Actually, you are correct. 20,000 is a pretty reasonable regular army size.
However a population, as you preject, of 1 million people would mean 500,000 males; if a quarter of thesemales were of suitable fighting age, then the figure of possible soldiers is 125,000. (I may be being slighty generous, or tight, here -- I don't know what the actual percentage of fighting-age men would actually be -- but for the purposes of this post I will use a quarter [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].)
Say half of these men are able to be (in a full mobilisation of the country's war machine) called up for service in the army, probably in its entirety over a period of at least several months, we have 62,500 that are able to raised to fight. (And this doesn't include the women, if we were to take Eowyn as an average example [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].)
(Ignore that last bit.)
This is just the reasoning I have used, don't know whether it would be viable or not... but although I realise 20,000 is a decent normal army size, I would have thought that in dire circumstances more could be found to fight.
I was probably being rather unrealistic at first, but I stand partially corrected and have edited myself. What do you think?
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