The latest Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) data on global military spending showed a surprising shift, as while the US remained predictably far ahead of everyone else, the Russian Federation has fallen completely out of the top five.
This wasn’t expected, but also shouldn’t be a huge shock. Despite the US hyping Russia as a threat for decades, Russia hasn’t spent deeply on its military in years, and drawing down from Syria, they don’t have much costly overseas engagement.
By contrast, after the usual top two of the US and China, of which US is by far spending the most, third is Saudi Arabia, which has been spending about 10% of their GDP annually on the military since invading Yemen. Fourth on the list is India, which is spending heavily to gear up for confrontations against Pakistan as well as China.
Fifth place fell to France, a nation which has seen its costs surge in recent years because of military adventures across its former colonial possessions in Africa, as well as eager intervention in Syria.
Russia, by contrast, has tried to keep its expenses down, quickly moving to draw down in Syria once their goals were reached, and not spending huge sums developing highly advanced speculative weapons systems of dubious utility.
Thus, while the US increased its military spending 4.6% year over year, Russia managed to decrease theirs by 3.5%. Thus, while everyone continues to hype their nervousness about Russia, and the US tries to parlay that into arms sales, the Russians are looking to save money and focus on a deterrence-heavy military stance.
It’s amazing how little we in the US get for our “defense” spending dollar.
“Russia, by contrast, has tried to keep its expenses down, quickly moving to draw down in Syria once their goals were reached”
True. It should also be mentioned that they never had the expensive involvement that was implied in US comment. They had about two dozen aircraft actively bombing at one air base. That’s it. No ground forces. No other forces. Sometimes their navy fired a few missiles, but often did it from far away, near their own bases in the Caspian Sea.
What they supplied to Syria was generally old stuff that had been in storage since Soviet times, and really cost them nothing.
So obviously the recent push by Trump for arms control talks must only involve nukes. There is no way in hell we’d consider spending Russia’s paltry amount on our own military. We spend more on our spooks.
Russian unlike so many others, actually uses “defense” spending for defense and tries to avoid waste and also threats and invasions. It uses intelligence ie brains, rather than throwing money around to pretend they are becoming secure by belligerence, an American specialty.