Remember:
Midtguardia's origins stem from a military unit suffering a treachery by the powers that be, overcoming this and carving out their existence through sheer military persistance. The earstwhile commander of this unit and his hiers using all of their considerable wealth and family connections to care fore the people and ensure their well beeing and security.
This makes for a strong military tradition, and a loyal population with a good recogning of the countrys history and a vivid understanding of the necessaty of a strong and alert defence, thereby ensuring a willingness to participate in the countrys defence that passes that of the ordinary democracy by the power of magnitude. This allows for a professional defence force of approx 5% of the population.
These professionals are mainly used as cadre and as techicians and frontline troops manning the complex weapon systems, while the reservists, adding up to another 15% of the population, are used in all other aspects. I think I have established the necessary personell supply.
As for education, yes, the Midtguardian education system is thin on many parts, but there is a university with a technical education path producing engineers. For the more specialized military technical skills, we send our people to schools in the UK and, for aviation, to the US. To some extent, we also employ expatriots.
Now for the budgetary questions. Midtguardia is an industialized country. It has its own computor industry, although not exporting. We have a thriving financial industry with banking, insurance and corporate finance on the international scale, partly a legacy of Midtguardias benevolent veiws on jew refugees just before and during WWII, partly due to tax incentives on capital placement and rules to some extent comparable to the so-called tax havens.
In addition, Midtguardia has natural rescources in the form of some oil and rich iron ore rescources, the latter beeing the reason for Midtguardias thriving mining operations and steel production, much of which is exported.
Midtguardia has its own electricity production (waterfall) of which some is exported, its own fishery industry that makes us more or less self sufficient in this aspect, but we do rely heavily on imports as to the more advanced foodstuffs, consumer goods and heavy machinery.
There is a chemical plant, complementing the steel works, that has some exports and of coarse the international merchant fleet. Finally there is a large brewery that exports beer to most corners of the world.
When the income from these industries and natural rescources are coupled with the ruling families traditional defence spending from their extensive international business holding incomes, I beleive we have enough dough to keep our guys in curry.
Of coarse, the US and Germany would, in real life, never sell anything to Midtguardia. Then again, Midtguardia would not excist where it does. This is the conditions neceassary to conduct this simulation at all. The complexities of procurement in the real world is, in this scenario, represented by the scarcity of models avaliable on the market, and the budgetary limitations represented by the amount of money I can afford to spend on models. Please bear in mind, the military competes with civilian priorities in the model world as well.
