Merely adding up all U. S. forces and comparing them with Soviet Forces, actual or potential, present or future, does not really tell one very much.
In fact, as we shall see in the next section, most attempts to explicitly measure military power are mere tabulations of forces of various sorts: the numbers of men underarms, the number of weapons of a given type, etc. This is in itself an evasion of the problem since it says nothing about the actual capabilities of the forces of one country to deal with another.
While the group of real strategists at RAND probably never numbered more than about 25 people, the overall quality, in sheer intelligence and intellectual breadth, is simply astonishing.