Ukraine (closed; covers till August 2014)

[AmericanPride]

American Pride:

That is an interesting concept. I think it is useful only in a like vs like sense. What I mean is if you compared Pakistan to the US the US beats Pakistan on every measure, yet the Pak Army/ISI beat us in Afghanistan (or will have barring a miracle). If Ivan went into the rest of Ukraine and the US and frontline NATO states embarked upon an Unconventional Warfare campaign I don't think the Russian economy could handle that, especially combined with economic sanctions over a period of years.

Carl,

You bring up a good point. My intention is to measure capability for the purpose of providing an analytical context for understanding state actions and outcomes. Context, execution, the availability of information, position and posture, etc all influence outcomes. So of course while Iran, for example, may rank higher than Bulgaria, I don't realistically expect Iran to ever succesfully attack (or attack at all) Bulgaria.

I'd be interested to see what you use for assessing power and how you integrate the various elements to get an overall ranking.

The first version uses these factors:
Political - EIU's Stability Ratings, KOF Globalization Index
Economic - GDP, FOREX, Government Revenue
Military - Manpower, Budget, Aircraft Carriers, Nuclear Weapons
Scientific - Global Innovation Index, # of Patents, (# of Degree Holders and/or Universities)
Social - Social Progress Index, Human Development Index, Population

These are not the final factors I will be using in the model, since there are others I am considering adding and some of these listed may be subject to removal also. I'm also debating about how complex to make the model - the issue will be how much information is actually available.

The reason why I chose not to use the DIME factors is because I want a quantitative rather than qualitiative measurement in order to measure each state in the same way.

EDIT: As to the methodology, each category has several factors (listed above). The score for each state is given as a percentage of the category that state owns; i.e. Russia owns 48.81% of the world's nuclear weapons. These factors are then averaged for the index of that category; and then those categories are all averaged together for the overall rating of the state.

Initially, I was going to rank each state in each category and then average all the rankings, but I think that approach was to disconnected from the quantitative factors I was using.