Military expenditures - percent of GDP: 1.2% (FY98)

Leadership
Commander-in-Chief:	Daniel Ortega
Personnel
Active personnel:	14,000 (Ranked 105th)
Military age population:	males age 17-49: 1,309,970 females age 17-49: 1,315,186
Total fit for service:	males age 17-49: 1,051,425 females age 17-49: 1,129,649
Reaching military age annually:	males age 18-49: 65,170 females age 17-49: 63,133
Military age:	18-49 years old
Service law:	Conscription law was abolished in 1990.
Industry
Annual spending:	32 million (Ranked 139th)
Percent of GDP spent on military:	0.7% (2006 est.) (Ranked 150th) Dollar Figure (per capita) $4.76

History of army

National Guard 1927-1979

The long years of strife between the liberal and conservative political factions and the existence of private armies led the United States to sponsor the National Guard as an apolitical institution to assume all military and police functions in Nicaragua. The marines provided the training, but their efforts were complicated by a guerrilla movement led by Augusto César Sandino that continued to resist the marines and the fledgling National Guard from a stronghold in the mountainous areas of northern Nicaragua.

Upon the advent of the United States Good Neighbor Policy in 1933, the marines withdrew. Having reached strength of about 3,000 by the mid-1930s, the guard was organized into company units, although the Presidential Guard component approached battalion size. Expanded to more than 10,000 during the civil war of 1978-79, the guard consisted of a reinforced battalion as its primary tactical unit, a Presidential Guard battalion, a mechanized company, an engineer battalion, artillery and antiaircraft batteries, and one security company in each of the country's sixteen departments.

The National Guard's main arms were rifles and machine guns, later augmented by antiaircraft guns and mortars. Nicaragua declared war on the Axis powers in 1941, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although Nicaragua was not actively involved in World War II, it qualified for United States Lend-Lease military aid in exchange for U.S. base facilities at Corinto. Additional shipments of small arms and transportation and communication equipment followed, as well as some training and light transport aircraft. United States military aid to the National Guard continued under the Rio de Janeiro Treaty of Mutual Defense (1947), but stopped in 1976 after relations with the administration of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967-72, 1974-79) worsened. Some United States equipment of World War II vintage was also purchased from other countries--Staghound armored cars and M4 Sherman medium tanks from Israel and F-51 Mustang fighter aircraft from Sweden.Except for minor frontier skirmishes with Honduras in 1957 over a border dispute, the National Guard was not involved in any conflict with its neighbors. The guard's domestic power, however, gradually broadened to embrace not only its original internal security and police functions but also control over customs, telecommunications, port facilities, radio broadcasting, the merchant marine, and civil aviation.