GLOBAL MILITARY SPENDING JUMPS 9% O £1.7TRN The rise in spending has also been driven by China as well as the NATO alliance
Global defence spending on everything from ammunition to nuclear weapons has jumped 9% to a record £1.7trn from a year earlier and will rise again in 2024 as the world enters “a more dangerous period”, new analysis has found.
Russia – locked in a war with Ukraine – allocates more than 30% of annual government expenditure to its armed forces, according to the assessment on the balance of global military power by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published on Tuesday.
It said the Russian armed forces have lost more than 3,000 main battle tanks in Ukraine – roughly as many as they had ready to deploy before the full-scale invasion two years ago. Moscow is now drawing on stored kit to replenish losses, “trading quality for quantity”.
The rise in spending has also been driven by China as well as the NATO alliance.
Even excluding the United States, which has the world’s most powerful military, NATO allies have regrown their combined defence spending by almost a third in the past decade, a move that was prompted by Vladimir Putin’s initial invasion of Crimea in 2014, the analysis said.