Sources and method

Where the numbers come from

Personnel and equipment come from Global Firepower 2026, which compiles public counts of troops, aircraft, armour, artillery and ships for 145 countries. Its PowerIndex rank is used for the headline verdict on each comparison.

Military spending is from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's2025 military expenditure data, published in April 2026, in current US dollars. SIPRI does not publish figures for every country; where it doesn't, the Global Firepower budget estimate is shown and marked with an asterisk.

Nuclear warheads are SIPRI Yearbook 2026 estimates of each country's military stockpile as of January 2026. No country publishes complete figures, so all of these are estimates.

How comparisons are scored

Each matchup counts which country has the larger number in every metric, then reports who leads in each area: people and money, land, air, sea and nuclear. The headline verdict uses Global Firepower's overall rank, which weighs dozens of factors including logistics, geography and finances.

What the numbers don't show

Counts measure size, not quality. A modern fighter and a fifty-year-old one are each counted once. The numbers say nothing about training, readiness, maintenance, morale, intelligence, alliances or the terrain a war would be fought on. Wartime figures, especially for Russia and Ukraine, change quickly and are hard to verify.

Spotted an error? Every figure lives in a plain data file and is reviewed when the sources publish new editions.