Good question!
It depends on a lot of factors:
- Casualty rates: have a big impact on the ability of the population or at least the military subsection of the population to reproduce itself. For example, think of how the extremely high casualty rates of WWI affected France’s war readiness in WWII.
- Population growth rates: if the population is growing quickly, it’s much easier for an army to “bounce back,” because you’re recruiting from an ever-larger base. Vice-versa, it’s a lot harder if the population is growing very slowly, because it’s harder to get back to where you were before the war.
- Overall population size: to use a famous historical example, one of the reasons why the Romans were so resilient and able to come back from unbelievable setbacks is that they were able to call upon both different economic classes of Rome and the populations of the whole of the Latin League to replace their losses.
- Economic productivity: in addition to fresh bodies, you need the ability to arm, equip, and supply those bodies so that they can fight effectively. The more productive your economy, the more you can do that, hence the U.S in WWII as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” producing most of the materiel not only for itself but also for the UK, the USSR, and the other allies.
- Social structures and customs: if your society is set up in such a way that only a small proportion of your population is allowed to fight, that obviously limits your ability to rebuild armies. For example, Sparta’s extremely oligarchical society meant that there were very few spartiates at the top of the social pyramids – thus the Spartans were extremely “brittle” and their empire collapsed after they lost a few battles and weren’t able to replace their manpower losses.
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