Briefings Magazine: Suddenly, Global Defense Spending Booms

By SIMON CONSTABLE

It was 1962, and tensions were rising as the Soviet Union began a buildup of nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles south of the United States. Worries of a nuclear Armageddon were palpable. Fortunately, the crisis was averted—and so was the military buildup. Over the next six decades, in a remarkable string of declines, global defense spending (including military equipment, war matériel, personnel, and weaponry) would fall from 6.3 percent of global GDP in 1962 to a low of 2.1 percent in 2018, helped in part by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But that was then. In a turnabout whose magnitude may surprise you, global defense spending rose a whopping 6.8 percent in 2023 from the previous year to a staggering $2.4 trillion, the largest annual increase since 2009. Read more here.

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