The Defense Burden

How heavily does each economy tax itself to field a military — and who is rearming?

Military spending as a share of GDP is the price a country pays, out of its own output, to sustain armed force. The United States carries by far the heaviest burden of the six — above 3% throughout, peaking near 5% during the Iraq and Afghanistan surge — while China holds a steady ~1.7–2%. But a modest share of a vast economy is still enormous in dollars: China is the world's second-largest military spender. The story of the 2020s is European and Japanese rearmament after 2022.

Read level, slope and timing together.

This is a share of GDP, not a dollar figure: China's low ratio still buys the world's #2 defense budget, because the denominator is so large.

• The US burden is structural — it spends a larger share of a larger economy than any peer here, decade after decade.
• China's share looks flat, but on a GDP that multiplied several times over, so absolute spending soared even as the ratio held.
• Germany and Japan turn upward after 2022 — the clearest break in the series, as both abandon decades of restraint.

• How big is the economy behind it?→The World's Economic Center of Gravity
• What funds the fiscal room?→The Savers
• How much does it invest overall?→The Investment Gap