The analogy to the army isn’t a very good one. It’s not a zero sum situation. A country can only devote so much of its GDP to the army, so the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army. You don’t end up with 195 armies of equal size. The other thing that it misses is that the army is intentionally a vehicle for social mobility, and perhaps the most efficient one at that. The army is available to most people, where they can make a good career for themselves, or learn skills to take to the private sector, or move onto highly subsidized college. Dismissing it as bullshit is pretty narrow minded.
You're comparing the entire NK armed forces to one US branch. The entire USA armed forces is about 1.3M active personnel, with about 800K reserves. Which the US manages to achieve without conscription or slavery. If you also consider equipment and vehicles (which you absolutely should), then NK is not even remotely close. The number of naval ships, air crafts, tanks, armored combat vehicles, APCs, UAVs , etc... that the US has is so far ahead of any other country that it's not even worth trying to draw a comparison.
You've made an overstated example of a single outlier. There's outliers at the other end too, with both countries that are too dysfunctional to have any national security at all, and countries that simply ride the coattails of their stronger allies.
In any case, this is all entirely irrelevant to my point, which is that armed forces do contribute measurable value to society, and that the level of investment in them is typically proportional to the level of security a country requires.
And that number goes up to ~1.3M once you add in the Air Force, Navy and Marines. And as I've said, you're still only comparing numbers of service personnel, and ignoring capability, equipment and other resources. You're also ignoring the point I was making entirely.
the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army.
That is demonstrably false, as shown in that Wikipedia article. In fact, there is barely any correlation between the size of a country’s economy and its army.
You're also ignoring the point I was making entirely.
Since your facts are wrong, there isn’t even a point to ignore
