Well, I'm coming back to this after a particularly hard stretch on this incarnation, so apologies on the delay in reply.
As I reread those posts at the beginning I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why I didn't add timeframes -- I'd thought that I had, but I guess not. The important thing to remember, that I failed to point out in my original posts (
mea culpa!), was that I was
only dealing with "front-end" logistics for infantry, because that is my specialty. Part of that was
not including capitol equipment (barracks/camps/forts, armory buildings, ammo bunkers, ranges, road/rail/maritime nets etc.) or precise, high-end figures for things like dedicated trucks and jeep-type vehicles, as well as their maintenance infrastructure, because I thought it was too much of a "fuzzy logic" problem for the game universe -- Khaffeenistan, being a mostly-agrarian world, will have neither the tax infrastructure nor the educational base (even given the SL) to support even a WW2/US Army. It simply isn't there.
Next, is the quality problem: Khaffeenistan's army, if starting from
absolute zero (i.e., nothing but a few police on-world), will simply not have a military to do more than die quickly in less than five years from "GO!"...if they're REALLY lucky, AND have a healthy leavening of seasoned professionals not just leading an army as officers, but scattered throughout the forces, at all levels above that of Corporal/E4.
Time Scale: If starting from scratch, with only a c.30-man Drill Instructor platoon of mercenaries, assisted by a small group of staff officers - who have to come down with a plan laid out and ready to go - with about 2 years of insane, back-breaking labor, they should have a military unit that will be able to stand an interior guard, and suppress a riot.
Given reasonable amounts of peace, say 10 years, they MIGHT produce a passable-quality infantry division -- which will only be manned to a strength of a single, THIN, infantry brigade, with maybe three or four more National Guard/Reserve units.
Twenty years of peace would be better. Thirty would be ideal.
The problem here is not that anything is inherently wrong with Khaffeenistan's population -- they simply have no traditions to build on; no foundation, if you will. You can
"shake-n-bake" NCO's and officers in 6 months with a good program, but they won't be able to do more than Company-level combat, IF that, when they take over their units -- you might get a passable junior NCO in 2 years, but "decent" officers take no less than 10, unless they are in combat from Day 1. US, UK and other Western armies have highly lethal NCO and officer corps' because we've been at this thing long enough, and have enough history to prove our points, that we can produce
very capable troops and officers, compared to the rest of the planet, in a relatively short time.
Take the Russian Army.
By 1993, the Russian army was a joke -- it had been deteriorating for decades, with one of the highest officer-to-enlisted ratios on the planet, and officers were reduced (
literally: I watched the interview!) to offering to sell their internal organs to feed their families.
Now, in 2011? They're
still shit -- no, seriously.
They have failed repeatedly, in most of their major combat actions (like Chechnya). The only exception to the rule was the Georgia/South Ossetia deal in 2008...and that, only because they went back to the Czarist playbook of using Cossack swarms as shock infantry, and leaving the Regular Army to handle things like tanks and artillery --
after the Cossacks had cleared a path.
Why?
Because Russia has a significantly different view of the military than the West does. In the West, we're heroes, most of the time, and most people see the military as at least an honorable profession. Russians see their military as heroes
only when there's a war on, and sometimes not then. Most of the time, the military is viewed as a dumping ground for criminals, or as a distasteful thing that is required by law (via the Draft), that you're either too poor or too stupid to get out of. Officers have it easier than the enlisted troops, but not by much. "Fit only for powder" is very much in effect.
Equipment has nothing to do with it -- Lady Bambi can land with an
Overlord, three
Triumph's and a bunch of
Mule's, carrying a battalion of Mechs in packing crates, a battalion each of
Long Tom's,
Patton's and engineering vehicles, and every scrap of uniforms, weapons, gear, and ammo that I outlined above, and more, ready to issue...and she
still won't have an army worth a damn in less than 10 years, unless all that gear is escorted by a crack brigade of troops with a good training plan behind them...
...And do
NOT get me started on aircraft, let alone Aerospace Fighters!
All in all, Lady Bambi can recruit a shit-load of Privates pretty fast, but she has to plug those Privates into a functional structure of veteran troops if she wants to do anything with her toy army in less than 3 years.
