Of Military Prowess and GFP

India's indigenously built, surface-to-surface nuclear capable intermediate range ballistic misslie (IRBM) Agni-III with a range of 3,500 km was test-fired from a range off the Orissa coast on Sunday with much fanfare. Later it developed a snag and the test-firing was described as unsuccessful. [Agni III testfiring unsuccessful]

These two events, which occurred in quick succession, made me ponder over India's military preparedness vis-à-vis other nations. I googled to get more information in this regard. I came across an interesting website, GlobalFirePower.com . It tries to predict the military might of a nation based on a composite average of various parameters like, Finance-related, Military Personnel, Armaments inventories, Logistics, and Key resources. "GlobalFirePower (GFP) provides a unique analytical display of information based on sources from all over the globe....Naturally a list such as this is designed to be subjective so there is room for disagreement as to its accuracy (or inaccuracy)."

A partial ranking of the world military powers:

1 United States of America
2 China
3 Russia
4 India
5 Germany
6 France
7 Japan
8 Turkey
9 Great Britain
10 Brazil
11 Italy
12 South Korea
13 Indonesia
14 Canada
15 Iran
16 Spain
17 Egypt
18 North Korea
19 Australia
20 Pakistan

"NOTE: Nuclear weapons, military experience, unit training and equipment quality are not taken into account."

If such a ranking using similar parameters had been designed in 1930s, India & China would not have even figured in top 20. Germany & Japan would have led the rankings for obvious reasons. GlobalFirePower website has this to add: "If history has shown the observer one thing, it is that war is a part of life. Strange as that may sound, documented records report only 300 years of known peace on our planet, leaving the rest to wallow in the path of war. What that statistic tells us is that there has been some source of conflict between two or more parties on our planet for thousands of years."

Hopefully the mistakes of last century will not be repeated in this century too. The very idea of a large scale war sends a shudder down my spine, but we can't ignore it either.