Global military expenditure recorded its steepest increase in over a decade last year, reaching an all-time high of US$2.4 trillion as wars and rising tensions fueled spending across the world, researchers said yesterday.
Military spending rose across the globe with particularly large increases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, according to a new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
“Total military spending is at an all-time high ... and for the first time since 2009, we saw spending increase across all five geographical regions,” SIPRI senior researcher Nan Tian said.
Photo: Bloomberg
Military spending rose by 6.8 percent last year, the “steepest year-on-year increase since 2009,” the report said.
“It’s a reflection of the deterioration of peace and security around the world. There’s really not a region in the world where things have gotten better,” Tian said.
The US, China, Russia, India and Saudi Arabia were the top five spenders respectively.
The continuation of the war in Ukraine led to an increase in spending by Ukraine, Russia and “a whole host” of European nations, Tian said.
Russia boosted spending by 24 percent to US$109 billion last year, according to SIPRI’s estimates.
Since 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, the nation’s military spending has risen by 57 percent.
Ukraine’s military spending rose by 51 percent, reaching US$64.8 billion, but the nation also received US$35 billion in military aid, of which the majority came from the US, meaning the combined aid and spending equaled over nine-10ths of Russia’s spending.
Tian said that while Moscow’s and Kyiv’s overall budgets were relatively close last year, Ukraine’s military spending equaled 37 percent of its GDP and 58 percent of all government spending.
By contrast, in Russia, which has a larger economy, military spending amounted to just 5.9 percent of its GDP.
“So the room for Ukraine to increase its spending is now very limited,” Tian said.
In Europe, Poland recorded the largest increase in military spending by far, up by 75 percent to US$31.6 billion.
Spending also rose across the Middle East, where Israel — the region’s second-largest spender — recorded a 24 percent increase to US$27.5 billion — mainly driven by the nation’s offensive in Gaza in response to last year’s Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.
Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s largest spender, also upped its spending by 4.3 percent to an estimated US$75.8 billion.
The US — which spends more on its military than any other nation — increased spending by 2.3 percent to US$916 billion.
China boosted spending on its military for the 29th straight year, raising it by another 6 percent to an estimated US$296 billion.
Beijing’s military buildup and worsening tensions in the region have prompted its neighbors to dedicate more funds to their militaries.
Taiwan spent US$16.6 billion and Japan US$50.2 billion last year, an increase of 11 percent for both nations. The world’s fourth-largest spender, India, hiked spending by 4.3 percent to US$83.6 billion.
In Central America and the Caribbean, spending increases were instead driven by other struggles, such as fighting organized crime.
The Dominican Republic upped spending by 14 percent in response to worsening gang violence in neighboring Haiti spilling over the border.
Africa also saw military budgets swell.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo increased its spending 105 percent to US$794 million, the largest percentage increase of any nation, as tensions grew with neighboring Rwanda.
With an increase of 78 percent, South Sudan recorded the second-largest increase, to US$1.1 billion.
With the war in Ukraine being “nowhere close to an end,” as well as the current situation in the Middle East and heightened tensions in Asia, Tian said he believed nations were likely to continue boosting their militaries.
“The expectation is that this increasing trend will continue for at least a few years to come,” he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS