven't been used ever since, is the fact that A WAR of that size has not been fought.

Economies have developed at least as fast as the expences of modern warfare.

7% of my population is roughly 35 million. Interestingly enough, my Ministry of Defence employs over 300 million citizens in all branches in all sectors (not including manufacture). Are you calling me a godmodder?
no, not if the campaign you are in agrees to this...i dont see how. but how many of those 3xx million are actually SOLDIERS? for every one soldier, there must be a ton of logistical / technical / etc forces... but its up to you and who you are attacking to agree on the rule, really.

That number also extends to peacetime. You could find approximately 80 million soldiers (reserves with helmets, coats, low-tech rifles, and a grenade or two if youre lucky), 100,000 old ex soviet bloc tanks, nearly 4,000 airplanes (<mig 29) and over 3,000 ships. Considering that it would take about 20 T64s to knock out anything in NS nowadays, I wouldn't say it would be too much of a "bad" number. The rest are saiors, logistics workers, militia, etc.

Aside from the facts about economy, soemthing like a 5%-10% rating is also not quite feasible is because that as technology develop, the money required in order to maintain an army of the same size and quality would also increase over time. Unless you choose to equip your army with obsolete equipment and give individual personnel little training, 5%-10% isn't going to do it. On the other hand, the entire size of my armed forces in terms of personnel is only about 1.47% (this is INCLUDING reserves and militia, but excluding paramilitary forces), and the active force is just below 0.7%. On the other hand, I could have my forces exhaustively trained and equipped (even for the militia), which explains why I have a rather large navy and a huge air force, with a heavily mechanized army.

You can have a massive militia (like the USA), but it probably won't be very effective (I doubt most militiamen in the USA even know there is a militia.), and you won't be able to call up much of it at once.
could you look at my ships to see if they are any good, because no one seems to be buying them :(When I'm done, do you want me to send you a telegram, or should I post in your storefront (which is this? (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=441625))?

haha, I tried that and it said that I had 286,700,000 people in my military, and 1,720,200,000 reservists lol.

yeah, thats my storefront. Im not sure whether no one sees it, or whether things are overpriced, or just horrible.

could you telegram me?

could you telegram me?Huge telegram sent...I forgot to mention ship prices. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/index.html has some info on prices buried in the various ship pages. I think GlobalSecurity.org is generally better than FAS.org, but I have Opera (http://www.opera.com/) set up to let me decide on whether to accept or deny third-party cookies, but it for some reason can't remember that I want to block some of the cookies I get at GlobalSecurity.org, and it's annoying to wait a while at each page as I remind it not to accept those cookies...

Edit: Oh, and the advice in the TG won't make the ships the best in the world, just better than they are now.

what I actually meant was

1 conscript < 1 soldier


althuogh yes an angry mob can be good for the moment - you certainly can not invade with them or fortify a position or anything like that... they are what they are - an angry mob and eventually they will disperse or die

Or calm down...

There's very few people who I imagine could invade Hogsweat anyway, my navy would pwn them >.> <.< I've only got to use my army once, which is a pity.

The point is, I don't actually care whether my army is efficient or not. You may not say that Militia are worth anything, but when I throw twenty of them to one of your soldiers your soldiers are going to lose morale. And then they'll eventually die >.>
Again, why has the amount of money needed to equip a soldier increased? IIRC there has been very little change in Combat clothing, and considering my soldier don't even wear webbing, they just have some crappy steel helmet and a rifle it costs less, one would assume.

Again, why has the amount of money needed to equip a soldier increased? IIRC there has been very little change in Combat clothing, and considering my soldier don't even wear webbing, they just have some crappy steel helmet and a rifle it costs less, one would assume.New technology and training are expensive. If your army is just a bunch of untrained guys on foot running around in privately purchased jeans and t-shirts with second-hand rifles and helmets, yeah, it'll be relatively cheap, but it'll get slaughtered.

There are several reasons why maintaining a modern military does require a lot more expenses than the older times (and even though efficiency and the ability to get the objective taken/accomplished/etc. can vary, it's also the defining characteristic of a modern military and its competence in general - history has taught us this, even though the actual success may vary, depending on a series of factors), even considering the advances in technology and the fact that manufacturing processes has improved over the times. The first thing one needs to consider is the manufacturing of the weapons themselves. You aren't going to have a F/A-22 manufactured for $40 million dollars, and likewise, the procurement of an equal number of weapons of equal quality (for the respective time period) will cost a lot due to the fact that modern weapons possesses a lot more components that involves modern technology and advanced manufacturing processes.

Secondly, one also need to consider the gear - a protective, fragment-resistant helmet /will/ be much more expensive than something like a steel helmet while body armour will add a lot more expenses to that as well, while other things such as new BDUs with advanced camouflage schemes will be more expensive to manufacture. Ammunitions and munitions are also the same, as crude rockets will be much more easy to manufacture than advanced missiles.

Thirdly, it also matters in that modern militaries has a more developed and complex structure in its organization due to the availability of new technology and transformation in how wars are fought - thus more money has to be spent in keeping up with the time.

Finally, training is also important - and this is far beyond basic training. As technologies gets more advanced and as warfare becomes more complex, you'll need proper trained men - not only the enlisted infantry, but all enlisted and officers. Sure, you can have a hugely incompetent officer corps with a conscript enlisted base, but the contrast between that and a properly recruited and trained army is huge. You also have to worry about money dedicated to recruitment, unless you have a conscript army, in which it will be a lot more different (/not/ necessarily in a good way).

This also leads to a similar factor that as you increase your military, there will be fewer chances to actually "filter out" those who applied for enlistment or a commission, but are simple unfit (physically, psychologically, and/or academically) for service. Thus you will be forced to take in most of the applicants (if you have a huge army and voluntary service - again, conscription is a completely different matter and will mean that you will take them all in), instead of being rather selective, and generally degrade the quality of personnel of your military in general.

Secondly, one also need to consider the gear - a protective, fragment-resistant helmet /will/ be much more expensive than something like a steel helmet while body armour will add a lot more expenses to that as well, while other things such as new BDUs with advanced camouflage schemes will be more expensive to manufacture.


Yes, but when has this ever come into use in an actually NS war ? The average NS'er never takes that into consideration.

IE:
Dude 1:My guys have US-type helmets
Dude 2: No way, with all you other stuff combined, those are too expensive !
Dude 1: What is wrong with you ?

Err... You should take it into consideration. Again, this is free-form, but I doubt that one will ever take another seriously if the latter implys that his 100 million army are equipped lavishly and are so fanatical that they are willing to commit suicide by charging in waves at machine guns.

Err... You should take it into consideration. Again, this is free-form, but I doubt that one will ever take another seriously if the latter implys that his 100 million army are equipped lavishly and are so fanatical that they are willing to commit suicide by charging in waves at machine guns.


Omz,
I meant that when does an argument occur over what kind of helmet the enemy has in relation to cost ? I can understand arguing over armament, but what type of boots the enemy has ?

My point is that for others, the decision to follow the suggestions is theirs, even though it would certainly help if they do. Though I don't recall any instances where I said that the type of boots also matters, gear and munitions are still very important factors that must be considered. Not surprisingly, the equipment which a soldier has is a part of it, and thus it is significant. Much more expense is spent per soldier if you equip him or her with the latest gears and personal weapons, than giving them a generic steel pot helmet and tell them to put on civilian clothes and grab an AK-47 that had been in storage for 20 years. The matter of fact is, it does matter as a cruical part of the central idea. If you don't plan to follow it, I thank you for providing this knowledge and fact, but it's all up to the player with associated consequences - and since the thread is about creating an army, why shouldn't I mention it?

If it is really pointless, then I wouldn't have posted from the start.

My point is that for others, the decision to follow the suggestions is theirs, even though it would certainly help if they do. Though I don't recall any instances where I said that the type of boots also matters, gear and munitions are still very important factors that must be considered. Not surprisingly, the equipment which a soldier has is a part of it, and thus it is significant. Much more expense is spent per soldier if you equip him or her with the latest gears and personal weapons, than giving them a generic steel pot helmet and tell them to put on civilian clothes and grab an AK-47 that had been in storage for 20 years. The matter of fact is, it does matter as a cruical part of the central idea. If you don't plan to follow it, I thank you for providing this knowledge and fact, but it's all up to the player with associated consequences - and since the thread is about creating an army, why shouldn't I mention it?


I never said you souldn't, agh nevermind, you out argumented me :D

Again though, it all depends on the player. But since there's a chance for providing advise and ideas, I gave it. In all honesty, I couldn't care less if some random nation doesn't follow it, but it'd be definately an improvement if one does. You did make a point however, but then again, not every NS nation is lacking a military purely based on numbers either.