Who Has the Biggest Military Budget? It’s Not Who You Think.

Teaching college students about data and analytics is fun; I love how data can shatter preconceptions and everyday notions of reality. Knowing that their instructor is a military veteran, a group of my students recently asked me why America spends so much on its military. They claimed it was overkill and that the United States spends more on its military than the other top nine countries combined!

Really? Let’s look at the data. And just to be impartial, we’ll use numbers from an independent resource on global security, The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Informationisbeautiful.net

And just to put it in context, let’s gobble up all of the other countries and put it next to Africa’s total debt and the UK’s budget deficit.

Budget as of 10 years ago. Informationisbeautiful.net

Wow! The U.S. military budget is indeed massive! So, is America an aggressive, war-mongering nation? Is the “military-industrial complex” completely out of control? Are we looking at the complete story? Are we seeing the whole picture?