Military Spending Continues to Grow

By Tom Kando
Read this and cry: According to the annual report of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute,(SIPRI), the world’s governments spent a combined total of $1.46 trillion on defense in 2008. Despite the worldwide recession, defense spending rose by 4% from 2007 in real dollars, and by 45% over the past 10 years.
Military spending declined briefly after the end of the Cold War. However, it underwent a gigantic increase after 9/11. Under President Bush, US military spending rose to the highest level since World War Two.

The US share of world military spending is 42%. The war on terror has also caused other countries to increase military spending.

Other rising regional superpowers are also contributing to the steady increase in world military spending. In 2008, China became, for the first time, the world’s second most powerful military power. Last year, China’s military budget rose by 15%, to $$46 billion. Over the past 19 years, China’s military budget has increased by more than 10% every single year.

The world economic recession has no impact on the amount of money countries devote to defense (NRC Handelsblad, June 10, 2009).

I suppose this calls for some comments. But what is there to say? Some will argue that the numbers prove America’s exceptional culpability (42% of the world total). Others will say that this is as it should be: There are terrorists and other bad guys out there, so we have no other choice than to defend ourselves and to be strong. Someone has to be the world’s cop, right?

Then there is the euphemistic fraudulence, unmasked long ago by George Orwell: Nowadays it’s always called “defense,” right? A century ago, governments were at least a bit more honest. It was called the Ministry of War, not the Ministry of Defense.

Calling aggression self-defense is old hat. Hitler was only the best-known practitioner of this, as when he justified the invasion of Poland by claiming that Poland was attacking Germany.
Orwell’s future governments went a step further, calling them Ministries of Peace. But we are already there. Countries nowadays engage in Police Actions, they dispatch Peace Keeping Forces, and they fire missiles called “Peace Keepers.” The killing of hundreds of women, babies and other non-combatants is called collateral damage.

And another thing: The countries which can afford it the least are the ones which spend the most on the military. Here are some rankings, from the World Fact Book:

Middle Eastern countries spend the highest percentage of their GDP on the military, namely between 9% and 11%
Israel is also high: 7%
Next are a host of African countries: 5% to 6.5%
China: 4.3%
The US and Russia: about 4%
France: 2.6%
Germany: 1.5%
Most other European countries: 0% (Iceland) to 1%
Japan: .8%leave comment here