Global military spending grew for the eighth consecutive year in 2022 to an all-time high of $2.24 trillion, with a sharp rise in Europe, chiefly due to Russian and Ukrainian expenditure, a Swedish think tank said Monday.
Spending globally increased by 3.7% in real terms, but military expenditure in Europe was up 13% — its steepest year-on-year increase in at least 30 years, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, said in a report. Military aid to Ukraine and concerns about a heightened threat from Russia “strongly influenced many other states’ spending decisions.”
The independent Swedish watchdog said that last year, the three largest arms spenders were the United States, China and Russia, who between them accounted for 56% of global expenditure.
‘The rise “is a sign that we are living in an increasingly insecure world,” said Nan Tian, a researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program.
Several states significantly increased their military spending following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while others announced plans to raise spending levels over periods of up to a decade. Some of the sharpest increases were seen in countries near Russia: Finland (36 %), Lithuania (27%), Sweden (12%) and Poland (11%).
Both Sweden and Finland jointly applied for NATO membership in May 2022, abandoning decades of nonalignment in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While Finland has been admitted, Sweden’s bid to join NATO remains stalled by opposition from Turkey and Hungary.
“While the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 certainly affected military spending decisions in 2022, concerns about Russian aggression have been building for much longer,” said Lorenzo Scarazzato, a researcher with SIPRI’s Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program.
“Many former Eastern bloc states have more than doubled their military spending since 2014, the year when Russia annexed Crimea.”
Russia also has increased its military spending. SIPRI said that grew by an estimated 9.2% in 2022, to around $86.4 billion. That is equivalent to 4.1% of Russia’s gross domestic product in 2022, up from 3.7% the previous year.
Established in 1966, SIPRI is an international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.
(AP)
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Guam has always been the U.S. military’s best kept secret. Military secrecy isn’t really new, but in the midst of the global pandemic the Pentagon ordered bases to stop publicly announcing their coronavirus cases. By July more than 29,000 service members had contracted the coronavirus, and this summer military and public health officials declared the U.S. military a source of transmission both domestically and abroad.
Guahan–the Indigenous name for Guam–is the hardest hit place in the Pacific region by the COVID-19 outbreak, and military transmission is clear. Since March 2020, aircraft carriers from the U.S.S. Roosevelt to the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan have offloaded thousands of infected sailors–many of whom contracted the virus for a second time and broke the island’s quarantine restrictions. To date, COVID-19 has infected nearly 2% of the island’s population of 165,000, putting the military on island in health condition “Charlie.”
The U.S. military will continue to put the people of Guahan at risk, long after the pandemic ends without a fundamental dismantling of the colonial project. After all, the military has always been a hotspot for colonial violence, destroying environments and occupying Pacific Island territories with impunity for generations. Despite the irreversible damage and desecration it inflicts, the general public is largely ignorant of its operations.
Did you know that those diseases are contracted in us military bases, for instance the first cases diagnosed with “the spanish flu” originated from the usa:
Albert Gitchell of the U.S. Army reports to the hospital at Fort Riley, Kansas, complaining of the cold-like symptoms of sore throat, fever and headache. Soon after, over 100 of his fellow soldiers had reported similar symptoms, marking what are believed to be the first cases in the historic influenza pandemic of 1918, later known as Spanish flu. The flu would eventually kill 675,000 Americans and an estimated 20 million to 50 million people around the world, proving to be a far deadlier force than even the First World War.
The initial outbreak of the disease, reported at Fort Riley in March, was followed by similar outbreaks in army camps and prisons in various regions of the country. The disease soon traveled to Europe with the American soldiers heading to aid the Allies on the battlefields of France. (In March 1918 alone, 84,000 American soldiers headed across the Atlantic; another 118,000 followed them the next month.) Once it arrived on a second continent, the flu showed no signs of abating: 31,000 cases were reported in June in Great Britain. The disease was eventually dubbed the Spanish flu because people erroneously believed Spain was the epicenter of the pandemic.
“The general public is largely ignorant of usa military operations” that says it all!
Zetruth
Don’t hijack
Go open one in the coofe room