Defense World’s Armed Forces Database (GAFD) is a research and reference almanac designed to provide instant access to data about armed forces’ all over the world such as forces structure, equipment in use, defense budgets and details of personnel strength.
The auto-installable CD has easy navigation with relevant a help menu on hand to guide you through the information you are seeking.

With GAFD, you can compare equipment inventories of different countries, find out which model of a specific hardware is in service with which force besides many other permutations and combinations. The results of your customized search and reference are displayed in a variety of graphical formats which you can integrate into your own reports and presentations.

How is GAFD different?

GAFD is based on Roboeditor^TM, an advanced dataming and relational database management technology developed by Defense World. Roboeditor^TM continuously crawls the internet looking for information relating to equipment, armed forces’ order of battle, acquisitions, budgets and many other parameters, which it then places into relevant databases. These databases are integrated by a powerful relational database management system enabling you to track equipment inventories and other details of armed forces all around the world.

What sets GAFD apart is its ability to find sources of relevant information on-the-fly and link them in a seamless manner to provide easy cross-referencing. Thus, customized comparisons, selective totaling and country and regional military balance can be easily viewed. Reports are generated in a tabular manner providing for easy assimilation into your own reports and presentations.

What data sources does GAFD draw information from?

The Armed Forces Database primarily relies upon on-line sources such as company press releases, announcements by ministries of defense and independent and freely available online sources of order of battle.

Once the data is obtained and placed into relevant databases by Roboeditor^TM, it is compared with offline sources whose data is fed into our database. As there could be several versions of a particular inventory number we rely on the Roboeditor^TM algorithm to arrive at the final number. This algorithm has been designed to give maximum importance to a direct source (such as a company press release or information given out by an MoD). The order of relevance drops depending upon the information source’s fidelity.

The inventory of a particular equipment as mentioned in the GAFD is different from what I read in an yearly publication of a leading defense publisher. Which one is correct?

Our data gathering and analysis is software driven with an algorithm working out the equipment inventory and other numbers. In cases where the information is clear (such as a company press release or an MoD announcement of equipment purchase), the GAFD is certainly more relevant than print publications. However in cases where there is no direct information, Roboeditor^TM arrives at a mean average. Some governments give out order of battle figures while some others do not part with such information. Therefore, any publication, including GAFD is severely hindered in its effort to report equipment numbers of nations which do not make public their order of battle. Where other publications make intelligent guesses, GAFD has devised an algorithm to arrive at insightful aggregations of the numbers.

How recent is GAFD data?

The GAFD 2007 contains data from January to December 2006. Relevant updates are added every day by our data mining software Roboeditor^TM. In some cases information relating to equipment or budgets may be older than 2005. This is because extensive datamining by Roboeditor^TM have not shown up any new updates.