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Government, Politics, Democracy, War - Future
Extract from The Future of Almost Everything book - written 2019.
More than $1.8 trillion is spent every year on weapons and other defence costs, or 2.5% of global GDP, down from 4% in the last days of the Cold War, equivalent to $250 per person on earth. Combined sales of the largest 100 arms companies is around $320bn a year. However, 40% of all global military spending is by one nation alone: America, which burns up more in this way than the next 15 highest-spending nations combined. This is a truly spectacular imbalance of military fire-power, and will be unsustainable in the longer term, as we will see. Next is China with 9.5% of global military spending, followed by Russia at 5.2%, UK 3.5% and Japan 3.4%.
America needs to spend just 3% of GDP on arms to achieve such dominance – compared to Russia, which today spends 4% of a much smaller economy, China 2%, India 2%, UK 2%, France 2%, Israel 6%, Saudi Arabia 9% and Oman 12%. This relentless build-up of ultra-powerful weaponry will continue to feed tension, resentment and fear over the next two decades. America’s army, navy and air force will be dominant globally for the next 15‒20 years, despite rapidly increasing military budgets in Russia and China.
Read more: Future of War: defence spending by superpowers, hybrid conflicts, space weapons, new nuclear risks, next global arms race, satellite wars, military drones, robot fighters, future arms industry. Assymetric threats and terrorism, dealing with failed states