Defence Spending

The amount a nation spends on defence says a lot about it. Becuase of the size of the USA it has the largest defence budget. It is interesting to see that Japan feels the need to be second in absolute terms.


Even more interesting in the amount a country spends per full time employee or soldier/sailor/airman/marine.

Country Amount Employees Cost per employee

1 USA US$291.2 billion 1,365,000 US$213,333

2 Japan US$45.6 billion 236,000 US$193,220

3 UK US$34.5 billion 211,000 US$165,507

4 France US$27.0 billion 294,000 US$91,836

5 Germany US$23.3 billion 321,000 US$72,585

6 Russia US$29.0 billion 1,004,000 US$28,884

Regretfully, doing the same exercise for Israel seems to be near to impossible given the nature of the IDF. If I was a Russian general, I'd be worried though.