Military Power Rankings

Destruction Power assesses the forces and weapons available for use. Readiness and deployment capacity determine how much of their nominal strength can be brought to bear.

Readiness and sustainment: GAO readiness review (2024) · Joint Logistics (2008), pp. II-4–II-7.

GDP and defense spending help finance military capability, but their contribution depends on what has actually been converted into usable forces, weapons and support. A future acquisition cannot fight today's war. Existing ammunition stocks, annual indigenous ammunition production and reliable weapons imports reveal different parts of the country's ability to fight and replenish its forces.

Resources and military capability: RAND, Measuring National Power (2000), chapter 7.

• Personnel and readiness: active and paramilitary forces, force readiness and battlespace deployment capacity.
• Ground firepower: tanks, armored vehicles, self-propelled and towed artillery, rocket artillery and anti-tank weapons.
• Missiles and strategic weapons: precision-guided munitions, ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, glide vehicles, multiple-warhead delivery capability and nuclear warheads.
• Air power and drones: fighters, bombers, helicopters, combat drones and coordinated swarms, airlift, aerial refueling, airborne warning, maritime patrol, electronic-warfare aircraft and reconnaissance drones.
• Naval power: aircraft carriers; strategic and attack submarines, including nuclear, conventional and midget classes; surface warships; coastal defense; mines and mine warfare; and amphibious forces.
• Specialist capabilities: special forces, offensive cyber and electronic warfare, anti-satellite and space-based weapons, directed energy and psychological warfare.

The ability to sustain and restore this fighting power is assessed through Destruction Tolerance.

Destruction Tolerance encompasses the material resources, protective systems, national resilience and human endurance that make continued resistance possible.

Russia: endurance under destruction

Russia's experience within the Soviet Union during World War II shows why the capacity to withstand destruction belongs at the heart of military assessment. The Soviet Union lost approximately 27 million people—military personnel and civilians across its republics—yet continued fighting to victory. Russian Academy of Sciences demographic research documents the scale of those losses.

MPR regards that wartime endurance as an unmatched demonstration of national resolve. It is a key component of MPR's assessment of Russia: the capacity to absorb enormous losses, sustain resistance and continue fighting for national survival. This historical experience informs the assessment alongside the forces, resources and resilience Russia possesses today.

• Personnel replacement: reserves, mobilization, national service, recruitment and retention.
• Stocks and sustainment: ammunition and fuel reserves, spare parts, aircraft maintenance, equipment recovery, field and depot repair, medical support and casualty evacuation.
• Transport and infrastructure: naval replenishment, military ground transport, sealift, merchant shipping, railways, roads, ports, military and civilian airfields and inland waterways.
• Protection and resilience: air, missile and drone defense; radar and sensor survivability; hardened sites; fortifications; strategic depth; natural defensibility; resilient infrastructure, supply chains, cyber defenses and communications.
• Replenishment and outside support: industrial surge capacity, annual indigenous ammunition production, energy security, resistance to sanctions, reliable foreign arms and spare-parts supply, foreign-exchange reserves, external funding, defense treaties, demonstrated allied support and diplomatic resilience.
• National endurance: military and civilian morale, discipline, cohesion, public support, national will and demonstrated grit, tolerance of casualties and hardship, civil defense, the domestic information environment, leadership continuity and sustained combat endurance.

Forces with comparable inventories can perform very differently. Qualitative Superiority concerns the leadership, skill, technology, experience, national resources and strategic circumstances that improve their effectiveness.

China illustrates the distinction between capability and demonstrated capability. In MPR's current assessment, the only remaining distinction keeping China from a tie with Russia is demonstrated military capability and combat experience, together with the uncertainty surrounding aspects of China's full wartime performance. MPR sees exceptional strength; what remains less established is how completely that strength would translate into performance in a comparable major war. Limited public knowledge is not evidence that a capability is absent.

• Equipment, training and command: aircraft quality, weapon generations, pilot and reserve training, military education, the NCO corps, command competence, decisiveness, execution speed, audacity, initiative, planning and joint operations.
• Experience and military thought: combat history, successful offensives and defenses, adaptability, institutional learning, flexibility across war types, doctrine, clarity of objectives and coherence between doctrine and force structure.
• Suitability for the war: defensive, offensive, expeditionary and asymmetric proficiency; weapons suited to the battlespace; mountain, urban, desert, Arctic, jungle and coastal warfare; mobile-fire coordination and sea denial.
• Institutions and partnerships: civil–military coordination, institutional integrity, forward bases, foreign access, deployment distance, strategic partnerships, foreign technology and training, joint exercises, coalition interoperability and intelligence sharing.
• Intelligence and advanced systems: command and sensor integration, intelligence analysis, signals intelligence, data fusion, AI-assisted decisions and targeting, stealth, military quantum technology, satellite navigation and communications, space reconnaissance and surveillance, and undersea communications.
• Population, economy and industry: population and military-relevant age groups, service eligibility, workforce skills, economic scale and growth, defense funding, industrial capabilities, resource conversion, oil production and demand, and strategic natural resources.
• Geography: land area, borders, coastlines, terrain, islands and archipelagos, chokepoints, climate and seasonal operating conditions.

Qualitative Inferiority accounts for constraints that prevent a country from applying its full military potential. A country confronting two hostile neighbors may have to divide its forces; a military committed across several theaters may be unable to concentrate where it is most needed. An assessment must consider these burdens alongside its advantages.

For the United States, global force dispersal is an important example. In MPR's assessment, forces and commitments spread across multiple theaters limit the strength the United States can concentrate in any one conflict. Its rating therefore considers the power available for the likely war, including competing commitments, rather than assuming that every American formation can be assembled in the same theater at once.

Force-allocation background: GAO, competing global requirements (2016), pp. 5–6.

• Dispersal and commitments: forces divided among competing tasks, internal conflicts and the burden of offensive objectives.
• Demonstrated failures: failed offensives and failed defenses.
• Strategic opposition: adversarial neighbors, major international disputes and influential strategic rival powers.
• Financial constraints: national debt, fiscal vulnerability and the military expenditure burden on the economy.
• Mismatch and credibility: a force design or doctrine ill suited to the war being fought, and the gap between declared doctrine or ideological claims and demonstrated military reality.