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Abstract
Military transformation is a complex, slow, asymmetric, changeable, political, and not necessarily completely rational process that clearly needs an effective monitoring mechanism. This paper fills a gap in current literature by creating and testing a model for multi-dimensional and multi-level quantitative monitoring of military transformation applicable in any country. The model is based on 10 transformation indicators that reflect changes in organizational structure, personnel structure, weapon systems, and defense spending. Its application on a sample of seven countries (USA, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and China) in the period from 1992 to 2010 unexpectedly shows that the USA – a protagonist in the transformation process among allies as well as globally – has carried out the smallest relative change. The non-directed transformation index indicates that Russia carried out 51.8% more change (or 34.1 index units), and the directed index indicates that Poland carried out 157.2% (or 40.8 index units) more change than the USA.
Notes
1. Two indicators in this study used data related only to the Army and not the whole armed force. This was necessary because the Navy and Air Force have different types of formations (e.g. fleets, squadrons, flights, wings) that cannot always be compared with Army formations.
2. Independent Army units are, depending on the size, divided into the following types of formations (i): corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, and other units which include independent companies, and groups without clear structure and batteries.
3. According to Military Balance (The International Institute for Strategic Studies Citation2010, p. 9), an average corpus has 70,000 soldiers, an average division 17,500, an average brigade 4000, an average battalion 650, and an average company 150 soldiers. For other units (e.g. teams, battery, squadron), the average of 150 soldiers was also taken into account. A regiment, which is not specified by Military Balance, has on average 1500 soldiers (see Moran Citation2006). In a case when the independent unit was designated as the command or battle group, the size of formation was determined with the help of units which fall under this command or battle group.
4. In databases, the size of SOF is usually written in a number of different military units. Therefore, we used a standardized number of soldiers for specific type of unit to determine the number of active members of SOFs.
5. Among the modern weapons systems we counted, those types of concrete weapons and their upgrades which were produced after the year 1980. This was the most modern generation of weapon systems in the 1990s when our analysis began.
6. Our assessment was that the average price for modern main battle tanks is 4.5 million USD, for modern tracked infantry vehicles 2.5 million USD, for modern wheeled infantry vehicles 1.5 million, and for a modern tactical combat aircraft 40 million USD.
7. The general technical characteristics of selected weapon systems suggest that tracked and wheeled infantry vehicles transport on an average 10 soldiers, while medium and heavy transport helicopters can carry on an average 25 soldiers.
8. According to the general technical characteristics, a medium transport aircraft can carry, on average, up to 50 soldiers, and heavy aircraft can, on average, carry up to 120 soldiers.
9. It could be also said that the joint index is the weighted sum of the changes of indicators where indicator i is weighted by the 1/(4∙ni), where ni is the number of indicators in the dimension in which indicator i is located.
10. Normalization by a maximum is similar as a min-max normalization often used in the data mining community (see, e.g. Linoff and Berry Citation2011, p. 364). However, 0 is taken here as the absolute minimum, even in countries variable pairs where such values do not occur. The reason for taking 0 is that using the empirical minimum would make changes in all variables/countries approximately equal, and so measuring the amount of change would not be possible. For all countries 0 is also the absolute maximum.
11. Indicator “The average number of active members in the Army independent unit” is special in this respect as the desired change is not simply up or down, but toward a certain value. Therefore, the downward change can never be 100 (as the change in the right direction cannot be equal to the maximum, than when the original value of the indicator goes below 4000, this is no longer a desired change). In practical terms, it is also not possible that upward change at this indicator would be 100, as this would require changing the original indicator from 0 to 4000.