| The measurement of military power is critical to the study of both international relations and of war, and is of concern to both academic and practical students of those subjects. Failures to accurately assess military power are common, despite the development of increasingly sophisticated tools to analyze and compare military resources. The failure to accurately assess military power can be ascribed in part to the failure of many analysts to consider military forces within the broader context within which those military forces employed. First, military power can be properly measured only if it is recognized that war is not an isolated act, but an instrument of national policy, and that the diplomacy and politics of war have much to do with the conduct of military forces. Second, economic, political, and social forces have a substantial influence on the creation and operation of military forces and often are of decisive importance in the assessment of military power. Third, military power is determined in part by the effectiveness of military forces, which is determined by their organization (both formal and informal), their equipment, their methods of operation, and their ways of thinking.;There are a variety of methods that can be used to assess military power. Indirect measures rely on military budgets, military manpower, gross national product or other economic indicators, or population or other demographic indicators, in order to compare the relative military power of nations. The military potential method treats concentrates on the transformation of economic and demographic resources into military resources, and treats military power as the resulting output. Military capability assessments consider the relative battlefield capabilities of opposing military forces, taking into account quantitative and qualitative factors. All of these approaches have value, but their weaknesses are such that they cannot reliably provide accurate assessments of military power. For this reason, all assessments of military power are inherently unreliable. |
