Global Firepower Index

The data here is somewhat interesting if you're curious about where a country might stack up outside of the three usual suspects at the top. But I question how some of the data is ranked and weighted. For example, I randomly clicked on `United States vs Iran` under flashpoints. One would expect the United States to dominate Iran in all of the categories, given the US is the world's military mac daddy. Not so, though.

According to this page, Iran bests the US in the following categories:

1. Manpower. I guess because Iran has 220k "paramilitary forces" and the US has 0.

2. Financials. This is the really bizarre one. Iran wins because it has less external debt than the US. Which, okay. I don't think ignoring the US economy (or any country's economy) is the best way to compare financials.

3. Geography. Iran wins because it has less coastline and less shared borders. I thought this would be more of a "we know the land" kind of thing but it's just a measurement of raw kilometers.

I hope the advertising revenue is meaningful, because boy does it detract from the user experience.

I feel like there is one more level of detail that is needed in many categories of "firepower" and that is the relative age of the platforms. The groupings are just a bit too high level with something like "tanks" or "fighter aircraft" not really being sufficient for any kind of understanding of capabilities. Even if the deeper numbers were even more estimations for some nations, it would still make this more useful.

Russia, #2? Not buying that, not after Russia's poor performance in Ukraine and the large losses they took in personnel and equipment.