Murphy's Law: What Is Real On The Battlefield

[Valin]

StrategyPage

June 5 2022

The failure of the Russian military in Ukraine during 2022 came as a surprise of many who accepted official (government intel agency) assessments of military power. This is not a new problem and comes from the difficulty in determining military capabilities during peacetime.

In peacetime it is difficult to determine whose armed forces are superior because realistic assessments often contradict government claims. There is a demand for independent rankings and the most popular measure is counting manpower, weapons, economic and logistical capabilities plus geography, natural resources and economic strength. Left out are nuclear weapons which have led nations with nuclear weapons to avoid conflict with other countries that also had nukes. This has led to what is known as the “nuclear peace” that has produced a record number of years without a war between major (nuclear armed) powers.

Some key factors are avoided in peacetime analysis and these usually include critical qualities like training and leadership. One of the more comprehensive conventional analyses is provided by the annual GFI (Global Firepower Index). The rankings seem to be accurate until you take into account actual performance of different nations. For example, GFI ranks Israel 20th behind other Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia (17th), Iran (14th), Egypt (13th) and Turkey (11th). Before the 2011 rebellion, and continuing civil war, Syria was considered to rank somewhere between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iraq, before its quality flaws were exposed in the 1991 and 2003 wars, was also ranked higher than Syria. Yet military historians and senior officers in many nations note that you cannot ignore historical performance that is usually described as the quality factor or quality multiplier. Not just in weapons and other aspects of military power that could be counted and compared. The quality multiplier is often a percentage decrease to a more conventional analysis like GFI. The firm producing the GFI admits this and stresses that its data, and rankings, depend on unclassified data of what each country possesses.

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