Hello everyone,

I am working on a M.A. thesis project about "small wars"/COINs. More specifically, I am going to investigate the relationship between force employment and equipment.

Those of you here who are interested in military theory and force employment may have come across Stephen Biddle's "Military Power: explaining victory and defeat in modern battle"; Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. In essence, I want to adapt his key hypotheses to unconventional war, use a similar methodology of testing them and see what happens and how the results compare.

There is quite a bit of number-crunching involved in my work but before I can do that I need data to work with. That's my problem. I cannot seem to find an open source and roughly comprehensive database/spreadsheet with basic facts on US and international weapon systems:

The Federation of American Scientists has plenty of data but mostly in pure text format scattered over various webpages.

GlobalSecurity has at least html-tables on its pages and some updated content compared to FAS but due to the table formatting I cannot easily bulk import them into Excel and merge them into a giant spreadsheet. The biggest problem is the lack of a name entry of the weapon system in the table itself (they are sorted by website). I could of course manually add a name entry for each but it would take me a very long time to finish and the resulting database would be difficult to keep up to date.

I don't know if Jane's has a database like the one I am looking for. I would think so (at least for their own use) but I could not find anything on their website about one and if/how access could be arranged.

I drew similar blanks on the web-presences of other organisations/institutions/companies I could think of.

Can anyone here think of a database that might be useful to me? Before I spend weeks creating one of my own, I would really like to know that I tried everything else.

Sam