Visualizing America’s Dominance In Military Spending

June 4th, 2016

Awake Goy

It’s no secret that the United States Spends more on its military than any other country in the world by far. To help understand the context of just how massive the the US spending is, the following video from howmuch.net shows each country’s share of of total military spending for the last 25 years (1990-2015).

Citing Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data, howmuch was able to show the change in share of the world’s total for each country, and not surprisingly the United States has the largest share each and every year by a staggering amount. In dollar terms, based on 2014 constant USD, the US has gone from spending $555 billion in 1990 and having 37.1% of the share, to spending roughly $595 billion in 2015, which accounts for 34.4% of the global military spend. China, which comes in at a very distant second, spent an estimated $214 billion in 2015, which accounted for 12.4% of the global spend – but the important thing to note with China is that the $214 billion spent in 2015 represents an increase of 874% from 1990 when the country spent an estimated $22 billion on its military, which at that time was just 1.5% of the global total.

With everything going on in the South China Sea, imagine the Pentagon’s internal panic that China is putting an emphasis on military spending at time when the US is looking to reduce deficits (or so they say). How can the US possibly be in a position to take over whatever they feel like, defend themselves if it only outspends China by roughly $381 billion a year…

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h/t MarketWatch