By politicaltheatrics - March 27, 2010
As a follow-on to my post yesterday, I’ve been working on two charts using data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies to compare U.S. military spending with that of our European allies. I’m grateful to Charles Zakaib for his help crunching the numbers.
I think that the charts are pretty evocative.
The chart below combines data showing the growth of U.S. defense spending (DoD only) as a share of GDP, and a corresponding decline among all other NATO countries. Please note that NATO member states are supposed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense.
The second chart shows changes in defense spending per capita over the same period. I’ve always thought this figure more instructive than spending as a percent of GDP. You can see that Americans are spending much more on our military over the past 10 years, whereas most of our European allies have made only modest increases.
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