Now you’re moving the goalposts. While percentage of the population is a good measure of how expensive an army is, it is not the definition of how large the army.

Part of what makes massive countries so dangerous is that they can field huge armies without damaging their economic base, which is why you’ll never see China field an army with 5% of their population, while smaller countries might have to.

This means by your measure the largest armies in the world are fielded by small tribes, which might have over 50% of their population at arms! Except this is absolutely silly, and we all know it.

But fine. Let’s play that game.How big are America’s armies by percentage of population?

You can’t use total people served, because that’s not the size of the army. When you measure total served you’re picking up the size of the army, the length of the war, and various bits about how recruitment and retention worked. The actual size of the army was 40,000 in 1776, which is a more prosaic 1.6% of the population.

By that measure the revolutionary army is decently sized (1.6%), the civil war army is actually about the same size (3.2%, or 1.6% per belligerent).

In between the wars you effectively have no army, by percentage. With 20,000 men under arms before the Civil War that’s 0.06% of the population. The army we had on the declaration of WW1 was a little bit larger at 0.16%.

Contrast that to Prussia above which had 187,000 men under arms in 1776 and had a population of 9.7m in 1800, which yields over 2.0% at peace, and that’s fudging the numbers in your direction because I can’t find population totals for 1776, which would be quite a bit lower.

France has a population of about 30m during the napoleonic wars, and they pushed a peak of 1.2m Frenchmen into the field at once, which was 4% of their population.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. When other countries are tossing up armies an order of magnitude bigger and comprising more than double the proportion of their population, you don’t have a “large” army, you have a moderately sized army. Ditto when there are peace time armies larger than your war time armies.

This unstructured agglomeration of historical information is not a replacement for thought.

I tried to illustrate my point to the best of my ability, but this disappointing reply just highlights how absurd your narrative is.

There were large armies in Europe, but there was also a balance of power, and armies kept each other in check. Prussia could have an army of 187,000, but they could not commit a significant portion of their army to an American campaign without being invaded by their neighbors.

That's how a force that would be considered small by European standards of the time, could project significant military power circa 1776.

Be nice. Implying that I’m not thinking is rude.

I never said that the Americans didn’t have the correctly sized force for their situation, I in fact pointed out that our numerically small armies were partially explained by weak neighbors. I was disputing the idea that we had a “large” army, which we for certain did not. You are correct in pointing out that “large” is not the same as “effective”, but that wasn’t the point I was making.

You are correct that European powers would have a very hard time projecting power over the Atlantic. If you had said that America was highly capable of defense because of its army and the high logistical cost of mounting an invasion across the Atlantic in pre-modern times, I would agree with you whole heartedly. France’s disastrous invasion of Haiti would also be a nice example to back this theory up too. But you said “large” and large in this context is an absolute without other qualifications (unlike say “effective”), which can be examined numerically.

Large is a vague predicate.

What is large, exactly? If a large person was 1% smaller, would that person be still large? How doing this repeatedly and asking the same question each time?

In the context of North America in 1776, the American army was large. QED, have a good life.