Defense expenditure increased by 3.7 per cent in real terms to reach a record high of $2.24 trillion in 2022, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, said on Monday. Half the annual increase was due to Ukraine’s ballooning military budget. Arms budgets are expanding across Europe in response to Russia’s aggression at the same time as tensions in East Asia are prompting larger outlays.
“The continuous rise in global military expenditure in recent years is a sign that we are living in an increasingly insecure world,” SIPRI senior researcher Nan Tian said. In another sign of how the world is sliding back into a situation last seen during the Cold War, military expenditure in central and western European countries exceeded the 1989 level for the first time.
Finland and Sweden were among the countries that increased such spending the most. Finland’s purchase of F-35 fighter jets contributed to a 36 per cent jump. Defence budgets of existing Nato members, meanwhile, increased by 0.9 per cent from 2021, as outlays declined in countries including Italy, Turkey and Greece.
In West Asia, Saudi Arabia increased its expenditure by an estimated 16 per cent to become the fifth largest spender globally. Qatar boosted outlays by 27 per cent.
The US remains the largest spender in the world by a large margin, as its military budget is bigger than those of all other countries that make the top-10 list of the biggest weapons’ buyers combined, according to SIPRI’s estimate. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea put an end to a brief period of shrinking defence budgets, with global expenditure growing for eight straight years since.
