British Army Orbat C.2020-25

[Suhiir]

Equipment is always the problem. You can fairly easily expand a cadre military into a full sized force. But when they US did so in the late 1930 they wound up training with brooms in place of rifles and had a devil of a time just equipping the 1st MarDiv for Guadalcanal in August 1942.

That's one thing the politicians always seem to forget, soldiers need equipment and that takes time to manufacture.

[IronDuke99]

Originally Posted by Suhiir

Equipment is always the problem. You can fairly easily expand a cadre military into a full sized force. But when they US did so in the late 1930 they wound up training with brooms in place of rifles and had a devil of a time just equipping the 1st MarDiv for Guadalcanal in August 1942.

That's one thing the politicians always seem to forget, soldiers need equipment and that takes time to manufacture.

UK faced exactly the same problem in WWI, with the added difficulty of losing most of its trained and experienced officers and men in 1914-15 and that was, at least partly, responsible for the disaster on the first day of the Somme in 1916 (the troops, brave as they certainly were, were not well trained, especially by 1914 BEF standards) and WWII where British tanks were generally far weaker than German tanks between 1941 and late 1944, only the Comet, of late 1944, and the Centurion (just too late for WWII) were a match for German tanks. History repeats itself because people never learn the bloody lessons of it...

[shahadi]

I am not certain modern economies have failed to account for material, training, and maintenance in their military spending budgets. While, today, it appears military spending at least in the US is sustained at a very high level compared to other countries, looking closer reveals countries are spending about a comparable share of their gross domestic product (GDP) to the US with several ahead, notably Russian and that's only a mere 1% of her GDP.

From Forbes:

We may say Saudi is burning a lot of cash to support it's air war in Yemen and funding the Syrian insurgency. As we have no evidence Saudi boys are being called up to fight.

In the US, congressional districts vie for department of defense (DoD) dollars. A lot of that money is spent for supply, bases, training, and maintenance as well as procurement of new platforms.

We can see the Brits are in the same neighborhood as France, Turkey, and China.

I say, modern economies have learned from the past and have heeded the words of the US president Eisenhower in his famous "military-industrial complex" speech in 1961 before leaving the Orval Office making room for the new president Kennedy, he said:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions [my emphasis]."

NPR Staff ("Ike's Warning Of Military Expansion, 50 Years Later", January 17, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942...50-years-later)

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[IronDuke99]

I don't think those defence spending figures are all that accurate.