The third realm, “military capability,” seeks to capture the manifest signs of national power that are ultimately personified by the combat proficiency of a country’s military force. Military capabilities may be treated almost as the “outputs” of national power production because they represent the effective coercive strength that a country can bring to bear against any competitors, which is, in the “anarchic” system of international politics, its first line of defense. In the framework illustrated in Figure 3, military capabilities are understood to be a product of the continual, cyclic, interaction of both national resources and national performance: resources may be “building blocks,” but these building blocks, far from existing in nature, must be consciously produced as a result of human artifice, which is captured, however imperfectly, by the domain of national performance. The institutions inhabiting this latter realm, in turn, rely on the resources they have produced both to maintain themselves internally and to expand their own (or their country’s) power externally, and the most important manifestation of this external power is military capability. Many traditional indexes of national power incorporated military capabilities in some form or another, though this was usually done through the use of summary variables like the levels of military expenditure or the gross size of the armed forces. The kind of capabilities focused on in this framework seek a greater level of detail. Toward that end, the examination of military capability as a vector of national power is patterned analogously to the larger framework for assessing national power. It identifies the
following variables of interest: