Saturday, February 16, 2008

MIlitary Industrial Complexes Around The World

It comes as no surprise to anyone that there are a good number of countries in the world who dedicate the bulk of their economic budgets to the endeavour of preparing for war. Nations around the world commit large amounts of financial resources in an attempt to achieve an elusive sense of national security. It is common knowledge that when it comes to this the United States is by far the leader of the pack but where do the other nations of the world stand in relation? Here now is a list of the top 20 countries around the world in terms of their annual defense budgets. The list is organized by naming the country and then the amount they dedicated to defense in U.S. dollars in 2007. (source - Intl. Institute of Strategic Studies)

1. United States -------582 billion
2. England -------------- 60 billion
3. France --------------- 49 billion
4. Japan ---------------- 41 billion
5. Germany ------------ 39 billion
6. China ---------------- 35 billion
7. Russia --------------- 32 billion
8. Saudi Arabia ---------25 billion
9. South Korea --------- 24 billion
10. India ---------------- 23 billion
11. Italy ----------------- 17 billion
12. Brazil ----------------16 billion
13. Taiwan -------------- 9 billion
14. Spain ---------------- 9 billion
15. Turkey -------------- 8 billion
16. Israel ---------------- 8 billion
17. Iran ------------------ 7 billion
18. Burma --------------- 6 billion
19. Poland --------------- 6 billion
20. Greece -------------- 5 billion

P.S. - U.S. figure is only the Pentagon's portion of the annual defense Budget. If you included all military related spending such as research and development and procurment the actual annual figure is closer to 1.3 trillion dollars.

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