>>Whoah, I just heard on the news that the Brits are sending 1/4 of their military (26,000 troops) to Iraq. That is commitment. A few things jump to mind:
>Thats just the army, the total armed forces personnel in the region will be 35000
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,879101,00.html
>
>>- must be very expensive
>Very - back in November there were reports that finance ministry officials had suggested that we could not afford to become involved to the degree that the US wanted.
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/02/nirq02.xml
>
>>- is this a national security risk?
>Possibly - another risk is that at present the army are having to provide emergency cover during a pay dispute with our fire service.
>
>>- I thought they would have more mililtary that that.
>Total military (Army-Navy-Air Force) is double that, figures are here :
>http://www.mod.uk/aboutus/factfiles/numbers.htm

That page doesn't separate active duty and reserves, so it's hard to gauge the real impact of the numbers. Taking the 205,700 military personnel, it works out to about a third of one percent of your total population of around 60M. That's rather low. The US is at around 0.7%, I would guess, maybe not counting reserves, the national guard, and civilian employees. Typically a country can get to around 1% without conscription, as I think we did in the '80s.