• KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    30 days ago

    But the US doesn’t literally use soldiers as construction workers to build random roads and bridges. They use private contractors for most things like that. The groups you mentioned just help out a little to practice for wartime. Most construction is done privately.

    Size of the “military” on paper is meaningless from a defense perspective, which is the main purpose of a military. What matters is the amount and quality of troops that you can deploy and support in the field, and the speed at which that happens. Someone paving a road in Hunan or building drones for export in Tehran shouldn’t be counted as a “soldier” because they are not able to be deployed.

    The US doesn’t count it’s construction workers or factory workers as “soldiers”.

    • njm1314@lemmy.world
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      30 days ago

      I go over a bridge every day that was built by the Army Corps of Engineers. There’s numerous cities in this country who rely on levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Army Corps of Engineers does way more than you think they do.

      If you want to continue to add all these extra criteria that’s fine, that was never the criteria of the graphic. It seems silly to spend your time complaining that a graphic with very specific criteria doesn’t contain a lot of other random criteria. If that’s how you choose to spend your time good for you though.

      • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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        29 days ago

        I’m just explaining to you that all the “largest armies” on there are outliers. Wikipedia lists Iran as having only 600K active personnel:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed_Forces

        The list is just incorrect, and I explained why. South Korea has only 51 million people. Do you really think that 7.5% of all people are in the military? No, that includes “reserves” who actually do not work as soldiers.

        In that sense, every male in the US signs up for selective service at 18. Should every male aged 18 to 40 be counted as a member of the military?

        • muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee
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          29 days ago

          Sir facts and logic have no place pointing out cherry picked data on propagandised infographics.