Oh, look closely, they do have weapons, swords to be exact. And after each soldier did get a sword, they would still have over 38900 swords left, to ie. build a fence (with a 10 cm spacing that should be enough to cover about 3890 meter of compound/fort border) to protect against worlcats or enough swords to throw at worlcats ;-) or to have still a few spare swords in case each recruit/soldier somehow misplaces a sword or two (or 35). Eventhough they might really have to build a fence with that amount of swords, as I do not know if the armory of Fort Sera is big enough to store the remaining swords there, but that is Major Valkess problem and not the mc/pcs problem.
Fort Sera did - as I did manually keep track of it - get exactly 40k swords, which would be enough swords to outfit 8 roman legions (at times during the ancient roman empire, where the mansize of a legion was not over 5k)¹.
And just dumping the male captives there and donating 40k swords (eventhough I never knew that Imperial Arms had enough swords stockpiled to cover my demands ;-) ) did boost the power value to 2760 (which incidently is higher than the power rating of the Confederacy on its formation, which would be 2500). And the without power increase from filling up the standing meter, the donation of swords did boost the power value by 2000 points.
And then to boost the power value from 1000 to 2760 alone with money donations would have cost a few hundred million RD (raanic dollar). As 0+1+...+ 1759 = 1759*(1759+1)/2 = 1759*880 = 1547920 and each 100 RD giving a standfill increase (increase of the standing meter) of 1, a better lower bound for the amount of money would be 154,792,000+175,900,000 = 330,0692,000 RD.
ps. There is a litte disparity between donating money and weapons to a faction (which are best shown through the donation of swords). The same disparity exists for "merchs" and money (for the two factions to which merchs can be donated to), but at least the availability of the merchs is lower than the availability of swords. But it is GD-Studios decision, if the disparity is a problem or not and should be addressed at one point or not. And it also might display, that some players will not flood any market in Redhaven or Hamah Bay with weapons from workshops as they might flood different factions with them instead (provided they are clever enough to manufacture weapons that can be donated to a faction), so that market saturation will not solve some problems, eventhough the limiting the stockpile at the weapon stores (like Waltons and Imperial Arms) might solve somethings to a degree or also keeping track of how many weapons of a kind a faction has and only increasing the power value, if the amount of weapons is lower then the soldier count (in case of a weapon donation), but then in the case of manpower increase (and enough weapons are available at the faction) some additional power increases happens (but that are just random ideas). I will just use the available game mechanics - eventhough some might call it abuse of game mechanics (but that is a matter of perspective) - and if the behaviour is changed, it does get changed, if not, then I will continue to use these mechanics. And I do not see any reason to mention these mechanics again.
pps. I did reduce the buying delay at Imperial Arms as I did not want to spent about 11.11 hours of my life purchasing swords.
¹) mansize did vary, during Ceasars times the size of a legion was ie. 4800 men.