Pentagon Budget Bloat at Record-Breaking Highs, Yet Again
Washington D.C. – This morning, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its annual Global Military Expenditures Report, revealing that the United States spent $916 billion total in the calendar year 2023, up $39 billion from 2022. This figure is more than the spending of the next 9 countries combined and makes up 37% of global military spending, with the U.S. spending 3x more on its military than China and 8x more than Russia. Total military spending is now up to $2.4 trillion, an all-time high for the ninth consecutive year.
Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen, said, “The worldwide expenditure on weapons of war and the military machine is barbaric. For the amount humanity spends to kill or threaten to kill each other, or to defend ourselves from such threats, we could address all the great challenges we face as a species: hunger, preventable illness and death, and catastrophic climate change.
“The United States is responsible for more than a third of the world’s inhumane levels of military spending. In a nation that fails to provide basic healthcare, housing and economic stability for all its people, it is unconscionable that we spend nearly a trillion dollars on the Pentagon.
“It’s past time to break the grip that the U.S. military-industrial complex has on our politics, policy and collective thinking. For the military-industrial complex, no amount is too much to spend on Pentagon contractors. For those of us in the real world, a dollar spent on killing machines is a dollar that we can’t spend on daycare, expanding Medicare or other human priorities. The SIPRI report is a call to reallocate our spending to meet human needs.”