Amid growing economic crisis in the United States, Britain and the European Union nations, and according to a new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), involvement of these countries in Ukraine war against Russia have compelled in massively increasing military spending, while the amount is expected to reach a record high this year and the subsequent years. Meanwhile, China and Russia also had to significantly increase their defense budget.
Global military investment reached an all-time high in 2022. With the war in Ukraine, several states decided to increase their defense spending or assured that they would allocate more resources to arming themselves, amid increasingly complex geopolitical scenarios.
According to SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program, “The continued rise in global military spending in recent years is a sign that we live in an increasingly insecure world. States are building up their military forces in response to the deteriorating security environment, which they do not expect to improve in the near future”.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report estimates that Russia’s military spending grew by 9.2 percent in 2022 to US$86.4 billion, equivalent to 4.1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2022 and 34 percent more than the country’s projected national budget.
On the other hand, Ukraine’s figures soared to unprecedented highs. In 2022, its military spending reached US$44 billion, a 640 percent increase over 2021 and what translates as the largest increase in a country’s military spending in a single year ever recorded by SIPRI data.
The US, in addition to being the world’s largest economy, is also the world’s biggest military spender, with figures that seem hard to match even for the second-and third-placed countries.
By 2022, the US has reached US$877 billion in military spending, almost 40 percent of global spending and at least three times the amount spent by China, which accumulates US$292 billion and ranks second.
In 2022, US financial aid to Ukraine amounted to US$19.9 billion, the largest amount of such aid granted to a single country in any year since the Cold War. But while the US investment was titanic, it actually represents only 2.3 percent of the country’s total spending, meaning that Washington invested domestically in many other military scenarios for its own benefit and security.
“The US spent US$295 billion on military operations and maintenance, US$264 billion on procurement and research and development, and US$167 billion on military personnel”, the report reads.
Behind the US and China come Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia, the latter with a 16 percent increase and 2022 was enshrined as the first increase in military spending since 2018.
Although the US takes first place in this ranking, it is the countries of Central and Western Europe that added the most to bring the world above US$2.4 trillion in military spending in 2022.
