NationStates Jolt Archive

Any answers I get here will help me increase/decrease my numbers based on how my nation changes.

But, how many troops can I afford? Here's my stats [relating to defense and money]:

Economic Rating: Very Strong
Major Industry: Uranium Mining
Total Population: 799,000,000 (hurry up and get to 800 million already!)
Income Tax Rate: 55%
Defense: I$1,346,183,153,754.07 19%
Exchange Rate: I$1.3226 = $1
Gross Domestic Product: I$12,301,525,893,442.50
GDP Per Capita: I$15,396.15
Unemployment Rate: 12.42% [I can use this to force some unemployed people into the military]

Thanks!

Any answers I get here will help me increase/decrease my numbers based on how my nation changes.

But, how many troops can I afford? Here's my stats [relating to defense and money]:

Economic Rating: Very Strong
Major Industry: Uranium Mining
Total Population: 799,000,000 (hurry up and get to 800 million already!)
Income Tax Rate: 55%
Defense: I$1,346,183,153,754.07 19%
Exchange Rate: I$1.3226 = $1
Gross Domestic Product: I$12,301,525,893,442.50
GDP Per Capita: I$15,396.15
Unemployment Rate: 12.42% [I can use this to force some unemployed people into the military]

Thanks!


Your military budget is roughly three times greater than that of the modern day United States (not including operational costs). If you want your military to be similar to the US in quality, you could just look at what they have and multiply it times three.

You seem to wage war a lot, which eats up a lot of money. If you expect that trend to continue, I suggest doubling what the US has, and allocating the rest to operational expenses.

Of course you can always sacrifice quality for quantity.

Hmm.. ok thanks.

That would mean my troop numbers would be 5,371,426 (for now) and then I could have better defense systems in my nation.

Please keep in mind the concept of diminishing returns. The more soldiers you have, the more support they require, the more training facilities (and associated support) you need, the more refresher training (and associated support) you need, so on and so forth.

To say nothing of the difficulty of transporting all those soldiers. There comes a point where enough is enough, and throwing around more meat and steel won't make a difference.

Considering that your GDP per capita is only about the equivalent of $20,360 USD, or around half that of the USA and many developed countries in the real world, your economy is quite weak (despite the "Very Strong" label); or about the equivalent of a country such as, for instance, Egypt or Thailand. (Not sure on the numbers here.) Thus, to have soldiers with reasonably good equipment, you wouldn't be able to have that many of them without drawing money from the already scarce amount of goods and services your nation provides, making your people very upset and probably causing them to rebel, or at least leave and not come back for a very long time.

In addition, you spend a little more than 10% of your total GDP on the military, which leaves a total of only around $14.5 trillion for you to spend on the goods and services, such as housing, foodstuffs, water, electricity, and so on, that your citizens will need to live. In other words, that automatically gives you a GDP per capita of around $18,230 that each citizen can actually use, with $2,130 per citizen redirected into the military.

Czardaian economists would recommend decreasing your taxes and restrictions on business, perhaps to such a degree as that of the Crown Commonwealth of Praetonia (http://nstracker.retrogade.com/index.php?nation=praetonia), which has a consequent GDP per capita of $94,813.70 USD, making it one of the most prosperous nations in the world; this would also lower the per-citizen amount expended on the military, creating more opportunities for citizens to take jobs in manufacturing or logistics or other industries related to the maintenance of a formidable military force.

At the current Icovirian situation, while you may have an absurdly large military, most of your citizens are living in poverty, and do not have the necessary skills through education to know how to manufacture the appropriate weapons or systems to equip those soldiers; in addition, with your planned model of 5.3 million soldiers, that would require a total of approximately 47.7 million military personnel, with the standard 8:1 logistics to field ratio. This is approximately six per cent of the total population of Icovir, and perhaps twelve per cent of its total workforce; in this is revealed the reson for such a poor economy, due to the dearth of adequate numbers of workers to supply it, as so many are being sent to the military in this model.

Even the Czardaian Armed Forces, which utilise almost six million combat personnel, and thus a total of fifty-three million, cannot all be deployed at one time without grievous effects upon the economy, although this number is estimated at under 1.5% of the total population.

No. Developing countries usually have a GDP of under $10,000. 18,000 is fine, many European countries have a GDP per capita about that high.

Praetonia's GPD/capita is actually 47,000 USD, not 94,000. That would be more than two times the highest RL GDP/Capita, and completely unrealistic.
Also, the yabble about how his people doesn't know how to build weapons is completely BS. His people are making almost as much money than those of RL Israel. That's far from inadequate to create a large and relatively well armed army. 6% of population in the armed forces is by no means impossible. It is really expencive to have such a force in arms all the time, but it is possible.