Defense Spending: Parsing the Numbers

If you listen carefully, you can hear a rumbling in the distance.  It’s the first salvos in an old debate about defense spending.  There are those who think spending is too high and needs to be cut to pay for other priorities, whether they are domestic programs or other non-kinetic means of national power.  There are those who think spending is too low, who think that increased defense spending will help stimulate the economy.  Finally, there are those who don’t really have an opinion and just want facts.

This post is the first in a series intended for this last group: people with an open mind who aren’t slaves to ideology or predetermined solutions, who understand that national security is a critical function of government, and is defined by more than just our ability to blow things up.

To begin this dialogue, I went back to basics.  I adopted a chart of the top-ten spenders on defense from the SIPRI Yearbook, 2008, and supplemented it with some GDP numbers from the CIA World Factbook.

The following charts tell a story:

1.  The United States dwarfs every other nation in terms of the money it spends on national defense.

2.  The United States accounts for 45% of global spending on national defense.  The next closest competitor is the United Kingdom–at 5%.

3.  The United States spends more per citizen on defense than any other country in the world.

4.  Finally, for those who believe that a percentage of GDP is a valid way to measure the necessary level of defense spending, here’s how America’s GDP stakes up against the world’s–and how that translates into the percentage of our GDP we spend for defense.

These are the numbers.  As the debate about defense spending unfolds in the coming weeks and months, we’ll see a lot of different takes on what constitutes the appropriate level of spending for our national defense.  (This doesn’t even begin to touch the issue of our investment in national security–and how to balance among the elements of national power.)  But let’s not lose site of this fact: the United States spends more on defense than nearly the rest of the world combined.

People who know me know that I’m not advocating massive reductions in defense spending.  But I am suggesting it’s time to think very carefully about how we invest in national security.  Any such consideration must begin with the facts.

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