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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (27428)	8/30/2006 2:48:49 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541791

Its kind of hard to offer evidence as to the results of unlikely future hypothetical conflicts. Of course its just my opinion, but its a reasonable educated one, and not a controversial opinion. It would be pretty hard to find any serious analysis that suggests that Saudi Arabia is more powerful than Israel, 4 times more powerful than Iran, and even more powerful than Israel, Iran, Jordan, and Syria put together. But if you just look at military budgets you would think that Saudi was more powerful than all four. The idea that military spending is a rather imperfect proxy for military power is a very solid one. Some countries (Saudi Arabia being a perfect example) have money to spend on fancy weapons, but don't have the best military tradition, and have high costs per soldier without having the type of exceptional military effectiveness that say the US (which also has a high cost per soldier) has. Other countries have low military budgets but can mobilize a lot of people, and also might spend money on their military that doesn't show in the official budget. Some countries pay very high salaries to their soldiers. That salary might in some cases relate to military effectiveness (expensive American soldiers are generally much more effective then cheap soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa), but it isn't universally the case. Saudi has high personnel costs without having the tradition, training, and flexibility that modern western armies have.