Procurement: Trillions For Defense
4th May 2024
Worldwide military spending reached a record $2.443 trillion in 2023. This was an increase of 6.8 per cent since 2022. This was the largest year-to-year increase since 2009. Global defense spending passed two trillion dollars a year in 2021. The nations with the largest defense budgets remain the same. In 2023 the top ten spenders were the United States, China, India, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea. As usual the United States accounted for the largest amount of global spending, 38 percent of it. China came in at 14 percent while India has 3.6 percent. The number ten nation, South Korea, had 2.4 percent. Russia, long the number two spender has not fallen to number five with 3.2 percent of world spending. The rest of the world, which has about 170 nations, account for 25.3 percent of global defense spending. The current global superpowers are the United States and China, with China a distant second to the Americans.