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For the next budget, Trump has requested the astronomical sum of 1.5 trillion dollars. In 1944 and 1945, in today's terms, 1.4 trillion dollars were budgeted...
Never, not even during World War II, has the United States spent so much on its armed forces. The astronomical figure requested by President Donald Trump for the next budget, $1.5 trillion, exceeds even the $1.4 trillion per year (adjusted to today's value) spent in 1944 and 1945, at the height of the conflict.
US military spending has always been volatile. This is partly because until 1940 the armed forces had few soldiers: mobilizations during wars were followed by rapid demobilizations after their end.
Thus, from eight billion dollars in 1916 it reached 181 billion in 1919 (World War I), only to then return to ten billion in 1924.
In 1935, spending was $16 billion and only multiplied after Pearl Harbor: from $121 billion in 1941 to $439 billion in 1942.
By 1948 spending had fallen again to $104 billion, but five years later the Korean War had pushed it to $529 billion. The Cold War and hundreds of bases built around the world kept the budget around $400 billion until the Vietnam War in 1968.
Then there was another drop to $436 billion during Jimmy Carter's presidency in 1977, followed by a strong increase during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, when it reached $671 billion.
The fall of communism brought the so-called “peace dividend”: $444 billion under Bill Clinton in 1999. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during the presidency of George W. Bush doubled spending to $800 billion, only to drop to $646 billion during the presidency of Barack Obama.
Trump, from the beginning of his term, increased it again to 850 billion in 2020, to now reach 1.5 trillion dollars. An extraordinary figure, which serves to maintain two and a half million soldiers. But above all, to produce increasingly expensive weapons.
In the 1980s, British scholar Mary Kaldor calculated in her book “Baroque Arsenal” that, at the rate at which prices for ships, planes and missiles were rising, one day the annual budget of a middle power like Italy would be needed to build an aircraft carrier. Today, this prediction is almost a reality. Unless the drone revolution reverses this trend./ Adapted from “Pamphlet” by “Huffpost”
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