Global military spending in 2019 jumped more year-on-year than it has in a decade, according to an annual report.
That rise is due mainly to China continuing its decades-long military ramp-up, and to the United States continuing a two-year spending increase after several years of steady decline.
China’s spending in 2019 was $181.1 billion, according to IISS’s calculations—also up 6.6 percent.
After China and the United States is Saudi Arabia, with expenditures of $78.4 billion, then Russia, which spent $61.6 billion, and India close behind at $60 billion. The next four in order of military spending are the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany.
IISS notes that market-exchange fluctuations can cause “significant” effects; other think tanks typically also use market-exchange rates for comparison.
According to the IISS results report, defense spending also rose in Europe, as NATO members shift to tackle a revanchist Russia, while being nudged by a budget-conscious United States to meet their military spending obligations.
“This was the largest increase observed in 10 years. In 2019, defence spending by both China and the US rose by 6.6 percent over 2018. In nominal terms, the US increase alone—at [$53.4 billion]—almost equaled the UK’s entire 2019 defence budget of [$54.8 billion].”
Modernizing for Great Power Competition
That modernization has been assisted by a bump in 2018, 2019, and 2020 Pentagon budgets—as reflected in the IISS report.However, the U.S. military is now trying to pivot within a flat 2021 budget proposal already locked in by Congress and is looking to shed maintenance-heavy Cold War-era systems.
China’s military spending has increased every year for the past two decades—at times rising by estimates of 10 percent annually.
The IISS report noted that Russia and China “continue to accelerate their military modernization,” highlighting the growing arsenal of missiles being developed and deployed by China and Russia, which blunt U.S. air supremacy.
For Russia, such developments include the Burevestnik nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed cruise missile, and the Avangard hypersonic missile, which, according to IISS, was “on the brink of service entry at the end of 2019.”
Hypersonic missiles are a new breed of ultra-fast missiles able to shift course mid-flight, evading missile defenses tuned in to more predictable flight paths.
Russia and China are currently thought to be ahead of the United States in the development of hypersonic missiles.
Difficulties with the Data
Producing accurate estimates of China’s military spending is in general very difficult due to deliberate obscuring of the figures.“Under Civil-Military Fusion, you now have a broader requirement for the economy to serve the military. In essence, anything under the control of the Chinese Communist Party that it deems is necessary for military power construction can be diverted to that end. So it is possible to ask: is it now essentially impossible for anyone, even Chinese, to tell you a real number for Chinese military expenditures?”
They say that using market exchange rates misses the distorting effect of lower wages in non-Western countries such as Russia and China. Analysis using purchasing power parity (PPP)—a measure of local spending power—produces better results, they say.
For example, according to their analysis, Russia’s defense spending in 2018 wasn’t around the $60 billion mark, but close to $160 billion. And their calculations put China’s spending at around $450 billion, equivalent to nearly 75 percent of U.S. military spending.
“I think you’ll find that Chinese and Russian investments, modernization, new weapons systems, etc., their [research and development]—which is all government-owned and also is much cheaper—I think you’d find a much closer comparison,” Milley said.
But no matter what the measure, there is a broader agreement across all the data that China’s military spending has increased around tenfold in the past 20 years.
U.S. military spending almost doubled during the “war on terror” to peak at about $800 billion in 2010 before slowly declining.
For example, at 28 years old, the average age of Air Force fighter planes is higher than at any point in the history of the service. The average age of U.S. bombers is around 45 years.