The paper is devoted to the comparative analysis of foreign military theoreticians’ works by the Russian military historian, statistician, one of the founders of “The Russian school” of military statistics and future Minister for War and reformer Dmitrii A. Milutin in his fundamental two-volume work “First Experiments in Military Statistics”. The works which dealt with descriptions of state armed forces in the 18th – the first half of the 19th centuries lacked a complex approach in the study of the state military potential. Later, the work “First Experiments in Military Statistics” became one of the main research works in the Imperial Military Academy – a forge of military academic cadres of the Russian Empire as well as a manual and a theoretical foundation of the methodology of military statistical studies based on positivism.