The Economist: The World's Biggest Military Spenders by Population | Hacker News Reader

The Economist: The World's Biggest Military Spenders by Population

economist.com

47 pointsComputerGuru35 comments

The US's dominant roll in NATO makes this graph misleading. For decades, Europe has essentially had a subsidized military through alliance with the US. They complain about increased US influence, but it's actually directly caused by who is defending whom.

It is more complicated than that. For example: bombings in Madrids. Would the Arab savages have targeted Spain if it wouldn't have been allied with the US? And what about stupid American ideas like the wars in Iraq and Afganistan? This is all included in beeing "defended". That beeing said, I aknowledge the gist of your argument: Europeans have choosen to be "defended" by the US so they shouldn't complain about the bill.

You may want to peruse your comment for spelling errors. I count six.

I'm fine with complaining about the bill. I think military spending is ridiculously high in the US, even accounting for the benefits of helping others.

It's just that you can't look at spending and get a good picture of the militarization of the culture. That counts doubly true for smaller arms. The cost of a carrier group is roughly equal to giving every citizen a gun.

Isn't Europe helping out the US in Afghanistan ? Can you cite a source stating that US is defending Europe ?

> Isn't Europe helping out the US in Afghanistan?

Yes, but that doesn't tell us which way the net benefits are going, it just says that Europe isn't completely dead-weight.

> Can you cite a source stating that US is defending Europe ?

Defending Europe is NATO's reason for existence.

"NATO's mandate is to provide a common defence for the European and Atlantic areas."

The simple truth is most of the US military spending is domestic in nature. Historicly military benifits (heathcare, education etc.) vastly outweigh spending on classical peacekeeping missions. Toss in R&D which has little to do with defending our allies and the numbers just get silly. "As of 28 February, 2009 1,454,515 people are on active duty[12] in the military with an additional 848,000 people in the seven reserve components." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_armed_forces) compare that to the numbers from 10 years ago and you will notice that the armed forces have grown little to fight 2 wars at the same time.

PS: I am currently typing this from an Army machine. Which is limting what I am willing to say.

> "NATO's mandate is to provide a common defence for the European and Atlantic areas."

Does anyone seriously think that said Atlantic areas includes the US side of the Atlantic? (I do think that the Brits would help on the US side of the Atlantic.)

We can argue about whether the US military would be as large as it is without the NATO committment, but that doesn't change the fact that said committment is part of the reason for the size of the US military.

The fact that most US military spending is domestic doesn't imply that the US doesn't devote a significant amount of resources to NATO compared to the resources provided by other countries.

Canada is also in NATO and sends troops on NATO missions.

When you look at US military spending as a fraction of it's GDP the US is not that insane. We just spend more as a fraction of our GDP than most rich nations. Which is not really a rational choice when you look at world wide threats.

PS: The Parties of NATO agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all. However, the French withdrawal in 1966 suggests it was less important than you might expect.

Excluding the US from both NATO and world number: NATO members account for 40% of worldwide military spending. Including the US it's 70%.

I'm told coordination efforts with, for example, inferior air forces, are often more costly than doing it alone. Compare it to coordination efforts between, say, Microsoft's marketting department and a local food blogger. They don't operate using the same methods.

Ohh, and US defending Europe, the best example: the cold war. It was decades of US military buildup largely to ensure they could invade or nuke eastern Europe if they invaded first. South Korea is another example of a military that is smaller because we keep a potential invader away.

It's true that US bases in Asia/Europe helped those countries in some ways. However the intention of the US is not to defend them, it defends itself first.

The most significant military assistance that Europe receives from the US comes through the network of US bases throughout the Continent.

Because of those bases, many of the European security problems of the past two centuries have disappeared. Britain no longer has to worry about a united Continent attacking them, as happened under Napoleon and the Nazis. Germany is no longer concerned about being a major power surrounded on all sides by potential enemies. And the entire continent is protected from expanding external powers, such as the USSR during the Cold War and the early Arab and Ottoman Empires.

Well, ignoring the rather loose way in which we (the west) have been using the term 'defending' in the last few years, I would agree that these figures may well be a bit skewed - similar graphs breaking down exactly what the spending is used for would be far more useful.

For example, I don't have the figures, but I would assume that the USA spends an awful lot more on military R&D than the nations here in Europe, and subsequently is likely to see something of a return when we decide we need a new line of state-of-the-art fighter jets or similar. It doesn't look like the potential returns on the spending have been taken into account in the data, here, which somewhat obscures their significance.

I was mainly referring to the Cold War. It isn't really up for debate that the US outspent Europe to build up and counter the USSR.

R&D doesn't make up a big part of defense spending. I'm not counting things like the F22 as R&R.

There is no way China is only spending $85 billion. They've been fudging numbers on military expenditures for years.

...apparently if we look the other way, it'll go away.

The risk of war with China is not that great. China can't afford to lose their exports to the US, and the US can't afford to see what would happen if China flooded the market with their massive reserve of US dollars.

I would guarantee that the per soldier spending China commits is much, much lower than what it costs the US. A Chinese solider is a guy with a gun, a US solider carries thousands of dollars of kit and is the product of millions of dollars of training.

In the context of percentage of GDP per person then China is probably much higher.

Percentage of GDP suffices. Otherwise you will be multiplying and dividing by population.

You can check the data for an arbitrary country in Wolfram Alpha: http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=israel+military+spend...

The numbers are different because they are estimates, possibly from different years. But is there a way to get the whole table of countries, sorted? I'm interested in the rest of the countries as well.

The best you can do is something like this: http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=israel+military+spend...

But the data is really inconsistent.. Different years for different countries, different years for the population vs military numbers within countries, etc.

This whole daily chart section of the economist is quite interesting, they've got 500 other charts like that one in there: http://www.economist.com/daily/chartgallery/

Like these interesting/surprising examples:

Countries with the most windpower generation in GWs:http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displays...

Public acceptance of evolution: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displays...

OMG! My friendly little country, Norway, is being ranked as number 7.

My guess is that they have huge amounts of money to spend and very few people, so they simply outfit their military with top of the line everything. Also, Norwegians love their ships.

Isn't Norway selling a lot of weaponry? If the statistic only counts spending and not loss/profit it would explain its presence in the top 10.

The US number is misleading, many innovations come from military spending that improve civilian life as well. i.e. the internet

Without all that Sri Lanka finished war.

I see these all the time, but never a single "spenders by GDP" chart. What gives? Seems like that info's more relevant anyways - how would they spend money they don't have?

Yes, I was hoping for that also. I am curious as to where North Korea stands. Their nuclear weapons program must eat up a lot of their (presumably small) GDP.

Edit: I answered my own question:

http://www61.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=north+korea+military+...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Googled military spending by GDP

China spends more per dollar of GDP on the military - very interesting.

China'a GDP is a bit of an estimate. For any country with a large internal market and a central government the GDP figure isn't very useful.

You must be thinking of GNP which has been supplanted by GDP >precisely< because it better reflects the product of a nation's internal and external trade.

I think the CIA factbook probably does not totally rely on the PRC's reported GDP (which I agree are likely suspect).

I feel dumb for not doing that. But it's as I thought - we're nowhere near the top if you look at it this way. I bet a lot of the money we spend military is 'wasted' due to the high cost of things around here, anyways.

> how would they spend money they don't have?

Absurd, isn't it?

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