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RVDondaPC on 10 October 2009
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lestatdark said:

I find the amount of history butchering in this thread amusing. So the USA, who's history started as a Colony of one of the largest Empires in the middle ages/rennaiscance, and the largest empire known to men, the British Empire, be it by total worlwide area and dominance of the most valuable strategic resource of that time, the sea ; is history's greatest superpower? Ha.

Forgetting the fact that america's "dominance" is more on the economical terms, as it's nowadays financial center of the world, as it was shown in the past months, in which the Lehman Brothers meltdown dragged down most of the world's markets. Also it's the largest in global GDP as well. But that ends there.
Even on military terms the USA pales, in comparison, to the massive army that the British had, as it was the largest Naval force ever known to men, and the biggest infantry known to men is still the Persian army, which had at one point more than 2 million soldiers fighting at the same time, which if you convert to today's population would be an staggering 100+ million soldiers.

So yeah...history is a funny thing that I recommend everyone to do a proper research before doing some claims like these ones that have been said in this thread ;).

You can't use the number of Soldiers to determine the dominance of a military. They are different era's in history they can't be compared. Now days if the US(or any developed country) has X number of men(let's say 10), 10 men at it's disposal, 3 of them are going to be in the factory building tanks, figher jets, warships(civilians), 1 will be in a government office(government officials), 2 of them will be researching for a third party company on weapons and technology(civilian scientist), 1 will be a doctor back home treating soldiers or other civilans contributing(civilian) and 3 may be considered soldiers, with only 1 of them actually out on the battle field. All ten of them are contributing to the military might, but only 3 are soldiers. During the times of the British empire if they had 10 men at their disposal probably 7 or 8 of them would be soldiers. 

With the technology now days the number of soldiers is not important and the whole point is to reduce the need for human lives to be involved in war. A fighter Jet may be flown by 1 soldier, but it took 10 people to put that fighter Jet in the battle field. So you can say that it's only 1 soldier, but it's a lot more dominant even relative to the times than 10 British soldiers were. Just ask Japan how one soldier pressing a button can have the might of 50,000 soldiers.