GINC Defence is a directory of each nation’s national security structure and the platforms its forces hold. It is an evidence layer: every figure on the site is a claim with a source, and the measures on it are worked out from those claims. It holds no strength score and ranks no nation. The GINC ratings, when they use this directory, will do that elsewhere.
Two layers
The structure. Each nation’s national security apparatus, always from the head of state down: the head of state (level 0); the head of government and cabinet where they are separate (level 1); the governing bodies of the security apparatus, such as the defence ministry, the intelligence coordinator, the interior ministry where it owns a gendarmerie or domestic service, the presidency or a supreme leader’s office where a force reports to it (level 2); the services and agencies (level 3); the major commands (level 4); and the major formations (level 5). Levels 0 to 2 are the same bodies, with the same identifiers, as on government.ginc.org. The structure covers every domain of national security in the GINC framework: the armed forces, intelligence, space, cyber and internal security forces with a military role.
The equipment. A catalogue of platform types (families, their variants and, for ships and submarines, the named vessels) and each nation’s holdings of them, linked to the formations that operate them where that is published.
The taxonomy
Six domains (Land, Sea, Air, Space, Strategic, Cyber and C4ISR) and their categories, in a fixed order, each mapped to its NCF capability and crosswalked to the Military Balance and SIPRI categories so that figures can be compared with theirs without copying either. Every platform has exactly one primary category; a platform seen in more than one is cross-listed. A platform is placed by the most specific evidence available, in order: the role column of the list it appears in, its Wikidata classes and description, then the section of the list it sits under. The categories and the patterns that place a platform in each are on the platforms page. The taxonomy is at version 0.1 and is not locked: the first pass reports which categories are empty or overloaded, and it will be pruned or split on that evidence.
Small arms, ammunition, individual equipment, munitions (missiles, bombs and shells counted as rounds) and soft-skinned vehicles are out of scope.
The display rule
A nation’s holding of a platform is recorded once per source: every source’s figure is kept. The figure shown is chosen by rule, never averaged:
- the most recent official figure, where the nation publishes an inventory (the United Kingdom, France, Germany in part, the United States in part and Australia in part);
- else the most recent Wikipedia equipment list;
- else SIPRI’s delivered total, if the last delivery was in 1990 or later and the platform has not been retired. SIPRI’s figures for missile systems count missiles, not launchers, so for those the site shows that the platform is held, with no count.
Where Wikipedia counts a family’s variants separately, SIPRI’s total for the family is not shown beside them, so that the two are not added together.
Confidence
Each figure carries a confidence: high for an official figure, medium for a Wikipedia or SIPRI figure, low for an approximate one (“about 200”, “200+”) and for a holding with no count. Counts for Iran, North Korea and Taiwan are low by default unless an official or SIPRI figure exists, and the site shows them as a range (the figure less and more 30 per cent), not a point.
Headcount
Headcount (active personnel) sizes the force fingerprint, so it was gathered with the structure. Sources, in order of preference: official personnel statistics, white papers and annual reports; parliamentary and budget documents; Wikipedia, recorded as an estimate. The World Bank’s armed forces personnel total is shown beside it as a check. A body whose headcount is not published is drawn at minimum width and hatched, so the gap is visible. Intelligence agencies will usually be hatched; that is the point.
Sensitivity rules
- Acknowledged bodies only. A body appears only if a statute, official site, white paper or parliamentary report acknowledges it, and the record says which. Nothing is inferred from leaks, press speculation or defector accounts. Where a state does not acknowledge part of its apparatus, the nation page says so in a known-unknowns note rather than guessing.
- Intelligence agencies. Name, native name, parent, statutory basis, founding year, a one-sentence public mandate, website, and headcount or budget only where officially published. No directorates, locations, capabilities or operations beyond what the agency itself publishes.
- Specifications stop at what Wikipedia, Wikidata and the manufacturer publish. No performance data from other sources, no operational locations, no basing.
- Strategic systems. Warhead counts and strategic delivery systems carry SIPRI or FAS attribution and nothing else. Counts of strategic missiles from any other source are kept in the database but shown as presence only. Everything in the Strategic domain is on a review list before publication.
- Contested designations (the Shahed-136 and the Russian-built Geran-2) are two platforms joined by a relation, never merged.
Origins and allies
A platform’s origin is its Wikidata country of origin, else the origin column of the lists it appears in. For the origin highlight, a supplier is domestic if it is the nation itself (a Soviet-origin platform counts as domestic for Russia), allied if the two share an alliance or a bilateral defence treaty or designation (NATO, AUKUS, Five Eyes, CSTO, the EU mutual defence clause, and the bilateral treaties listed in ref/alliances.yaml), and otherwise other foreign.
Measures
All worked out at build time from the display figures: active personnel by service and domain, reserves, personnel per 1,000 population, headcount coverage; active platforms by domain and category, platforms held, supplier count; fleet age (median and interquartile year in service, weighted by count); supplier concentration (the Herfindahl index of origin nations across active platforms); domestic share; the modernisation ratio (on order against active); the generation mix within fighters, tanks and submarines; and, for the nine nuclear states, warheads from the SIPRI Yearbook.
Precision
How far the Wikipedia equipment lists can be trusted is measured, not assumed: their counts are checked against the five published official inventories, and against SIPRI’s delivered totals for the other 19 nations. The figures are below.