Defence spending

The US often complains that the rest of the western world does not pay its fair share of defence spending, with the US running at around 4% of GDP and the rest of us at around 2%. Their spell checkers also complain about our spelling of defence.

There is something in the first point, although it does beg the question of what we should all be spending, but it is hard to see how the rest of us are ever going to field anything like what they manage, with their single, very large country spending around one third of the total and I don't think we are quite ready to simply subscribe cash on a pro-rata basis to their defence umbrella, and leave all the dirty detail to them.

But maybe they have found a way round. À propos of the present difficulties in the Ukraine, they are proposing all kinds of soft restraints & sanctions; freezing of assets, putting logs in the way of normal trade & travel and so on and so forth. But it strikes me this morning that such restraints & sanctions are going to cost us in Europe with our much stronger links with Russia a lot more than they are going to cost the US, particularly given their newly recovered energy independence. It is also a way to have another poke at BP, still a bête noire in the US following the 2010 disaster in the Gulf. They always seem to be much happier having a pop at one of someone else's corporations, rather than one of their own, but that may just be how it seems from over here.

PS 1: struck by the amount spent by the Saudis. Perhaps a convenient way of recycling all their windfall gains from happening to be sitting on a lot of oil, but I wonder how much bang they get for their buck. Are all the air filters of all those swanky jets just full up with sand?

PS 2: I imagine that the production of comparative figures of this sort is beset with all kinds of difficulties. What counts as defence spending? How do you score large capital spends? Are some countries trying to hide what they spend in other budgets? Are the statistics of some countries more accurate than those of others?

PS 3: I got the illustration from Wikipedia and thought to check with the IISS, which turns out to have a very solemn & serious website (http://www.iiss.org/en), with a tone which reminds me of the 'Economist'. But while there are freebies, a lot of them in the form of videos, a lot of what looks like useful information is guarded by invitations to flash the plastic, which I didn't. Not a very philanthropic lot at all.