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Other Militaria
The armed forces of a state are its government sponsored defense, fighting forces, and organizations. They exist to further the foreign and domestic policies of their governing body. In some countries paramilitary forces are included in a nation's armed forces. more...
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Armed force is the use of armed forces to achieve political objectives.
The study of the use of Armed Forces is called military science. Broadly speaking, this involves considering offense and defense at three "levels": strategy, operational art, and tactics. All three levels study the application of the use of force in order to achieve a desired objective.
Organization
In most countries the armed forces are divided into three of four forces: an army, a navy, an air force, and often a gendarmery. Gendarmeries (including equivalents such as Internal Troops, Paramilitary Forces, etc.) are common in most of the world but are uncommon in Anglo-Saxon countries. A number of countries have no navy, for geographical reasons.
Many countries have a variation on the standard model of three or four basic forces. Variations include China (army, navy, air force, strategic missile force), South Africa (army, navy, air force, military health service), and Egypt (army, navy, air force, air defense). The United States has five armed forces or services; the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, and the US Coast Guard.
Most smaller countries have a single organization that encompasses all armed forces employed by the country in question.
In larger armed forces the culture between the different branches of a countries armed forces can be quite different. It has been said that "a navy and an air force man equipment" whereas "an army equips men".
Third-world armies tend consist primarily of infantry, while first-world armies tend to have larger units manning expensive equipment and only a fraction of personnel in infantry units.
The state of readiness of a military organisation may be indicated by its alert state.
Armed forces may be organized as standing forces (e.g. regular army), which describes a professional army that is engaged in no other profession than preparing for and engaging in warfare. In contrast, there is the very rare citizen army as used in Switzerland. A citizen army (also known as a militia or reserve army) is only mobilized as needed. Its advantage lies in the fact that it is dramatically less expensive (in terms of wealth, manpower, and opportunity cost) for the organizing society to support. The disadvantage is that such a "citizen's army" is less well trained and organized.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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