Raenir Salazar posted:

The way I imagine it should work is that when you go to war you have some sort of subsystem to pass War Time wars to raise funds, expand the army etc that similar to the policies in Hoi4 only become available due to high jingoism/revanchism or because you're at war; but once you're out of the war there needs to be a political or economic pressure to start a draw down until your tech/laws/etc get to the point you can keep that expansion going (like the European states engaging in an arms race and Germany/UK passing social welfare reforms to have the political support and healthy population to sustain that build up).

The US historically demobilized quite significantly after each conflict keeping an easily expandable core of officers and NCOs which is somewhat of a special case but that can be modeled by the US's interest groups/pops being firmly anti-military until around WW1 to force that sort of elastic snapback to the pre-war normal.