First off, I've changed the title of this thread to something a little more credible. As well, I've moved this to the General Discussion forum, as it deals with more then just "Foreign Militaries".
Again, the spectra of viewpoints on this thread leave so much to be looked at when trying to figure out a "best" military. A few thoughts:
We say military, but I think it is important to make the distinction between Army, Navy, and Airforce. The elements of Air and Naval combat are so fundamentally different then that of Land Warfare that to measure capability without looking at each Element individiually will only confuse things. I am assuming, and for the rest of this post, that we are focussing, in an attempt at
Comparative Force Structures, on the Land Forces of various states.
Now, the variety of factors in determining the capability to fight and win wars on land are varied and large in number - how does one go about gaging and correlating all these factors? Right now I am reading a facinating book by US Army War College professor Steven Biddle titled
Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. The depth of this book is amazing - Biddle forms a mathmatical equation with a vast range of variables and uses it to test case studies. His in-depth case studies are the 1918 St Michael Offensive (where the defenders should have won but didn't), Operation Goodwood in 1944 (where the attackers should have won but didn't), and the 1991 Gulf War (in which attacker heavy casulties were predicited but never failed to materialize). He finds that these case studies, along with numerous other small studies, are consistently validated by the formula he derives in his book.
"Today, most analyses are either rigorous but narrow, or broad but unrigerous. Mathmatical models of combat, for example, are rigorous but typically focus on material alone: how many troops or weapons do the two sides have, and how good is their equipment? By contrast, holistic assessments consider issues such as strategy, tactcs, morale, combat motivation, or leadership as well as just material but treat these variables much less systematically. Real progress demands rigor and breadth: a systematic treatment of both material and nonmaterial variables, backed up with a combination of empirical evidence and careful deductive reasoning. Nelow I advance such an analysis for one key nonmaterial variable: force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which armies use their material in the field.
I hold that a particular pattern of force employment - the modern system - has been pivotal in the twentieth century and is likely to remain so. I argue that since at least 1900, the dominant technological fact of the modern battlefield has been increasing lethality. Even by 1914, firepower had vecome so lethal that exposed mass movement in the open had become suicidal. Subseqent technological change has only increased the range over which exposure can be fatal. To perform meaningful military missions in the face of this storm of steel requires armies to reduce their exposure, and since 1918 the central means of doing so has been modern system force employment.
The modern system is a tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level, and depth, reserves and differential concentration at the operational level of war. Taken togther, these techniques sharply reduce vulnerablility to even twenty-first century weapons and sensors. Where fully implemented, the modern system damps the effects of technological change and insulates its users from the full lethality of their opponents' weapons."
Steven Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle pp 2-3
Biddle's model (from what I've read so far) seems very convincing. Michael Dorosh said earlier that initial German victories in WWII were not do to any new and magical method for fighting war (they essentially used
Modern System Force Employment that they mastered, with
Stosstruppen tactics, in the trenches or WWI), but rather their opponents were worse (and by extention the Germans were better) at properly using the Modern System. He is quite right.
How did the German's lose then, if they were better at winning battles? They lost their monopoly on that ability, plain and simple. In the Soviet Union, misjudgments on will and resistence led to the Soviets to survive long enough to get a measure of what the Germans were doing and to bring back some of their military brillence that had been smothered in the Officer Purge of the late 1930's. By at least 1943 and for sure by 1944 the Soviets possessed an unmatched capability to conduct operational level battle successfully - most of the histories I've read seem to agree on this. Indeed, the idea of the "operational" level of war, along with corresponding principles such as "deep battle" come from Soviet theory. Thus, the Soviets were able to beat the Germans at their own game. This was combined with Stalin's ruthless ability at the Strategic and Grand Strategic levels.
On the Western Front, the story was a little different - most histories are also apt to point out that the Western Allies never possessed commanders who possess the operational abilities that a Zhukov or a Konev, a Manstein or a Guderian possessed (a view I agree with, there are individual examples, like Patton, but systemically, the lack of operational excellence was clear). Victory was acheived the Allies succeeded by strategically rendering German operational excellence irrelevent. No amount of operational slyness by Erwin Rommel in North Africa would get over the strategic fact that the British controlled Malta (thus preventing German resupply) and Gibralter and the Suez (ensuring British resupply) with the Americans and Torch evetually turning the Theatre into a two-front disaster. Quite frankly, the Western Allies where able to "out-strategize" the Germans and, by 1944, rip into what amounted to a huge geo-political flank (never more then 25% of the German Army was deployed to the Western Front after 1941).
Anyways, moving along....
Interestingly enough, Biddle argues (and I agree) that for now, RMA theory is bunk - technological advances still fight within the same paradigm of Modern System Force Employment that has been dominant since 1918 and thus cannot be "Revolutionary". He argues that, in effortto achieve a "Revolution" in the way that modern forces fight, a technology would have to eliminate the ability of armies to use terrain at all levels of war for cover and concealment (thus turning it into something akin to Naval or Air battle). Until then, no amount of firepower, mobility, or information technology can completely decimate an opponent (an arguement Biddle backs with numerous documented examples).
As well, Biddle constricts his own level of analysis to the
operational level of war (and thus, by extention, the tactical). It is something that we would do well to heed on this thread as well. An example of where different spectrums of analyisis with regards to "level of conflict" yield differences in results of "good or bad" can be found by looking at the Germans on the Eastern Front in 1941:
Tactical Level: The German tactical art was unsurpassed - their combined arms intergration was superb, and their leadership was relatively intact and experienced by short and dramatic victories in the West.
Operational Level: Again, the Germans where at the height of capability at this level - their well trained and well led formations where capable of fluid and fast war against a lumbering Soviet machine, ensaring them in Kessels for Battles of Annihilation which brought operational victories on a scale unheard of in the history of war.
Strategic Level: The Germans where strategically mishandled by spreading their effort along three seperate axes. By spreading their efforts out on three strategic fronts in the Soviet Union, they failed to drive on a "center of gravity" and showed a gross unappreciation for the strategic depth of manpower and resources that the Soviet Union possessed. As well, ideologically, the German attitude to their conquered areas pissed away any strategic advantage of support in Russia - they treated the people no better then Stalin and thus found little in terms of allies in the vast Steppe of Russia.
Grand Strategic Level: The Germans showed their usual bumbling here, letting an ideological twit drive them into a two-front war. They were forced to divide resources, manpower, and energy in an effort to fight off the three remaining superpowers of the world.
You could take this "snapshot" of anaylisis to other conflicts as well - the US in Vietnam would be just as disparate. As you can see, each level has its own unique appreciation of "capability" and its own variables on what can determine capability.
Finally, when looking at "Military Force Capabilities", I think that an important distinctions must be made between:
1) "conventional" conflicts, which are mostly fought on "Physical" (manpower, equipment) and "Mental" (morale, cohesion) levels of war
2) "unconventional" conflicts which move the fight to the "Moral" level of conflict, which deals with ideas such as national will, perceptions of victory, and strength of cause.
Biddle makes this distinction in his book, stating that his analysis is focused on high to mid intensity conflicts that focus around territory as the "center of gravity" - essentially discounting Thermonuclear War (which focuses on destruction) and irregular conflicts (in which territory is largely irrelevent).
I think this is an imporatant distinction to make, one that USMC Col Thomas Hammes, in his book
The Sling and the Stone makes by pointing to a different form of fighting, a "4th Generation" model, which renders many of the variables which Biddle uses irrelevent. Looking at a distinction between "Physical", "Mental", and "Moral" levels of conflict can help to explain why the situation in Iraq that the Americans and British face managed to change when the war went from
Invasion to
Occupation and the opponent changed from
Republican Guardsman to
Insurgent and
Jihadist. I believe that tactically, the Coalition Forces are still as proficent as ever and the Iraqis are as poor as ever (some sources tell me that Iraqis are tactically unsound and the real threat is Chechen or Afghan Jihadis, who are quite capable, coming to Iraq to fight and lead), but in a "4th Generation" conflict, tactical success isn't always important and can sometimes translate into strategic failure.
Ironically, Col Hammes states in his intro that he was able to develop alot of his thoughts while on exchange to the Canadian War College. He felt that the Canadian War College, which was heavily oriented towards politics as opposed to pure military topics (which the US counterpart is), was a much better environment to analyse and expound upon the realm of politics, so vital in "4th Generation" warfare, that is beyond strictly military levels of analysis. I think this is important in that, if one is to do "comparative" studies of military capabilities, political aspects must be brought into play.
Anyways, as you can see, if you want to approach the topic seriously, without relying on juvenile cheerleading, there is a vast array of variables and levels that one must look at when comparing military capability.
Cheers,
Infanteer
