On: Global military spending hits record $2.9 trillion in 2025 amid growing insecuri
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.