My thinking is that a peacetime military is basically a skeleton that needs to be able to be rapidly fleshed out when it becomes necessary. That's not exactly a novel thought, but I think there's a lot of room to explore when you stop thinking about fighting wars, and start thinking about how to build the machine that builds an army (preferably within weeks) if a war breaks out.

European countries can be quite good at this: the whole logic of Finland's conscription system is to have it so that if a war breaks out, you can mobilize the whole nation within a short time, and everybody knows where they fit in.

In previous big wars, nations have typically just slashed their standards when the war broke out to meet manpower quotas. It would be better, generally speaking, to build an institution that can, in an emergency, use everyone. That would mean, in peacetime, working out if there are profitable places to put people to use, so when you get a deluge of asthmatic flat-footed civilians signing up because a big war has broken out, you don't waste time trying to make them into infantry.

Obviously, my view is informed by being a peacenik. If you want an army to do offensive, expeditionary operations on a budget, there's much less to change. Having a big and capable HR department would be important if you were going to get all the dysfunctional people in a country to fight in an actual war, but it would be better, in a small professional force, to just not induct anybody who doesn't meet a bunch of stringent standards.

At this point you are just trying to force fit your ideals to the real world. Please stop, you clearly don’t understand. the original post i made is clear, make your army hard. or lose your country. maybe you’re russian…