Military Spending

Military expenditures, broadly defined, are the aggregate funds spent by a national government for military-related purposes. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual SIPRI Yearbook 2007, the aggregate military expenditure by all national governments in 2006 was $1.024 billion in market exchange rate (MER) terms. Adjusted for inflation, this figure marked a 37% growth in military budgets since 1997. This level of increased military spending follows a long trend that dates to World War II and that greatly accelerated during the Cold War. The levels of military spending over the past 60 years have been—and continue to be—a dynamic force that has deeply altered the fabric of social, political, spatial, and economic relationships, from the scale of the local to that of the ...