Since the dawn of time, military capacity has been one of the fundamental attributes of any country system. Today, in an era characterized by the re-explosion of violent large-scale conventional wars and a consequent arms race on a global scale, it is more important than ever to understand which countries spend the most in this race to the top: predictably, the three superpowers currently “reigning” on the planet (United States, China and Russia) are the masters.
However, there are some methodological problems that make comparative analysis complicated, first of all the opacity that characterizes official documents or government communications relating to defense budget expenditure. Countries such as China, North Korea or Iran are notoriously reluctant to release information regarding the extent of their defense systems and this forces us to use a whole series of alternative tools, such as the contracts that defense ministries periodically sign to modernize their arsenals.
The second problem instead has to do with the separation between expenses related to actual national defense and those related to the security sector. In fact, there are countries in which the two expenses are confused and, among these, there is also Italy. Our armed forces are made up of the Army, Navy, Air Force and also the Carabinieri, while the Guardia di Finanza constitutes an autonomous “armed corps”. Therefore, since the Carabinieri are an official branch of the armed forces, how should we evaluate the budget allocated to them?
The last of the problems concerns economic evaluation: although in many cases the US dollar is used as a unit of measurement for military spending, most countries in the world use currencies other than the US dollar or the euro and many of these national currencies are subject to notable inflation rates which impact real spending capabilities. Let’s see a possible ranking based on the information at our disposal.
The United States of America ranks first in armaments
Predictably, the first country in the world for the consistency of defense appropriations is the United States of America, officially credited with the figure of 954 billion dollars for the year 2025, but which according to some estimates should be adjusted to 1.025 trillion dollars.
There are essentially three reasons why US defense spending is so high.
First: as the world’s leading power, the United States has always relied on overwhelming military strength to ensure that no other country could challenge its supremacy and thus undermine the US dollar’s role as an instrument of economic and financial leverage against all other currencies.
Second: to increase the efficiency and ability of their armed forces to intervene abroad, over the decades the Americans have created a logistics network organized around a huge number of bases spread across all continents (except Antarctica); an authentic “logistical and infrastructural empire” with costs that are almost unsustainable today.
Third: since the 1970s the doctrines of the American armed forces have placed emphasis on the use of increasingly sophisticated but at the same time very expensive and difficult to produce armaments and this, predictably, ends up being reflected in defense spending.
China advancing in military defense
Universally regarded as the strategic rival of the United States, the People’s Republic of China has seen a substantial increase in its spending on the military but, traditionally, the Chinese have always been reluctant to release official figures so the assessment of their spending on the subject is of an approximate nature.
Officially, the Chinese defense budget amounts to approximately 336 billion dollars for the year 2025 but if we consider inflation and the comparison based on purchasing power parity, it rises to over 567 billion dollars thanks to both the lower costs and the mammoth size of the Chinese military-industrial complex. As the strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing has only increased in recent years, it is expected that Chinese arms spending will go hand in hand. For these reasons, the People’s Republic of China earns a very solid second place.
Russia and the “elephantiasis of war”
After a period of decline linked to the global realignment following the end of the Cold War, the Russian military has been able to enjoy, since 1997, a progressive increase in appropriations and a series of reforms that have radically changed its structure.
The Russian defense budget then “exploded” after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War (24 February 2022) in response to war needs. It is important to underline the fact that, as in the Chinese case, even when we talk about Russia’s defense allocations we must consider the fact that, net of the opacity of the data (it is still an authoritarian regime), the currency used is the ruble, characterized by important periodic fluctuations, and that the purchasing power parity in Russia is decidedly different from the Western reality so much so that, if officially the Russian defense budget for the year 2025 amounted to 190 billion dollars, the figure in reality it should be around 400 billion dollars and this state of affairs will certainly not change in the near future given that the Kremlin decision-makers plan to continue to increase war spending also for the next three-year period 2027-2029 with the aim of reaching full parity in the field of conventional armaments with Europe by 2030, a prospect not to be underestimated given the current state of relations between Russia and Europe.
The global increase in military spending
As we have seen, the increase in military spending is a trend that is affecting most countries around the world, in light of the increase in tensions at an international level. It is not clear at the moment where this process will lead, but the fact that in the past all the main large-scale wars have been preceded by a period of intense and prolonged arms race constitutes a wake-up call that should not be underestimated and which also closely concerns the European Union, which in response to the persistence of international tensions following the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War has in turn decided to increase the defense budgets of the member states.
