A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO DETERMINING FORCE SIZE AND BUDGET ALLOCATIONS
Hello there!
In this brief introduction, I'd like to point out what this guide is, and what it is not. This guide is meant for new to even experienced players as a guide and measure on how to develop a sizeable, efficient, and combat-ready military force to defend your nation. It is not, however, an end-all-be-all and it is not meant to help you develop unit sizes or organizational structure or equipment. The overall goal of this guide is to provide you, the reader, with a better understanding of how military's around the world allocate their funds to different areas of their defense, and how to translate these numbers to your own uses. I highly recommend reading the How to Build Your Military guide, as it covers strategic-level and organizational concepts that will not be discussed here.
I will preface this guide by saying that the majority of the calculations are being done based on United States Department of Defense figures, and you should examine them accordingly. There are many resources out there for those that want to budget like Russia, and spend like Russia or smaller States, but that will not be the focus of this guide for the sake of scope and depth. I will try my best to provide all of the resources I've used to run these numbers as accurately as I can determine them, and am more than happy for feedback and criticism.
For the record, I am a N&I RP Mentor, and you should feel free to TG me, or one of the other N&I mentors listed here. Helpful tip: use this online percentage calculator to save yourself a lot of time and frustration.
Let's get started!
Determining Overall Force Size
The first thing to determine when developing your military is to decide how big that military is. Typical conventions around NationStates say that, if you want to have a modern, capable fighting force, you should restrict your military to anywhere between 1%-2% of your national population. However, the U.S military, as of Fiscal Year 2017, had an active (that is, full-time soldiers) force of 1,301,300 and a reserve (that is, part-time soldiers) contingent of 811,000,[1] which makes the total size of the United States military (excluding contractors) 2,112,300 personnel. This means that the United States military comprises only 0.65% of the national population of 324,118,787 people.
In contrast, the Russian Federation has 1,000,000 active personnel and 2,000,000 reserve personnel[2] (this number varies in exact personnel but doesn't differ significantly from this base estimate). This means that Russia, a nation with an estimated population of 144,192,450 as of 2016, has 2.08% of its national population involved in service in the military. Their budget, significantly, was only $65.6 billion in the last year. Now, this is not to say that the Russian military doesn't have formidable equipment or is totally antiquated. It does mean, however, that they're still modernizing a large portion of their armed forces and it will take time to get those systems ready for combat against modernized armies.
So the main question you have to ask yourself is this: how large do I want my military to be? Other questions may be: what do I need my military to do? Do I need to project power? Do I want to use my military offensively or defensively?
A simple calculation to determine the size of your military is as follows: (y)% x national population = z, where y = % of population in the military and z = number of people in the military.
For example, Aquitayne is a nation of 196,687,168 people, with a military size of 1,022,072 personnel. This means that 0.519% of the population is in the military. If we were to do this in reverse, it would look like this:
The next thing we'll be determining is your defense budget, which may influence the number you just calculated - so be ready to make changes!
In contrast, the Russian Federation has 1,000,000 active personnel and 2,000,000 reserve personnel[2] (this number varies in exact personnel but doesn't differ significantly from this base estimate). This means that Russia, a nation with an estimated population of 144,192,450 as of 2016, has 2.08% of its national population involved in service in the military. Their budget, significantly, was only $65.6 billion in the last year. Now, this is not to say that the Russian military doesn't have formidable equipment or is totally antiquated. It does mean, however, that they're still modernizing a large portion of their armed forces and it will take time to get those systems ready for combat against modernized armies.
So the main question you have to ask yourself is this: how large do I want my military to be? Other questions may be: what do I need my military to do? Do I need to project power? Do I want to use my military offensively or defensively?
A simple calculation to determine the size of your military is as follows: (y)% x national population = z, where y = % of population in the military and z = number of people in the military.
For example, Aquitayne is a nation of 196,687,168 people, with a military size of 1,022,072 personnel. This means that 0.519% of the population is in the military. If we were to do this in reverse, it would look like this:
0.519% x 196,687,168 = 1,022,072
The next thing we'll be determining is your defense budget, which may influence the number you just calculated - so be ready to make changes!
Determining Defense Spending
Defense spending is a critical aspect to any nation's national defense. It is the final number on which your country has the ability to defend itself, ready itself for war, and provide the nation with the security its government and people demand. Defense spending is not only a measure of military strength and might, it is likewise a measure of national ability to allocate funds to its own defense. There are a multitude of factors that go into determining a defense budget, but for the purposes of this guide we'll be sticking to one relatively simple metric: GDP.
Another long-standing NationStates convention is that a nation should spend around 2% of its overall GDP on its national defense. This measure allows the country to allocate adequate funds to its military while permitting it the flexibility of putting funds into other areas of society and funding social programs (depending on your type of government ideologies). As an example, the United States spent 3.3% of its GDP on defense this year, which is equal to $597 billion dollars. Russia spent 5.4% of its GDP on national defense this year and their budget was $65.6 billion. As you can see, the economic health of a nation drives its allocations for spending - not only in defense.
This is where you need to take a good hard look at your nation and decide what kind of economy it has, how valuable its currency is in relation to the NSD (USD), and determine how much of that money your government and people are going to consider acceptable to provide an adequate defense of the nation. GDP is calculated in a variety of different ways, and is pretty complex, so if you don't know what your GDP is, base it off of a real-life nation on this list of nations by GDP (PPP). My recommendation for finding a nation to base it on is similar industrial outputs, population, culture or geographic make-up, and some other simple determining factors. Don't base your GDP off of the United States if you don't have the economy and population of the United States. Same goes for China.
So, got a GDP set? Great. Now, decide how much of that GDP you want to allocate to your armed forces. As I said earlier, the U.S spends 3.3% of its GDP on national defense, which is equal to $284,285 per soldier in the military compared to Russias 5.4% GDP at $21,866 dollars per soldier (this is simply budget divided by personnel). As you can see, even though Russia spends 2.1% more of its GDP on national defense than the United States, this does not equal a greater investment of funds. I recommend you set your percentage of GDP anywhere from 1% to 4% of your GDP, depending on the purchasing power of your currency. If its not a very healthy currency, you may need to allocate more of your GDP to make up the difference as Russia does.
For example: Aquitayne has an overall GDP of $7.682 Trillion, and allocates 2.15% of its GDP to national defense, which equals $165.4 billion every year. The formula used was:
Now, with the size of your military and the budget it works with determined, we can begin to delve into the more nitty-gritty aspects of allocating funds to the different areas your military needs money. I will make a not here, however, that it is up to you to decide how to best divide your overall military into active and reserve soldiers, and further into each branch of service. Only you can really decide these numbers, but I highly suggest looking at your strategic goals in doing so (i.e do you need a bigger navy or army? Better ships or tanks? etc).
Another long-standing NationStates convention is that a nation should spend around 2% of its overall GDP on its national defense. This measure allows the country to allocate adequate funds to its military while permitting it the flexibility of putting funds into other areas of society and funding social programs (depending on your type of government ideologies). As an example, the United States spent 3.3% of its GDP on defense this year, which is equal to $597 billion dollars. Russia spent 5.4% of its GDP on national defense this year and their budget was $65.6 billion. As you can see, the economic health of a nation drives its allocations for spending - not only in defense.
This is where you need to take a good hard look at your nation and decide what kind of economy it has, how valuable its currency is in relation to the NSD (USD), and determine how much of that money your government and people are going to consider acceptable to provide an adequate defense of the nation. GDP is calculated in a variety of different ways, and is pretty complex, so if you don't know what your GDP is, base it off of a real-life nation on this list of nations by GDP (PPP). My recommendation for finding a nation to base it on is similar industrial outputs, population, culture or geographic make-up, and some other simple determining factors. Don't base your GDP off of the United States if you don't have the economy and population of the United States. Same goes for China.
So, got a GDP set? Great. Now, decide how much of that GDP you want to allocate to your armed forces. As I said earlier, the U.S spends 3.3% of its GDP on national defense, which is equal to $284,285 per soldier in the military compared to Russias 5.4% GDP at $21,866 dollars per soldier (this is simply budget divided by personnel). As you can see, even though Russia spends 2.1% more of its GDP on national defense than the United States, this does not equal a greater investment of funds. I recommend you set your percentage of GDP anywhere from 1% to 4% of your GDP, depending on the purchasing power of your currency. If its not a very healthy currency, you may need to allocate more of your GDP to make up the difference as Russia does.
For example: Aquitayne has an overall GDP of $7.682 Trillion, and allocates 2.15% of its GDP to national defense, which equals $165.4 billion every year. The formula used was:
(y)% of GDP x GDP = Defense budget, where y = the percent of GDP you spend annually on defense.
Now, with the size of your military and the budget it works with determined, we can begin to delve into the more nitty-gritty aspects of allocating funds to the different areas your military needs money. I will make a not here, however, that it is up to you to decide how to best divide your overall military into active and reserve soldiers, and further into each branch of service. Only you can really decide these numbers, but I highly suggest looking at your strategic goals in doing so (i.e do you need a bigger navy or army? Better ships or tanks? etc).
Determining Areas of Allocation
Now that you have the overall budget of your military decided, you should further decide where that money is being allocated to. It's important to know how much you're spending in each area, as that will help you get a picture of what you can and can't afford equipment-wise and personnel-wise. Below is a chart of United States defense spending allocations in FY2015.[3]
As you can see, the largest chunk of the defense budget allocated each year to the Department of Defense is spent in the Operations & maintenance category, which would constitute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (pre-withdrawal), ongoing airstrikes against ISIS and other terrorists, training exercises for all branches of the service, training for recruits going through Basic Training through their Advanced Individual Training (AIT or MOS school). It also accounts for all maintenance expenditures in the U.S military, which can be summed up to a pretty large number.
Below, I'm going to provide a few examples of some of the expenditures that are included in the above table's overall budgets, and how you can calculate the same type of expenditures if you wish. It should be noted that these numbers are based off of calculations I did for my own military, but the base numbers are accurate for the United States.
Aircraft Carrier Cost: $287,671 a day[4] x 365 days x 3 carriers = $315,000,000 [there are disputes to the cost of operating an aircraft carrier. This number can vary between $287,671 a day to $1,800,000 a day (for U.S super carriers).]
Annual fuel costs: 4,600,000,000 gallons of fuel annually at current rate of $2.47/gallon (today's rate) = $11,362,000,000
Fleet Maintenance budget = $12,500,000 per surface ship (average per annum)[5] [6] x 113 = $1,469,000,000
Submarine fleet Operating Cost = $44,142,857 (per sub per year)[7] x 20 = $882,857,140
Additionally, you may want to think about the cost of paying your soldiers. This is an important aspect that is often overlooked when people develop their military, and can definitely hinder their overall budget expenses. Using Aquitayne's pay scale, I can determine the following about Aquitayne's expenditures in paying its soldiers:
TOTAL SALARY EXPENDITURE ENLISTED (FY2016): $19,082,176,000
TOTAL SALARY EXPENDITURE OFFICERS (FY2016): $3,589,661,000
TOTAL MINISTRY OF DEFENSE MILITARY PERSONNEL SALARY EXPENDITURE (FY2016): $22,671,837,000
RESERVIST MONTHLY TRAINING STIPEND: $1,500 x 12 x 565,500 = $10,179,000,000
This pay scale means that Aquitayne spends $32,850,837,000 a year, just to pay our soldiers. This equates to 19.86% of Aquitayne's entire national defense budget being allocated solely to soldier's salaries. This will not be insignificant in your military either. Remember, depending on the strength of your national currency, your soldiers could be paid anywhere between $500 USD a year and $100,000+ USD a year. It is also important to note that this figure is based only on active duty soldiers in the Aquitaynian military, and does not include the additional 565,500 soldiers we could activate if necessary. To see a complete breakdown of Aquitayne's active duty soldiers by rank and pay, see this pastebin document.
Additionally, you may find it pertinent to calculate the rough estimate of training your yearly intake of recruits. The United States military trains over 180,000 new recruits every year. It's important to know how much money you're spending on each recruit to get a fuller understanding of that soldier's capabilities once fully trained and how well they'll fight or do their job. It's important to realize, however, that specialty job training such as Infantry training, Special Forces training, Airborne School, Sniper School, etc., are not readily available and are hard to quantify. Thus, we'll only be looking at a recruit going through Basic Training.
12-WEEK BASIC TRAINING: $28,658.23 per soldier
$4,161.84 in pay (18,000 / 52 x 12 = 4,161.84)
$1,306.52 in equipment
$1,403.25 in food
$2,450 in housing
$8,307.60 in instructor pay
$305.12 in classroom equipment and instruction
$724.50 in medical in-processing (dental, vaccines)
$10,000 other miscellaneous items
Size of 1 platoon: 40-50 recruits ($1,146,329.20 per platoon)
Platoons per training company: 3 ($3,438,987.6 per company)
Companies per cycle: 4 ($13,755,950.40 per cycle)
Cycles per year: 4
TOTAL COST: $55,023,801.6 (1,920 recruits)
FOR ANNUAL INTAKE OF 30,000 TROOPS: $859,746,900
I will reiterate here that this is only for Basic Training. The training cycle of a recruit going through BCT and specialization school to their unit can take anywhere up to 2 years. Below is a chart of the training cycle to help illustrate the time it takes from a recruit to go from basic training to full readiness:
As you can see, there are multiple stages of training before a soldier even reaches their first unit, and afterwards, training is continued to ensure combat readiness and unit cohesion. It's important to know that the Initial Occupational Training, in the United States known as AIT (Advanced Individual Training), can last weeks, months, or even upwards of a year in some instances. The amount of money you're willing to spend on a soldier's initial training and subsequent training will dramatically change the effectiveness of that unit and increase their combat effectiveness and excellence on the battlefield.
| Components | Funding |
| Operations and maintenance | $258.277 billion |
| Military Personnel | $153.531 billion |
| Procurement | $97.757 billion |
| Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation | $63.347 billion |
| Military Construction | $8.069 billion |
| Family Housing | $1.483 billion |
| Other Miscellaneous Costs | $2.775 billion |
| Atomic energy defense activities | $17.424 billion |
| Defense-related activities | $7.433 billion |
| Total spending | $610.096 billion |
As you can see, the largest chunk of the defense budget allocated each year to the Department of Defense is spent in the Operations & maintenance category, which would constitute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (pre-withdrawal), ongoing airstrikes against ISIS and other terrorists, training exercises for all branches of the service, training for recruits going through Basic Training through their Advanced Individual Training (AIT or MOS school). It also accounts for all maintenance expenditures in the U.S military, which can be summed up to a pretty large number.
Below, I'm going to provide a few examples of some of the expenditures that are included in the above table's overall budgets, and how you can calculate the same type of expenditures if you wish. It should be noted that these numbers are based off of calculations I did for my own military, but the base numbers are accurate for the United States.
Aircraft Carrier Cost: $287,671 a day[4] x 365 days x 3 carriers = $315,000,000 [there are disputes to the cost of operating an aircraft carrier. This number can vary between $287,671 a day to $1,800,000 a day (for U.S super carriers).]
Annual fuel costs: 4,600,000,000 gallons of fuel annually at current rate of $2.47/gallon (today's rate) = $11,362,000,000
Fleet Maintenance budget = $12,500,000 per surface ship (average per annum)[5] [6] x 113 = $1,469,000,000
Submarine fleet Operating Cost = $44,142,857 (per sub per year)[7] x 20 = $882,857,140
Additionally, you may want to think about the cost of paying your soldiers. This is an important aspect that is often overlooked when people develop their military, and can definitely hinder their overall budget expenses. Using Aquitayne's pay scale, I can determine the following about Aquitayne's expenditures in paying its soldiers:
TOTAL SALARY EXPENDITURE ENLISTED (FY2016): $19,082,176,000
TOTAL SALARY EXPENDITURE OFFICERS (FY2016): $3,589,661,000
TOTAL MINISTRY OF DEFENSE MILITARY PERSONNEL SALARY EXPENDITURE (FY2016): $22,671,837,000
RESERVIST MONTHLY TRAINING STIPEND: $1,500 x 12 x 565,500 = $10,179,000,000
This pay scale means that Aquitayne spends $32,850,837,000 a year, just to pay our soldiers. This equates to 19.86% of Aquitayne's entire national defense budget being allocated solely to soldier's salaries. This will not be insignificant in your military either. Remember, depending on the strength of your national currency, your soldiers could be paid anywhere between $500 USD a year and $100,000+ USD a year. It is also important to note that this figure is based only on active duty soldiers in the Aquitaynian military, and does not include the additional 565,500 soldiers we could activate if necessary. To see a complete breakdown of Aquitayne's active duty soldiers by rank and pay, see this pastebin document.
Additionally, you may find it pertinent to calculate the rough estimate of training your yearly intake of recruits. The United States military trains over 180,000 new recruits every year. It's important to know how much money you're spending on each recruit to get a fuller understanding of that soldier's capabilities once fully trained and how well they'll fight or do their job. It's important to realize, however, that specialty job training such as Infantry training, Special Forces training, Airborne School, Sniper School, etc., are not readily available and are hard to quantify. Thus, we'll only be looking at a recruit going through Basic Training.
12-WEEK BASIC TRAINING: $28,658.23 per soldier
$4,161.84 in pay (18,000 / 52 x 12 = 4,161.84)
$1,306.52 in equipment
$1,403.25 in food
$2,450 in housing
$8,307.60 in instructor pay
$305.12 in classroom equipment and instruction
$724.50 in medical in-processing (dental, vaccines)
$10,000 other miscellaneous items
Size of 1 platoon: 40-50 recruits ($1,146,329.20 per platoon)
Platoons per training company: 3 ($3,438,987.6 per company)
Companies per cycle: 4 ($13,755,950.40 per cycle)
Cycles per year: 4
TOTAL COST: $55,023,801.6 (1,920 recruits)
FOR ANNUAL INTAKE OF 30,000 TROOPS: $859,746,900
I will reiterate here that this is only for Basic Training. The training cycle of a recruit going through BCT and specialization school to their unit can take anywhere up to 2 years. Below is a chart of the training cycle to help illustrate the time it takes from a recruit to go from basic training to full readiness:
As you can see, there are multiple stages of training before a soldier even reaches their first unit, and afterwards, training is continued to ensure combat readiness and unit cohesion. It's important to know that the Initial Occupational Training, in the United States known as AIT (Advanced Individual Training), can last weeks, months, or even upwards of a year in some instances. The amount of money you're willing to spend on a soldier's initial training and subsequent training will dramatically change the effectiveness of that unit and increase their combat effectiveness and excellence on the battlefield.
Determining how to bring this all together
Ultimately, it's up to you on how you decide to coagulate this information and use it the way you want to. It's important that you look at strategic goals, spending capabilities, organizational structure, equipment, and logistic strength in compiling your military as a comprehensive, functioning defense force. This guide, while admittedly incomplete in covering every aspect of your nation's defense budget, is aimed primarily to give you a better understanding of what goes into your defense budget. A lot of people pick a big number and don't consider the realistic ramifications of what that number means, and if they can even afford to do what they say they can with that budget.
This guide, ultimately, is to help new and experienced players gain a better respect for the intricacies of their defense forces as well as helping new players shape their military's in a realistic way. Determining how best to put these forces together will, as I said earlier, depend on your nation's strategic vision and how these forces interact on the battlefield. It's up to you to decide how they do so.
This guide, ultimately, is to help new and experienced players gain a better respect for the intricacies of their defense forces as well as helping new players shape their military's in a realistic way. Determining how best to put these forces together will, as I said earlier, depend on your nation's strategic vision and how these forces interact on the battlefield. It's up to you to decide how they do so.
Guides on Warfare
- Building Your Military
- Aerial, Ground, and Naval Warfare
- The Art of NS War
- Guide to Overlooked Aspects of Warfare
- How to Create a Military Doctrine for Your Nation
- A Brief Roleplaying Guide to Genocide
- The Ultimate Guide to War
- Krieg's Guide to Losing
- Logistics: War and Peace
- Creating and Effectively Using an Air Force
- The Ten Basic Rules of Naval and Ship Design in Roleplay
- A Primer on Naval Strategy
- The Effects of Mass Murder/Genocide on Your Nation
- Spacetech: Orbital Mechanics
- Brewing a Revolution
- From Factbooks & National Information: Lasers in Modern and Post-Modern Tech: A Brief FAQ
- Guide to Terrorism
- Allanea’s Handy Guide To Military Incompetence and Errors
- Guerrilla Warfare - A Primer for Nationstates Players
Citations
- Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2017 Report.
- Masters, Jonathan. "The Russian Military." Council on Foreign Relations. N.p., 2014. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.
- "Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2015". United States Government Publishing Office. 2015. Retrieved 2016-09-29.
- Unknown. "NIMITZ-CLASS AIRCRAFT CARRIER OPERATING AND SUPPORT COSTS." Santa Monica: Rand Corporation. 2015.
- Button, Robert W., Bradley Martin, Jerry M. Sollinger, and Abraham Tidwell. Assessment of Surface Ship Maintenance Requirements. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2015. PDF.
- Unknown. Naval Ship Life Cycle Cost (LCC) Model. Annapolis: SPAR Associates Incorporated, 2015. PDF.
- Unknown. Estimated Costs of a Science Submarine. Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2015. PDF.