A cool guide to the world’s largest armies in 2024

Now cross reference that with military spending...

USA: 👀
Personnel is much more apples to apples. Comparing spending between two nations muddies the waters.

I assume you're commenting on US spending, but consider that other countries don't have to pay US wages and benefits to it's soldiers, contractors, and manufacturers. If we could buy our weapons from India, recruit our soldiers from China, and build ships in S.Korea our defense budget would be much smaller without having to ration a single fighterjet.

Did you know that we spend almost 4X as much on social programs than we do on the military today?
- What's stopping the USA from building (some) ships in South Korea? Many navies all over the world use foreign designs or foreign builders.

This feels wrong. And doing by personnel is also a shit metric.

I thought it was interesting. Strange to see some ofnyge much larger armies like Vietnam and Koreas.

Both Japans and the USA were larger than I expected.

I don't think anyone will be confused to think this metric is the most important for the might or usefulness of the force.
- I think there are lots of people who will confuse this for the might of a force u can see this exact thing in this comment chain.
Doing by personel is another way of stating we got more men than you got bullets
- You know how much Hess countries spend on defense? The US could buy enough bullets to kill everyone in the world 10 times over and miss 50% of the time.
- That's why artillery was invented.
How is it a shit metric? They said the largest army. What do you think an army is? It's soldiers, it's people. The graphic wasn't what's the largest Arsenal or the largest navy or the largest Air Force Etc..
- Now, this is based on slightly outdated statistics but let's roll with it for a second.
  
  Vietnam's Reserve, according to this chart, is 5M give or take.
  
  Vietnam's 2018 Defense Budget was 5.5B USD, give or take.
  
  If somehow we spent that entire budget on the Reserve, we would end up with an expenditure of $1,100USD per Reserve Soldier.
  
  Counting Uniforms, Food, Weapons, and Ammunition for training, how much quality training do you think you can accomplish for $1,100USD per Soldier per year? Even taking into account currency conversion, $2.3M VND per month isn't a lot when you're talking military budgets. At that point, we should just count draft card holders as "Reserves" for the US.
- An army is a tool for accomplishing goals in defence from and enactment of violence on actors of significant capability. Personnel are just one of the few raw resources said tool consumes. Conveniently said personnel can be used in place of other resources in this calculus but usually at significant inefficiencies. This can even mean that militaries with inflated personnel may even indicate that said military is lacking in other critical areas which must be plugged with disposable personel ie look at the Russian military and its meat wave attacks.
- You can't use numbers of people to make comparisons between countries because they are misleading. Some countries use their soldiers for construction work (China) or have whole industries owned by the military (Iran). A person working on a defense industry assembly line isn't a member of the military in most countries.
  
  The Islamic Revolutionary Guards were put in charge of creating what is today known as the Iranian military industry. Under their command, Iran's military industry was enormously expanded
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed_Forces
  
  Using numbers of personnel to compare China or Iran to a country like Belgium would make Belgium look like a pushover. Belgium has a tiny military but uses it's location in Europe to ensure security through diplomacy and membership in NATO.
  
  I promise you would be harder to invade the headquarters of NATO than either of those countries.

Given that Service is mandatory in China, that number seems kind of low.

Its VERY low, China has mandatory service, however due to high number of volunteers, the mandatory service is not enforced.

I think we need to update the Russian numbers. If they're not defecting, they're going into a meat grinder....

Imagine if all those resources were put into something more productive and progressive?