In our NATO meetings we're at least a rank lower than our counterparts generally with much, much smaller teams and that includes the US. NZ seems to be about the same.
They absolutely get more done but it's still weird sometimes when you realize you are working as a 2 1/2 and when you talk to someone with similar responsibilities in the US they are a one star or something. The scope is bigger with a larger budget, but not that much bigger.
Definitely a lot of GO/FO bloat, but I think a lot of that is because we try and have all the same capabilities being worked on as a tier one military, except we use skeleton teams which can result in pretty questionable results. Other countries that are actually comparable seem to focus on much more specific and limited scope of things but resource them properly and do them very well.
I think if instead of trying to be able to field a fully self sustained independent force we picked some specific things for the army, air force and navy to focus on and dropped a lot of fluff we'd probably bring a lot more to the table in real terms than continuing to spread ourselves thin by trying to do everything, which results in a lot of compromises and some equipment that doesn't really do anything well, but can kind of do a lot of things a bit half assed.
CSC is probably a good example, we took a very good ASW platform and turned it into a destroyer that will also be doing ASW, interdictions, land bombardment etc etc (but without bunks to have people onboard to do it all at once anyway). Weirdly it's now way too top heavy and blown through weight margins before delivery, with a lot of passageways that look huge actually only one person wide when you see all the stuff jammed in there.
