Al Jazeera :
Global defence spending jumped 9 percent to a record $2.2 trillion last year, a British military think tank said, and is set to rise in 2024 with Israel’s war on Gaza, the conflict in Ukraine and rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. A new report on Tuesday from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) also mentioned growing unease in the Arctic, North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, concerns over China and the rise of military regimes in the Sahel region of Africa as contributing to the world entering “a highly volatile security environment”. “The current military-security situation heralds what is likely to be a more dangerous decade, characterised by the brazen application by some of military power to pursue claims,” read the annual report which the IISS has been compiling annually for the past 65 years.
The “era of insecurity” is resetting the global defence-industrial landscape, with the United States and Europe ramping up production of missiles and ammunition “after decades of underinvestment”, the report added.
Driven in part by NATO member states’ response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global military spending reached a record $2.2 trillion, it noted. The alliance’s non-US members have boosted military spending by 32 percent since Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the institute found. The report comes days after Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said he had previously told an unspecified NATO member’s leader that he would “encourage” Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” in that country if it had not met its financial obligations to the military alliance.