Combat Participation

[Chris jM]

I can say this from personal experience, in all the different units I have trained or trained with around the world, I have never yet encountered one that I would consider a top rate force that did not have a strong NCO corps. So if you want to decide who produces the best soldiers then the first thing you have to do is eliminate those countries that do not have a strong NCO corps.

This is true from my experiences of ABCA armies, where the NCO corp is required to compensate for the inexperience of the junior officers. Does it hold true, though, in an army that has a different command system - for example the IDF, where the NCO corp directly feeds into the junior officer corp? I also seem to recall that German junior officers spend some time initially as a section commander - someone correct me if I am wrong - so they may hold up as another exception. I'd also be interested in knowing how the Baltic and Scandinavian armies work in this regard, if anyone out there has information on this topic?

I have always been taught (informally!) to quickly assess other armies with the term of 'swimming' nations vs 'non-swimming' nations. If the average population can swim they will make good soldiers - if not, they're rock-fish and will be more or less operationally ineffective. I'm sure there is absolutely no scientific basis to this criteria, but a swimming status does tend to favor the developed world where quality of life, fitness, individual competency etc pushes families to have their children participate in sports and outdoor activities. Causation vs correlation, or complete irrelevance??

[Schmedlap]

I think that pondering which country produces the best Soldiers is kind of like pondering who would win in a fight between Captain America and the Punisher or, to use a more common example, whether Soldiers are "more elite" than Marines or vice versa.