It’s that time of the week again. Yep. If you think this is meant for you, well, it probably is.

So, your country is poor and possibly recently decolonized, and you want a big shiny military. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you probably know that this is not usually a great start.

Or maybe you’re a superpower, and you want the biggest, shiniest military. That’s ok too, we’ll get to you in a moment.

Anyways: What to do (and especially what not to do) when you want to engage in a fun little bit of milwanking

Part One: Operational Considerations

Operating Costs

The lifetime costs for most complicated weapons are far greater than their initial purchase costs, especially if you want your soldiers to actually get some meaningful training in. Artillery, tanks, automatic weapons, and especially jets all quickly become wasting assets - in order to keep them useful a lot of money needs to be spent on fuel and ammunition. Maybe consider this when you try to build a modern air force from scratch.

Availability of Trained Personnel

Advanced weapons also require an enormous number of trained soldiers to properly operate. Battle damage, routine wear and tear, stupid accidents, all need to be repaired by someone who has spent a lot of time with the operator’s manual and knows at least something about how machines work, which is to say they at least went to secondary school. People who have gone to secondary school are a scarce resource in many countries, and furthermore, they won’t want to join the military when there are far more prestigious and lucrative options in the private sector. If you want your equipment to work, you need some way to get your hands on these kinds of people for long periods of time, and find some way to train them.

The troops using your equipment on a day-to-day basis also need to be trained pretty extensively. In the West, soldiers are usually expected to be able to perform basic maintenance on their equipment, and have a decent education, and so the equipment is often designed with this in mind. Your stuff will perform ideally if this is not the case.

Even if you follow the Soviet way of thinking, which is more or less “our troops don’t need to know how to maintain their own equipment, or be able to read,” you still need large numbers of dedicated technicians to keep everything running.

More broadly speaking, if your country is very poor, a lot of the people you’re recruiting into the military have never driven a motor vehicle before, never traveled very far from home, never had to read a map or operate a radio, and so on. If you put them in a tank, they will have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. Training them to know what they are doing will be very time consuming and expensive, and if the people in question are temporary conscripts, by the time you’re done training them, they’ll probably be done with their service.

Part Two: The Budget

Money

Unless you’ve worked out some incredibly preferential trade deal, weapons are bought with foreign exchange. Not only that, any spare parts, ammunition, and personnel you can’t source yourself also have to be bought with foreign exchange. Most countries have very little foreign exchange, because almost all foreign exchange comes from exporting goods, and most of those earnings are naturally spent buying nice cars, food, and fancy industrial machinery from abroad. Buying more weapons will mean your people can spend less on industrializing, luxury goods, or in some cases not starving, all of which will make them unhappy.

More broadly speaking, money is a token which gets you access to real resources. Sure, you can get the money by devoting more revenues from this-or-that to your military, but it always comes at a cost. Every person in your military is a person who could be in the workforce doing something productive, every weapon you buy is fewer textile mills and coal mines.

So, yes. Typically, your country will be able to afford a huge military budget, short of your government literally lacking the administrative capacity to collect enough tax revenue. The better question is what will it cost you? And the answer is usually: a lot. Maybe even enough to cause a crisis. Give that a thought.

Who not to emulate

Well, the title here is a bit misleading. Many countries often have legitimate political reasons to milwank beyond their economic means. Often, they can even afford it, usually by squeezing their economy hard. These examples can and should should be emulated for accurate RP, but you should be prepared for the negative consequences.

Nasser

Nasser and his successor Sadat obviously had a pretty good reason to spend huge amounts of money on the military that began with an “Is” and ended with a “rael.” And spend huge amounts they did. Not just on real threats like Israel, but also on self-aggrandizing foreign adventures like intervention in North Yemen.

Between 1967 and 1973, Egypt routinely spent around 17% of GDP on their military. Egypt was already financially struggling due to less-than-competent governmental institutions, high population growth, and Nasser’s ambitious yet highly inefficient development plans. Military spending was the boulder that turned the camel into mincemeat. During the post Six-Day War era, Egypt’s economy stagnated as over half of the country's engineers were drafted into the military and the country spent huge portions of its stagnating export revenues on over $10 Billion in Soviet weapons. By the time Sadat finally closed out the books in the 70s, despite incredibly generous financial aid from Arab Petrostates and several rounds of Soviet debt forgiveness, Egypt had amassed several billion dollars of Soviet loans which would continue to haunt Egypt for another decade or two.

The Shah

Oh boy oh boy. There’s a lot that can be said about the Shah’s military spending habits. But long story short, the man had a psychological obsession with amassing modern military equipment, eventually coming to spend around 7% of GDP on the military in a country unlikely to ever be invaded. Unlike many would-be Napoleons, the Shah did actually invest a great deal in training - thousands of Iranian officers were sent to VMI, West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs the Shah's dime. Yet the sheer quantity of equipment still managed to overwhelm the military, which was still largely manned by illiterate conscripts. And once the oil money ran out, the Shah’s expectations failed to adjust, military spending continued to rise, and so Iran fell into hyperinflation. In the end, the Shah's military, filled with conscripts of a similar background to the protestors and designed to fight conventional enemies, turned out to be completely useless against masses of (mostly) peaceful revolutionaries, and so his regime collapsed.

Coming soon to r/Coldwarpowers: Saddam, and why you should be more like him