The military force of the Triple Alliance…

The military force of the Triple Alliance had been inferior at the beginning of the war to that of Paraguay, which includes—according to some historians—more than sixty thousand well-trained men—thirty-eight thousand of whom are currently under arms—and a naval squadron of twenty-three steamboats (vapores) and five river-navigating ships, based around the Tacuarí, a gunboat.

Its artillery includes about four hundred cannons.

However, recent studies have shown a different picture.

Although the Paraguayan army has somewhere between seventy thousand and one hundred thousand men at the beginning of the conflict, they are badly equipped.

Most of the infantry armaments consist of inaccurate smoothbore muskets and carbines, slow to reload and with short range.

The artillery is similarly in bad shape.

Military officers have no training or experience and there is no command system, as all decisions are made by López.

Food, ammunition and armament are scarce and logistics and hospital care are deficient, if existent at all.

The armies of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay are a fraction of the size of the Paraguayan forces.

Argentina has approximately eighty-five hundred regular troops and a naval squadron of four vapores and one goleta.

Uruguay had entered the war with fewer than two thousand men and no navy.

Many of Brazil's sixteen thousand troops are located in its southern garrisons.

The Brazilian advantage, though, is in its navy: forty-two ships with two hundred and thirty-nine cannons and about four thousand well-trained crew.

A great part of the squadron had already met in the Rio de la Plata basin, where it had acted, under the Marquis of Tamandaré, in the intervention against Aguirre.

Brazil, however, had been unprepared to fight a war, its army unorganized.

The "troops" used in the interventions in Uruguay had been composed merely of the armed contingents of gaucho politicians and some National Guard staff.

The Brazilian infantry who fight in the Paraguayan War are not professional soldiers but volunteers, the so-called Voluntários da Pátria.

The army is heavily recruited from the landless, largely black, underclass.

The cavalry has been formed from the National Guard of Rio Grande Do Sul.

From the end of 1864 to 1870, about one hundred and forty-six thousand Brazilians will fight in the war, while eighteen thousand members of the National Guard will stay behind in Brazilian territory to defend it.

The Brazilian forces actively engaged in the war consist of ten thousand and twenty-five army soldiers stationed in Uruguayan territory in 1864, two thousand and forty-seven that are in the province of Mato Grosso, fifty-five thousand nine hundred and eight-five Fatherland Volunteers, sixty thousand and nine National Guards, eighty-five hundred and seventy ex-slaves who had been freed to be sent to war, and nine thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven navy personnel.