An exploration into all global military capability
The newest release of information from the Correlates of War Project (COW) was released on January 6th, 2020. We will be exploring this dataset to determine the most powerful militaries as scored by the newly released dataset and providing a summarized version of our findings. For our entire analysis please check out the notebook here. This project is written from the U.S. perspective when considering allies, non-allies. The COW Project was founded in 1963 with the continual goal to acquire "systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge about war". As stated by the COW Project, "Power is considered by many to be a central concept in explaining conflict, and six indicators - military expenditure, military personnel, energy consumption, iron and steel production, urban population, and total population - are included in this data set. It serves as the basis for the most widely used indicator of national capability, CINC (Composite Indicator of National Capability) and covers the period 1816–2012." Why were these six variables chosen? According to the project, these variables were chosen based on an immense amount of research and work by historians, social and physical scientists, military analysts, and operations researchers that examined the ideas of power base, national strength, and material capabilities.
Dataset Variable Description
1 “stateabb” 3 letter country Abbreviation
2 “ccode” COW Country code
3 “year” Year of observation
4 “irst” Iron and steel production (thousands of tons)
5 “milex” Military Expenditures (For 1816-1913: thousands of current year British Pounds. For 1914+: thousands of current year US Dollars.)
6 “milper” Military Personnel (thousands)
7 “pec” Primary Energy consumption (thousands of coal-ton equivalents)
8 “tpop” Total Population (thousands)
9 “upop” Urban population (population living in cities with population greater than 100,000; in thousands)
10 “cinc” Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) score
11 “version” Version number of the data set
Citations
https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/national-material-capabilities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_alliances#Current_military-security_alliances