NationStates Jolt Archive

My nation has a population of 2.745 Billion and I was wondering what a good size for my military should be.Anyone over the age of 16 can join,however combat duties are only open for men.I need to know some rough details.

How many men for each service
How many tanks?
How many fixed wing aircraft?
How many ships?

Your help would be appreciated.

Depends largely on the size of your defence budget... and how large you want your military.

It really depends. Keep in mind that having more than about 8-10% in military-related professions (i.e. logistics, production, as well as combat) can be harmful to your economy, and I believe the following logistics ratios are standard:

5-8:1 army
6-10:1 naval
Anything from 15:1 to 80:1 air force, depending on how good you want it to be.

Personally, I have a population of around 4 billion, of which about 40 million total are in all military-related professions (or around 1%), and about 4-5 million of these are actual combat personnel. With a defence budget calculated to be the sane maximum of my RPd GDP, around 8-10% -- or $17 trillion -- this means all of my troops are very highly trained and with good equipment. I could conceivably support 40 million, but they would have poor equipment and training and the like, given that Czardas is a liberal democracy as opposed to a nation with a war-based economy.

I have a puppet with the latter type of economy, which will literally collapse if the nation is not at war; it has 72 million enlisted with about average equipment, although they are trained and conditioned from birth to fight, so it's really the only thing they know how to do and thus they are quite good at it.

It's really your choice as to what type of country you'd like to have.

As for numbers of tanks, ships, fixed wing aircraft, etc. -- take the total number of personnel you have for those crews and the like, and the total number of logistical personnel; factor in numbers:

Tank crews are about 4 people; maintenance and logistics can require 20 or more.
Fixed-wing fighters have 1-2 pilots and 20+ logistics.
Ships have anywhere from 200 to 20,000 large complements, and require even more to build, push into the water, clean, paint, etc.

If you want to go down the pure "affordability" route as opposed to numbers then you have to use your Defence budget as a starting point.

According to the NS tracker your defence budget is $5.7trillion (http://nstracker.retrogade.com/index.php?nation=Frenzia).

How you break this down is entirely upto but based on a quick scan of Rl expenditures i like the following ratios:
Maintance and operational costs: 25%, Personnel costs: 25%, Procurement: 20%, research: 20% and finally construction/nuclear capability: 10%

Obviously you can vary these numbers, the 25% Maintance and operational costs figure is based on RL western nations who generally have some kind of ongoing active combat commitment and the research and procurement percentages will vary constantly as you equip with and develope new equipment. The Personnel costs are likely to be the msot stable of the fractions.

Now that you have an idea of a Personnel budget (in this case $1,425billion) we cna start looking at numbers and costs. As a rule there are generally a number of rough areas of "per head" costs, i.e. for really well trained, well paid, superbly equipped troops (i.e. everything is better than the RL US military) you can be looking at an anual per head cost in the region of $100,000 or more, for roughly US equivelent perhaps 70,000-80,000, for fairly avaerage about 50,000-60,000 and for low cost cannon fodder we could be talking $20,000 or less

From your budget you could likely afford about 14.25 million top grade personnel with the other numbers being quite a bit higher.


Now that you have a total number then you cna look at splitting it down into services which will of course depend on what services you have, what sort of country you occupy and what sort of military stance you desire (i.e. purely defencive, almsot entirely focused on expeditionary warfare or somewhere in the middle), as an example the US has about 35% of its troops in the army, 25% in the navy, 25% in the airforce, 12% in the marines and 3% in the coast gaurd (i would note here that the marines could be assigned to either the army or the navy for simplicty and depending on your nation then the coastgaurd could be a direct part of the navy).
As an obvious example of how national geography woulda ffect your percentages we coudl assume you are land lock in which case a navy is a little bit pointless.

I will stop here as once you get past the macro level sevice numbers thigns get a lot more confusing but if you wish i cna delve into the darker depths.

OK well I decided that 14 million men was good.I then split the 14 million men into services,But what I'm stuck on is how to organize my army.How many ground vehicles and artillery can I afford,by the amount of men I have,I could have hundreds of thousands of ground vehicles but each vehicle would cost so much per year for maintenece and fuel,so what I'm wondering is how many vehicles and artillery can my nation support?

I believe you should just buy out nations like me. It saves money.

For land forces the easiest measure si to break things down into divsional or brigade level force groups.

Based on the US army (you might npotice i use US numbers as a basis for my estiamtions ona fairly regular basis, i do this for no reason other than the numbers are readily availble) about 40-50% of your soldiers should be assigned directly to Combat formations with the others making up logisitcs and support formations.

As to the actual formations used i find divsiosn easier to work with for size reasons. In Rl a western Division consists of approximately 15,000-20,000men depending on its type so for ease we could assume each divsion has 20,000men.

Thus from your 14million we assign 35% to the army for 4.9million soldiers, take 40% of that for front line troops numbering 1.96million which would allow about 98 divsions.

If we were to average out the numbers of tank deployed by the various types of divsion i would put the esitmate at about 100tanks per divsion so you woudl require 9800 tanks at least and working from an average price of $5million per tank these beasts would cost $49billion to aquire and about $4-5billion per year to maintain out of a roughly esitmated $500billion army maintaince/operational budget.
For artillery be it self propelled or towed guns or rocket systems i would make a rough esimate of 200 per divsion for a total of at an average price of $3million each for a procurement price of say $60billion and an annual cost of $6billion

The above are very rough esitmates and examples but hopely they make a rough indication of where should be looking.