World military spending explodes
Global military spending is skyrocketing. The total spent on waging or preparing for war in 2024 was about US$2.7 trillion, 9.4 percent more in real terms than in 2023, according to the latest Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates. This is the biggest year-on-year increase since the institute began tracking world military expenditure in 1988.
The United States remains the world’s biggest spender, outlaying US$997 billion and accounting for 37 percent of the global total. China was a distant second, spending an estimated US$314 billion. The top five spenders (including Russia, Germany and India) account for 60 percent of the global total. The top fifteen countries, Australia included, all increased military spending and made up four-fifths of the global total, spending a combined US$2.1 trillion in 2024.
The spending growth is part of a longer-term trend. Last year was the tenth consecutive year of increases in global military expenditures, the total being 37 percent higher in real terms than in 2015.
While US military spending is more than triple that of China, Beijing’s ten-year real increase is nearly 60 percent, about triple America’s 19 percent. As tensions increase between the two biggest powers, other countries are marching in lockstep to hold their ground.
This includes Australia, where uncompromising allegiance to the US has been central policy for Labor and Liberal governments for decades. Australian military spending in 2024 was 25 percent higher than in 2015. However, the big increases associated with obtaining nuclear-powered submarines have yet to be felt. The government is set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars that should be spent on public housing, welfare and healthcare.
Europe’s trajectory is more dramatic. Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more than doubled their annual military expenditure in the last decade. Among them is Germany, which in one year has increased its military spending by 28 percent to US$88.5 billion, making it the biggest spender in Western Europe.
These trends will only continue. And it won’t be the wealthy footing the bill—it’ll come at the expense of social services and working-class living standards.
Only a fraction of the money being spent on weaponry would be needed to end world hunger (US$48 billion a year, according to the World Food Program) and provide universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation to 140 low- and middle-income countries (US$138 billion a year, according to the United Nations).
But capitalism’s priorities are elsewhere. British conservative columnist Janan Ganesh, in a March Financial Times opinion piece titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”, put it plainly: “[T]he welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal”.
Every dollar added to the world’s military budgets takes us closer to a potentially apocalyptic scenario of world war. The working classes of all countries have nothing to gain from this. The war drive must be resisted.
