this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 41 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

One thing to keep in mind is that defense spending tends to rely heavily on local provision. You generally can't just import soldiers, and keeping military-industrial supply chains local or at minimum trusted is also a requirement. So using something like a PPP-adjusted figure rather than a nominal figure is probably going to be closer to what you're actually buying, and that rather considerably diminishes the difference.

kagis for someone discussing the matter

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-military-rise-comparative-military-spending-china-and-us

Given current data, China’s military expenditure in PPP terms is estimated to be $541 billion, or 59% of US spending, and its equipment levels are only 42% of US levels. Comparing trends over time shows that the US has matched China in recent years, albeit at the cost of a much higher defence burden.

The underlying mechanism here is that China has a lot of people who will work for rather-lower wages than in the US, which means that each nominal dollar China budgets for their military can buy them more military capacity than in the US, via taking advantage of those lower wages.

If the US had a large supply of workers willing to work at Chinese wages, and could use them to drive its military and military-industrial system, that wouldn't be a factor.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago

China also owns their own resources while the US doesn’t so the US has to pay a middle man to build anything.

[–] Fmstrat@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Also, this probably includes what the US sells.