| The key words though, are "man for man". All that tells you is that the Chinese military cares less about the lives of their soldiers, since they train, supply, and protect them to a much lower standard. It also explains why the US spends so much more on their military than regimes which actually have MORE powerful armies (not man for man, but overall) - the US focuses on maintaining a fast, proffesional, and well protected fighting force capable of engaging different types of opponents in an unlimited range of environments. Countries like China, North Korea, Russia, etc focus primarily on building up their numbers enough to be able to overwhelm any opposition. The US focuses on making smart-bombs, while they focus on building MORE bombs for saturation bombing. That kind of thing. It's always more expensive to perform proffesional, surgical ops, and MUCH more expensive to build and maintain a proffesional military. For instance, the lowest NCO leader, by the time he reaches that level, will have cost the military upwards of a quarter million dollars just for training, equipment, and ammunition. Any specialized training will ofcourse raise that ammount even more. That's a lot of money to invest on someone who's job it is to get shot at. It's also why the armies of NATO states are, man-for-man, a hell of a lot more effective than any that have ever existed before. |
