Global military spending hits record $2.9 trillion in 2025 amid growing insecurity

April 15, 2025

Two point nine trillion dollars for the privilege of distrusting each other properly. The receipts say “defense,” but the menu clearly lists fear, with a side of habit.

We’ve polished our doomsday buttons to such a high shine you can see your reflection in them - how appropriate, since vanity’s the only thing they’ve ever defended. The generals assure us it’s all very technical, very necessary. Funny how necessity always wears a price tag that just happens to fit last year’s budget, plus ten percent.

Eleven years of growth. Like a tumor. Like a child we forgot to feed.

They’ll tell you it’s about security. It’s never about security. Security is what you promise people when you’ve run out of everything else to sell them. The only thing growing faster than the budgets is the certainty that none of this will ever be enough.

I’d suggest we drink to it, but the glasses are all being melted down for bullets.

The world, it seems, cannot sit quietly in a room. $2.9 trillion. A sum so vast it loses all meaning, a number that gestures towards an abyss of human fear and ambition. They call it “growing insecurity,” and indeed it is. But is this spending a solution, or merely a grand diversion? We build our walls higher, sharpen our spears, and call it prudence. Yet, the more we spend, the more insecure we feel. This is the wager they have made, though they do not name it as such.

What do they gain if they are right? A fleeting, fragile peace, perhaps, bought at an unimaginable cost, a peace that must be perpetually re-purchased. What do they lose if they are wrong? The very peace they claim to seek, swallowed by the engines of war they have so diligently constructed. And what of the alternative? To not act, to disarm, to trust? That, they say, is madness. But is the current path not a madness of its own design?

We are caught in the middle, between the infinite capacity for destruction and the infinite yearning for repose. The heart cries out for an end to this madness, but reason, trapped in its own geometry of threat and counter-threat, sees no exit. This endless rearmament is the grandest diversion of all, a frantic activity to avoid the terrifying silence of true vulnerability, the silence where one might confront the true nature of man, a reed, yes, but a thinking reed, capable of both such grandeur and such folly. The fragment of a thought: perhaps the greatest strength lies not in the weapons we amass, but in the courage to lay them down. But who dares to make that wager? Not the world, it seems. Not yet.

Monday, 10th April 2025

Two point nine trillion. I wrote the number down, just to see the shape of it. It has a certain weight, doesn’t it? A number so large it ceases to be money and becomes a force of nature, like a tectonic plate or a particularly stubborn weather system. We have collectively agreed to spend, in one year, a sum of money that could, if you stacked it in one-pound coins, probably reach the moon and buy you a cup of tea when you got there. The article says it’s due to ‘growing insecurity’. Of course it is.

This is the trapdoor: we are spending this unimaginable fortune to feel secure. And what we have built, with all these gleaming ships and silent submarines and clever missiles, is the most spectacular, intricate, and breathtakingly expensive system for feeling insecure that the mind of man has ever devised. Every new tank in one nation is a fresh reason for another nation to buy two new anti-tank systems, which is a splendid reason for the first nation to develop a tank that can’t be stopped by those systems, and so on. It’s the perpetual motion machine the alchemists never found, powered not by water or fire, but by fear. A kind of terrible, logical insanity.

The humanist reversal, then. Somewhere, in an office with bad coffee and fluorescent lights that hum a flat B-flat, a civil servant is filling out Form D-742b, “Justification for Additional Expenditure on High-Altitude Counter-Measures.” He’s thinking about his daughter’s school play next week, and whether the car will pass its MOT. He is not thinking about global annihilation. He is thinking about timing his lunch break to miss the queue in the canteen. He is a tiny, warm, worried cog in a vast, cold machine whose sole product is a state of theoretical safety. We have outsourced our terror to the bureaucracy of deterrence, and the bureaucracy, being a living thing in its own right, has found it needs feeding. It’s grown rather large.

Two point nine trillion. That’s not just a budget. That’s a monument. A great, grim, steel monument to the fact that we haven’t yet found a better story to tell each other. And the interest alone could probably fund every library, hospital, and decent road we’ve ever dreamed of. Funny, that. We can imagine a weapon that can think for itself, but we seem to have real trouble imagining a world that doesn’t require one.

DEATH, I suspect, would find the whole business terribly inefficient. And he’d be right.