Editorial policy

Who publishes ForceTally

ForceTally is published by ProRank Ltd, a company based in the United Kingdom. Advertising on the site does not affect which figures are published or how countries rank: rankings are calculated from the published figures by the formula in the methodology, and no rank is set by hand.

What we cover

Military equipment in service today, or in development, production or on order, and the armed forces of 198 countries. Historical equipment and civilian products are not covered, even when an armed force operates them.

Sources

Specifications are looked up in this order, stopping at the first source that gives the figure:

1. the English Wikipedia article;
2. the Wikipedia article in the language of the country of origin, and Wikidata;
3. the manufacturer’s own product page or data sheet;
4. the operating force’s page or a defence ministry fact sheet;
5. one specialist defence reference.

Holdings come from national equipment lists and reference works. A count taken from a Wikipedia list is labelled as such and dated by the source the list cites. News reports, press releases and procurement announcements are not used for specifications.

Checks before a figure is published

• The figure must appear in the passage quoted from its source. Each one stores that passage with the source’s address, the date it was retrieved, where in the source it appears, its unit and what it measures, such as a length with or without the gun.
• Units are converted and checked, and figures with different scopes are never compared as if they were the same.
• No figure is written from memory or copied from a sibling version of the same equipment.
• A field the sources do not give is left empty only after every source above has been tried, and the page says how many were checked.

Photographs and 3D models

The equipment must be the main subject of its photograph, and every photograph passes a subject check before it is shown. The image policy explains how photographs are chosen and credited. 3D models are scaled to the equipment’s sourced dimensions and compared with photographs of the real equipment before they are published.

Keeping figures current

Sources are checked again as they change. When a source gives a newer dated figure, it replaces the current one, and the earlier figure stays in the country’s change history with its own source. A figure dated only by when it was retrieved never replaces a dated one.

Corrections

Signed-in readers can challenge any figure from its source button with a replacement value and the evidence for it. Each challenge is reviewed, and a corrected figure is published with its new source while the old one stays in the history. You can also report a mistake, a photograph credit or a rights concern by email; see Contact.