Arms spending is up! Among the rich and rising great powers--quelle surprise!
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 12:09AM 
I'm too sexy for my hurt
A Guardian story by way of WPR's Media Roundup.
SIPRI, the arms-spending-tracking think tank out of Stockholm, says global defense spending is up almost 50% over the past decade, so a more dangerous world right?
Except when you examine the details, it's all so underwhelming.
Global defense spending peaked in the late 1980s and then dropped dramatically over the 1990s, picking back up around the turn of the century and eventually equally the late 1980s total in the latter years of the last decade. That means we spent two decades getting back to the late Cold War total.
How did we do this as a planet? Well, the bulk of that additional spending was by the U.S. (more than half). The rest was almost all by rising powers like India, China, Turkey, etc.--nothing out of the historical norm there.
So you look at the top spenders and unless you can sustain the fantasy of America taking on its banker (China), this is simply a cash of the rich getting richer.
Meanwhile, the 65-year moratorium on great-power non-war holds as steady as ever, despite our collective navigation of the worst financial crisis in modern globalization's history. State-on-state war remains historically low, and our primary problems remain terrorists and civil strife.
SIPRI's report admits as much:
Only six of the biggest armed conflicts last year concerned territority, with 11 fought over the nature and makeup of a national government, according to Sipri's report. It said that only three of the 30 big conflicts over the past decade were between states.
My, what a dangerous world. Rich, largely uninvolved rising great powers are bulking up their militaries, while rich-but-aging Western powers are spending precious coin on COIN. All that tells me is that we need to get the free-riders to pay for their ride.
Reader Comments (2)
AMEN!! Free riding is something that I wish would be addressed more at the State Department level. I too have been saying this for quite some time. If foreign nations have an interest in a region where the US providing security then it is time for those nations to step up with their military capabilities to help secure the region as well in order to protect or advance their economic interests.
Felt a little depressed today, my usual tie resources to security and make them all pay their way argument got a bit a a pasting over at Exum's blog,but now I feel a little better.
Free riders, with us for a long time, and damn it more must be done to get them to pay the ferryman.
And as always Tom, thanks for the eternal optimism. Damn refreshing.