World Wide Military Spending

“I was a racketeer for capitalism” — Major General S. Butler, the most highly decorated U.S. marine in history

War is a very lucrative business - the highest paying next to the drug trade. Huge profits are made: arms dealing, acquisition of resources, and the like place billions upon billions of dollars into the hands of a few. If a millions upon millions of people die in the process, well, such collateral damage is unfortunate.

“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.” — Albert Einstein

The United States and its allies account for roughly 83% of the entire world’s total military expenditures.
- (Update 1 - the figure is now at 85%.)
- (Update 2 - the figure is now at 87%.)
The U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone have cost taxpayers in excess of $2 trillion at time of writing, and are projected to exceed $4.4 trillion within two more years
Up to 64% (depending on source) of its total GNP is funnelled in to its military operations.
These percentages has been steadily climbing since the second world war, particularly in the last decade.
Not Included in these percentages are military contracts to private corporations below $1M, and vast arms trade in which the U.S. engages.
U.S. spending on its Middle East wars is per annum more than all of its states combined put into health, education, welfare, and safety for their citizens.
U.S. military spending at time of writing is roughly $50,000,000 per hour. If we add the current Pentagon budget, nuclear weapons budget, NASA’s military budget, foreign military aid budget, veterans’ benefits budget, interest on debt for past wars, regime change budgets, and several other military-related budgets [P] [P] And air conditioning - the U.S. military spent $20,200,000,000 per year on air conditioning during its invasion of Iraq and Afgahnistan. from DARPA research through to the X-37B, SR-71 and similar space weaponry budgets... the United States spends in excess of a million dollars a minute on war. Good for them
- 1 in 7 of U.S. citizens lives in poverty
- 1 in 6 U.S. children lives in poverty - the highest rate of child poverty of any industrialized nation in the world
- the U.S. population has thelowest literacyrateof any industrialized nation with a crumbling educational infrastructure
- Malaria could be completely eliminated from the world for the cost of a mere few hours worth of this expense.
- Every person in Africa effected by AIDS could have pain medication, life extending drugs, and clean clothing for just a few more hours of military spending indulgence.
- There would be no more poverty in North America.
- Every child on the planet could have sufficient education to be able to read.
- Every person in the world could have free fresh clean water in perpetuity
- According the the United Nations, one month’s worth of U.S. military spending would completely eradicate the current mass starvation in many countries
Over £647,147,795 (roughly $1.2 trillion USD) of taxpayer monies has recently been spent by the United States on internal (within the continental U.S.) security initiatives and proping up the security state they have created, each and every year. This has made the anti-terrorism industry is one of the largest industries in the world, and it is an industry that is growing exponentially. It is effective? Yes - in exactly the same manner that placing dill pickles around Whitehall protects it from tigers. No tigers in the building? Then our dill pickles must be working. Need to sell more pickles? Issue a yellow alert, and amber alert, a red alert based upon secret not-publically-available “evidence” that tigers have been stirring. Sigh... sales of dill pickles have made their manufacturers and the several law makers who coincidently are former CEOs of pickle companies very, very rich. What if the government had not spent taxpayer money on pickles? What would the money buy instead? Some examples:
- 63,300,000 scholarships for university students every year for ten years
- free health care for 58,900,000 low income children every year for ten years
- Give 23.6 Million People Access To Low-Income Healthcare Every Year For Ten Years
- retrofit 69,400,000 homes with wind power every year for ten years removing dependance upon oil
- and oh, so very much more which would actually be of real benefit to people ...
The priorities and motivations of those in power may be, as they have been throughout history, questionable:
- "In the Pentagon ... one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. ’Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq’, he said [this was well before the U.S. invasion of that country]. But there was more. ’This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan’, he said, and ’there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan....’” (U.S. General Wesley Clark, “Winning Modern Wars”, pp. 130).

Please note: The numbers publically available for military spending by the U.S. do not include so-called ’black-ops’, space weaponization, spending on mercenary troops, SOCOM activities, spy drone and armed robot development and deployment, covert wars (eg. in Columbia, Darfur, etc.), or weapons spending. It has been estimated that where these numbers included then actual spending would make up 73% of U.S. GNP. In other words, the U.S. economy has been alleged to be a war-based economy.

"What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap... between the government and the people. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting.
It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ’crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ’national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ’regretted,’ that... one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.
One day it is over his head. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. But the one great shocking occasion... never comes. That’s the difficulty." - Milton Mayer (1908-1986) on the Nazi takeover of Germany [1]

Sources:

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Military Expenditure Project [Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo and Elisabeth Sköns, principle authors
United Nations Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries
US General Accounting Office
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Congressional Research Service
CIA Word Fact Book
U.S. Census Bureau
US Department of Defense Discretionary Budget Requests
Institute for Peace and Justice
Friends (Quakers) Committee on National Legislation
Federation of American Scientists: Military Analysis Network
United Nations War Crimes Commission
United Nations Human Development Reports
United States Census Bureau
United States Department of Defence Base Structure Report
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (numerous reports)
Médecins Sans Frontières
Democracy Now and Amnesty International: serveral reports on mercinary armies
Arms Control Center reports
many others

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” — D. Eisenhower, former U.S. president