The costs and benefits of military primacy

I’ve blogged in the past about the security benefits of American military hegemony — namely, that when one state holds military primacy, the incentives for other countries to engage in arms races and military advanturish declines. One obvious measure of these kind of security benefits is the reduction of aggregate military expenditures. As Gregg Easterbrook noted two years ago:

Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That’s a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms.

Soooo….. I was a bit chagrined to read this AP report that says global defense spending is on the rise:

Global military spending in 2004 broke $1 trillion for the first time since the Cold War, boosted by the U.S. war against terror and the growing military budgets of India and China, a Swedish think tank said Tuesday. Led by the United States, which accounted for 47% of military expenditures, the world spent $1.035 trillion, equal to 2.6% of global gross domestic product, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said. The world total grew 6% in 2004 from the previous year, the institute said. Adjusted for inflation, the total is only 6% lower than its Cold War peak in 1987-88, said researcher Elisabeth Skons, who coauthored the annual report.

Sounds like a strike against the theory of hegemonic stability. However, if you click on the SIPRI report and go to Chapter Eight, you find out the cause of the increase:

The major determinant of the world trend in military expenditure is the change in the USA, which makes up 47 per cent of the world total. US military expenditure has increased rapidly during the period 2002?2004 as a result of massive budgetary allocations for the ?global war on terrorism?, primarily for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. These have been funded through supplementary appropriations on top of the regular budget. The supplementary appropriations for this purpose allocated to the Department of Defense for financial years 2003?2005 amounted to approximately $238 billion and exceeded the combined military spending of Africa, Latin America, Asia (except Japan but including China) and the Middle East in 2004 ($193 billion in current dollars), that is, of the entire developing world. Thus, while regular military spending has also increased in the USA as well as in several other countries and regions, the main explanation for the current level of and trend in world military spending is the spending on military operations abroad by the USA, and to a lesser extent by its coalition partners.

What are the normative implications of this? We go back to the AP report:

“It’s hard to put the United States in the center, or blame everything on the U.S.,” said Alyson Bailes, the think tank’s director. “Despite all the ongoing problems, the state of world security is a great deal better than it was in the Cold War.” (emhasis added)