Wolfram|Alpha announced on June 1 that it had added information on army, navy, and air force personnel for over 150 countries as well as armament statistics (tanks, nuclear warhead stockpiles, etc.)

I wondered if this new data means you could now do a Wolfram|Alpha search for random army, but it doesn’t. However you can do country army requests and separate them with commas to get a table of results comparing army sizes. For example, you could search for South Korea army, North Korea army.

You’ll get a result page that compares several different data points, including total population, military population, military fit population, and military expenditures. This is interesting, but I liked
taking it a step further and comparing military statistics with non-military data. I could run this search: South Korea army, North Korea army, Luxembourg population and get data about the size of the armies of South and North Korea, and by comparison the Luxembourg population. In case you’re wondering, the population of North Korea’s army is over twice that of the country of Luxembourg.

You can also stack up several bits of data about the same countries and put those together in a table. I did a search for North Korea army, North Korea Population, North Korea GDP, South Korea army, South Korea population, South Korea GDP and got a table of information comparing the two countries. Note when you do a search this way you don’t get all available information about a country’s military.

Finally, you can also do military information math by using military statistics with other data. If I wanted to get the ratio of the population of South Korea to its military population, I could do a search like South Korea Population / South Korea Army and get the answer 86 — in other words, 86 people in the general population of South Korea for every member of the military. There’s also a chart showing how this number has changed over the last 210 years and how it is expected to change over the next 40.

As I’m discovering more and more with Wolfram|Alpha, the data itself is of secondary interest to discovering all the new and interesting ways you can divvy it up.