Originally Posted by
meleagertoo
According to accessible sources Russia's military expenditure is much the same as the UK's yet their military might is many, many times as great. Ten times more troops at least, far more if you count reserves. A Navy perhaps three times the size in terms of major units and infinitely larger if coastal vessels abd conventional subs are counted, an Air Force many times the size too. Plus an absolute plethora of offensive and defensive weapon systems we can only dream of posessing.
Clearly mere size is not necessarily a deciding factor but sheer numbers are a big advantage.
How is it that they manage to have acheived such a vast superiority in numbers and strength with such an all but identical budget?
Or is the question how we manage to achieve such poor numbers with so much spent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...y_expenditures
Russia and UK are rated 4th and 5th in world rankings on Wiki but 2nd and 8th in terms of capability.
https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php
What's gone wrong? The differences are far, far too big to be accounted for by relative values of currency, economic status or even legacy equipment, surely?
Surely the pay differentials between a volunteer force and a draft force make a big difference. A draftee force does not bring the same size pension and benefits costs that a professional military does either.
Also contributing imho is the massively costly military specifications and purchasing bureaucracy, with its industrial counterparts.
Still, it most fundamentally reflects massive management failure.
To illustrate, SpaceX was initially funded privately by Musk's profits from his role at PayPal, $200MM at most, about 1% of what the US government has spent on the still to be launched Artemis launcher.
The NASA and US industry engineers are not that much less capable than those at SpaceX, but clearly the latter's management processes function a lot better.
The most useful question would be: How did Russia, famous for its sclerotic bureaucracies, manage to get so much better management, as shown by the results?