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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.

Isn't it "War Spending" now?

Isn't the USA numbers very skewed because they include like healthcare and pensions in their numbers, even for former soldiers, while say europeans don't?

Stop calling it defense.

Hold up. I see three NATO countries in that top-spending list, yet Trump is crying that they don't spend enough? It seems, as everyone seems to agree, that the problem is the US spends way too much. But since US "defense" spending is an obvious grift to shift public money to private pockets this isn't too surprising.

And most of it goes either into super inflated prices for the most silly things, or into projects that no one can talk about and are unsupervised.

"War" spending, now.

Edit: I am slow

The United States provides security guarantees for most of the western world. That was the entire point of post-WWII reconstruction.

The US will provide security guarantees. Participating countries will provide free market access to their citizens.

- The Marshall Plan

The US has been in a position to overspend (proportionally) on defense due to having the strongest economy basically since WWII. Other countries are able to invest in their own economy, innovation or infrastructure without needing to spend money on defense.

Ignoring any Trump jingoism, look at NATO expenditures. These countries agreed to a certain level of spending based on their GDP so the US wasn’t the sole guarantor, but no one met their obligations for decades.

*war

Socialize (military) spending, vassalize smaller countries, privatize wealth, that's the american way of running businesses

yet they still lost against the Taliban,

shame

2 Trillions that could have been invested in education, science and welfare instead.

Y.S.K. some countries are bigger than others. Per capita or G.T.F.O.

its "necessary" once you figure out that when people get tired of the complications caused by it, they are willing to use the military to quash discent on behalf of the elite class, to maintain control.

all i know is, i play warhammer total war 3 a lot. and when my skavens are starving and start an uprising, i just send a lord with his army to quash the discenters, and maintain control.

simple as.

It's gonna be funny though when the aliens finally show up and obliterate the US without even trying. lmao

If the VA was a military it would be in the top 5.

Peter G. Peterson

The most "Booty McBootface" type white name I've seen.

at least half goes to defense contractors.

Depends on how you define "necessary".

More than actual use, the American military is about "implied threat"

"Do as we say, or else".

Its always been that way. Without the implied threat, the other world leaders would have told cheetolini to pound sand on day one.

Most of that money stays in the country. If we shut down the tiny helicopter training base by my house, it would crush the local economy.

Winning

I'm surprised Japan is at #9, I would've expected Sweden or Finland above them