Given the relative sizes of their economies, one might conclude that Russia would quake before the military might of Europe’s Nato members. Russia, the ninth-largest economy in the world, is up against the third, sixth, seventh and eighth in the shape of Germany, Britain, France and Italy.

Yet the reality is that, militarily, it is the other way around. Russia has the world’s second-strongest military, while France comes sixth, UK eighth, Italy tenth and Germany 12th. To put a few figures on it, Russia has 1.32 million active service personnel, 560 fighter aircraft and 3,941 tanks ready for deployment. For Britain, the corresponding figures are 141,000, 67 and 187; for France 264,000, 178 and 342; and Italy 165,000, 62 and 142.

As for Canada, it ranks a lowly 28th, despite being a G7 nation with the world’s tenth-largest economy. It has 63,000 troops, 50 fighter aircraft and 56 tanks – all to defend a landmass that is larger than that of the US. Looked at from a military perspective, it is not hard to see why Donald Trump is considering incorporating Canada into the US. After all, Canada’s vast Arctic frontier is virtually a demilitarised zone.

Simply counting people and kit does not give you an accurate comparison between Nato and Russia. What matters just as much is how quickly those forces can be deployed.

Germany is a case in point. Things have notionally improved somewhat since 2014 when German forces – under the ultimate control of the country’s then defence minister Ursula von der Leyen – were, for want of guns, forced to use broomsticks during an exercise of Nato’s Rapid Response Unit. The country now claims to have an army of 60,000 soldiers. However, in the opinion of the Military Review – the in-house journal of the US Army – no more than 10,000 are deployable and only 4,000 of them could be put into a sustained deployment. Just 1,000 are in a state of readiness to be put into service in Nato’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force.

France seems to be in a better position, as demonstrated when 10,000 soldiers were deployed on its streets following the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. But that is a very different business from deploying troops in a battlefield capacity. France, estimates the Military Review, could deploy two battalions within a week (a total of around 2,000 soldiers) and a heavy brigade (8,000) within a month.

A major problem for Nato is that its members have committed large amounts of their forces and equipment to peacekeeping operations around the world. In the event of a national emergency, how would France repatriate 2,000 men and mountains of military kit from Africa and other places where they are currently deployed? Unfortunately, Britain is the only European Nato member which has a fleet of super-heavy-lift transport aircraft.

Since 2022, Nato has worked around a New Force Model which divides forces personnel into three tiers: those which can be deployed within ten days, those which might be put into service in ten to 30 days and those which could be deployed within 30 to 180 days. The ambition is to have at least 100,000 troops in tier 1, 200,000 in tier 2 and at least 500,000 in tier 3. That is a big improvement on the Nato Response Force that preceded it, which was formed of 40,000 soldiers – but it is only the beginning of what would be needed to repel a Russian invasion of a Nato state.

Prior to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army is estimated to have amassed 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border. Russia has since seen 325,000 troops killed and lost a total of 1.2 million to death or injury, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Yet still it manages to fill its front lines.

The Russian army operates in much the same way that rabbits breed: if the numbers are high enough you don’t have to worry too much about how well individuals are protected. That is a very alien concept to western European countries, but somehow they must have an answer to the threat.