ISLAMABAD – The Pakistan military has been ranked as the 15th most powerfulmilitary by Global Firepower’s 2019 Military Strength Rankinglink.
The three most powerful militaries in the world are United States, Russiaand China followed by India, France, Japan, South Korea and United Kingdom.
Global Firepower ranks the militaries of 137 countries by giving weightageto a complex number of factors and not just sheer numbers of soldiers orweapons. It looks at a large number of different criteria, including thediversity of each country’s weapons, manpower, population, geography andits state of development.
While it gives bonus points to countries with nuclear weapons, it does notfactor in their nuclear stockpiles in the final score. While landlockedcountries are not penalised for not having navies, countries that do havenavies but their fleets lack diversity are penalised.
The Global Firepower ranking utilises over 55 factors to determine acountry’s PowerIndex score. The formula allows smaller, moretechnologically advanced countries to compete with larger, less developedones. A perfect PowerIndex score is 0.0000, which is realisticallyunattainable.
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The closer countries are to that number, the more powerful their militaryis. For example, the Power Index rating for the US is 0.0615. For Pakistan,the figure stands at 0.2798 and for India, it is 0.1065.
According to the ranking, Pakistan has an estimated total of 1,204,000military personnel, total aircraft strength of 1342 (ranked 7th out of137), 348 fighter aircraft, 197 total naval assets and a defence budget of$7billion.
India, meanwhile, has an estimated 3,462,500 military personnel, a totalaircraft strength of 2082 (4th out of 137), 4,184 combat tanks, 295 totalnaval assets and one aircraft carrier. India’s defence budget is$55.2billion.
