World's powerful militaries: India at four beats arch-rival Pakistan hands-down

In the list released by the Global Firepower Index 2021, India ranked in the fourth position, just below the US, Russia and China.

Pakistan ranked in the 10th position in the list, highlighting the military superiority which India holds over its arch-rival nation.

The Global Firepower ranked the armies of 138 countries in its list.

Bhutan ranked at the bottom of the list.

Perched up between the behemoths of China and India, the kingdom prefers to keep minimal reserve forces of just two helicopters and 23 armored vehicles at an annual defense budget of just $19 million.

The United States retained the top spot with Russia a close second in the 2021 Military Strength Ranking by independent defense analytics website Global Firepower.

In an annually updated list of 138 nations’ military strength based on disclosed statistics across over 50 individual factors, Global Firepower showed no changes from the previous year in the top nine foremost militaries.

Using a special formula that squares off differences in nations' sizes to objectively compare militaries, the analyst devised the PwrIndx score, where 0.000 is the perfect score and higher scores mean weaker military force.

The US military came in at 0.0721 and Russia scored 0.0796 at the top of the scoresheet, as China came in third with 0.0858 on the PwrIndx.
This is despite the fact that Russia’s annual military budget is less than 1/16th of the US’ mammoth $740-billion budget and about a quarter of the Chinese equivalent.

In military budgets, the US outranks the next 10 countries combined, with China spending the second most at $178 billion. Russia ranks 11th in spending, outlaying $42 billion on military needs, according to Global Firepower. 

Global Firepower says the data was accrued through publicly disclosed information provided by the Defense Ministries of the respective countries.