From AlJazeera:
Global military spending surged to a record $1,464bn last year, with the US maintaining its position as the world’s leading arms spender, a report by a Swedish monitoring group has said.“The idea of the ‘war on terror’ has encouraged many countries to see their problems through a highly militarised lens, using this to justify high military spending,” Sam Perlo-Freeman, head of the Military Expenditure Project at Sipri said in a statement.
“Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $903bn in additional military spending by the USA alone.”
From MarketWatch.com:
Global spending on military armaments and services hit a record in 2008, driven by the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped by sharp increases in Chinese and Russian defense budgets.
For 2008, countries around the world spent $1.5 trillion on weapons, vehicles and intelligence and reconnaissance services, according to a Monday report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or Sipri. The amount represented a 4% increase from 2007.
The year “saw increasing threats to security, stability and peace in nearly every corner of the globe,” the Swedish group said in a statement. “The effects of the global financial crisis will be likely to exacerbate these challenges as governments and nongovernmental organizations struggle to respond effectively.”
The United States accounted for about 58% of the global increase between 1999 and 2008, with spending up about $219 billion in constant 2005 prices over the period, Sipri said. At a far distance followed China and Russia, with absolute increases of $42 billion and $24 billion, respectively.
China became the world’s second biggest military buyer, increasing its spending by 10 per cent to an estimated $84.9 bn last year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) said on Monday.
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