NationStates Jolt Archive

I've come up with some numbers for Kesshite's military and wanted to know if they're realistic. Kesshite has a medieval/renaissance tech level and is covered with a large amount of wilderness.

Current Population: 16,000,000
Active National Military: 160,000 (1%)
Active City Militia: 64,000 (0.4%)
Reserve Military: 80,000 (0.5%)
Total: 304,000

GPD: $114,010,190,855.00
Troop Budget: $11,401,019,085.50 (10%)
Budget per Soldier: 37,503.35

I used this (http://nseconomy.thirdgeek.com/nseconomy.php?nation=Kesshite) calculator for my defense numbers.

My problem is that these numbers are based on a certain division of labor that seems to favor the modern world. Kesshite has no 'police force' but the militia acts to both guard a city from invasion and as peacekeepers. Likewise, the military protects national boarders, patrols internal trade routes, bodyguards the nobility, and in the case of "officers" are the nobility.

In addition, though they aren't part of the government military, hunters in many tribal groups would attack those they perceive as being enemies. Those hunters would be any man of fighting age. Admittedly, we're talking people with no armor who fight with bows and spears.

What I want to do is reflect this information without seeming to say that 15% or more of my population is in my military.

One more thing, I have a defence budget of 23% right now and have allocated 10% of that to soldier training, equiping, administration. Is that correct?

((Because I only get to use it in this forum: :sniper: ))

If you are operating at a medieval/ren-tech level and wish to go for a level of pseudo-realism, then I would suggest that the Reserves be anywhere from 10-20%, active military be around .05% and town guard be arounnd .5%

I suggest this, because in large part, decent weapons were quite expensive at the time meaning the majority of an army was composed of peasent militia, who were conscripted in times of war, armed with spears or bows. They could train a decent spear/bow man in something like a couple weeks, but to train someone to use an arquebus or sword would take much longer not to mention they would cost many hundreds of dollars(in relative comparison) more.

Also mercenaries tended to play a fairly large part in armies at the time for the simple fact that they were much cheaper than equipping, training, paying and providing for members of a standing army.

Yeah! Someone answered my thread!

Thank you, I'll redo the numbers and add that type of description. :)