When talking about war, the only measure more useless and irrelevant than GDP and economic strength is toenail length.

Afghanistan is sitting at around $500/capita. Russia and the US have completely failed there despite four decades of conflict. Vietnam was about $60-70 during the tail end of the Vietnam War[1]. We know how that ended.

I'd say that maybe you could win if you abandoned traditional war tactics and just bombed indiscriminately and avoided suffering too many casualties, but, well, that was tried and failed in those wars. You also wouldn't want to try it against a country that can and will fire back.

[1] https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/vietnam?year=2008

So you are comparing Afghanistan and Russia, my point actually

Compared to US, maybe. But you are not doing justice to them just by looking at the USD expenditure since they produce almost everything within Russia and it might be far cheaper to produce stuff there. Here is what GFP ranks their military at: https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.asp. Even an economically more powerful country like China still has defence imports from Russia.

It's ranking countries by an opaque "power index" (sorry, "PwrIndx", because vowels cost more or something?), and there is no description of what this entails other than "over 50 individual factors". The only thing I could find to drill down on contains effectively a bare listing of things such as army size, population size, number of tanks, oil reserves, etc.--which emphasizes quantity over quality.

So you might understand why my trust in those numbers to mean anything is rather lacking.

Yeah, not sure about that power index calculation myself. But I think it would be very hard to compare things on quality. Like take the example of air power. Sure F-22, F-35, B-2/B-21 combination probably beats any other force. But after that, it gets murky as every country will hype its own inventory. I think PRC still purchases some of the planes and parts from them, so I guess Russian made planes might have an edge on them at least in some areas.

It's worth pointing out that there's a distinction to be made between having modern military kit and being able to effectively use it. This is a problem that most notably plagues the Arab militaries, in that they have the funds to buy the good stuff, but they are unwilling to invest in the training (or the operational independence) to effectively use it [1].

I'm not sure how modern Russia and China fare in this regard, compared to each other or to Western powers. Both countries have definitely showed signs in the past decade or so of trying to push through military reforms and adding more junior officers compared to senior officers.

[1] Classic case study: first Gulf War, where the casualty ratio was a lopsided 100:1, despite the Iraqi military having rough numerical parity and access to modern kit.

I was comparing to EU (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy in the list), maybe should compare with NATO. Following your logic China production is far cheaper. Israel has a lot of exports too [1] vs [2] but that's a good point [3]. Unfortunately your list is opaque.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_industry_of_Israel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_industry_of_Russia

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World's_largest_...