Winter’s Haven

The Economist magazine presents some useful data on military spending by the world’s biggest powers. Per person, Israel spends the most on its military, followed by the United States. Most developed states spend less than half of what the US does per person.

However, if one asks how much a state ought to spend on defense, the answer is determined not by how many citizens it has. The correct way to go about answering that question is to examine the magnitude of the external threats one faces and buy guns in proportion to those threats. There’s no reason military spending should scale linearly with a state’s population.

Israel is a perfect example. There’s a very good reason for Israel to spend a lot of money on its military: its neighbors have attacked it in the past and might very well want to do so again.

The United States spends $607 billion on its military each year. That’s 41.5% of all the military expenditures in the world. Spending that much might be perfectly sensible if we were worried about, say, being simultaneously attacked by Russia, China, and all of Europe. Or space aliens.

Yes, I’m being flippant. But the fact is, outside of loony conspiracy theories full of blue-helmeted stormtroopers and flying saucers, there’s simply no justification for spending $607 billion on defense.

This entry was posted 2009-Jun-12 and is filed under Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.