Swanson -- $3 Trillion a Year for U.S. Military Spending -- freakish and bizarre

$3 Trillion a Year for U.S. Military Spending

Leave a Comment / June 10, 2026

Recently the least popular person alive said, “I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Already unpopular with kind and decent people, Trump may have — with that comment — tanked his popularity with every weapons company public relations hack on Earth. Their most deeply held pretense has always been that military spending isn’t needed for wars but rather to prevent wars.

Of course, Trump promised not to start any wars and to end existing ones easily and swiftly. Of course, one of the many reasons not to have believed him was that he wanted ever higher military spending. Of course, military spending makes the use of a military more, not less, likely.

But Trump’s current push is supposedly to take his record-breaking trillion-dollar-a-year military budget and raise it to $1.5 trillion a year. This is a lie built on a falsehood wrapped in a Truth Social post.

According to a new report from POGO, U.S. military spending is already $1.5 to $1.7 trillion per year, or — if you include (and why shouldn’t you?) interest on debt for past military spending, $1.7 to $2.3 trillion per year. The variations among the five different calculations featured in the report have a lot to do with the complexity and obscurity of the U.S. government, including the variety of sources of government data that can be used. It takes serious research to dig the militarism out, as it’s hidden everywhere. But the big-ticket items are things like “Homeland Security” and veterans’ benefits and debt interest.

The report gives us not the slightest hint at any reason to doubt the highest figure. If that $2.3 trillion per year is correct, and if Trump’s servants on Capitol Hill add another $0.5 trillion just for kicks plus another $0.2 trillion specifically for destroying Iran and rebuilding the bases that Iran destroyed — and the pending destruction of which was the immediate excuse for the war — then we’ll be at $3 trillion. . . and — barring the appearance of a spine in a significant number of members of Congress — another $3 trillion or more the next year and the next and the next.

The military budget figures from SIPRI are widely used, in part because SIPRI provides them for most nations on Earth so that one can do comparisons. But SIPRI has the U.S. at $0.95 trillion in 2025. The new report from POGO suggests that SIPRI’s omission of veterans’ benefits may be a bigger mistake for the United States (which has waged so many wars) than it would be for some other countries. The U.S. government also far outpaces the rest of the world’s nations when it comes to debt. And less of other nations’ smaller debts may be due to wars they haven’t waged. So, possibly it is not completely outrageous to make a comparison between the real level of U.S. military spending and SIPRI’s level of everybody else’s military spending. (Note that SIPR has no 2025 data for Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea.)

In 2025, the entire non-U.S. world for which SIPRI has data spent $1.86 trillion on militaries. China spent $0.336 trillion, Russia $0.19 trillion, Iran $0.007 trillion. Meanwhile the U.S. was at $2.3 trillion, vastly more than the rest of the world combined, or over 4 times its three designated enemies combined. The U.S. and its allies and partners and weapons customers in 2025 (that is, every government except the three designated enemies) spent $3.63 trillion or almost 7 times the combined spending of the three designated enemies.

The reason the U.S. government cannot win a war is not a lack of spending, but a lack of any coherent meaning to the concept of “winning a war.” There is no amount of murder and destruction that persuades survivors to like or willingly obey you. There just isn’t. The United States and world would be made vastly safer by spending less on war and more on actual aid, cooperation, the rule of law, disarmament, diplomacy, and unarmed civilian defense.

We can assume that the whole world’s military spending is going to keep increasing. The U.S. government has made badgering others into this a top priority. But if the U.S. military budget goes to $3 trillion, then even if the rest of the world hits $2 trillion, the U.S. government alone will be spending to kill on behalf of 4% of the world’s population 150% of what the rest of the world spends to kill on behalf of 96% of the world’s population. Per capita that would be $8,746 for wars from the U.S. government for every man, woman, and child in the United States, as compared with $241 on average from the rest of the world’s governments for every person in the rest of the world.

Is there something about the U.S. person that requires 36 times as much investment in warmaking as the non-U.S. person? Of course not. Nor is there anything in so-called “human nature” that requires another dime for this madness anywhere. But if anyone should use the feeble excuse of “human nature” it should probably not be the outlier with little in common with 96% of humanity.

Those inclined toward the normal and standard should be aware that U.S. military spending, like the aforementioned debt, like U.S. incarceration, and like U.S. gun violence, is freakish and bizarre. 

https://davidswanson.org/3-trillion-a-year-for-u-s-military-spending/