Despite the virus, global military spending grew in 2020, according to the US Military News

2020 was the largest year-over-year increase in spending over a decade, although some countries channeled funds to deal with the pandemic.

Global military spending rose 2.6% to $ 1.98 trillion last year, even as some countries relocated their defense funds to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a report released Monday.

In 2020, the top five spenders, accounting for 62 percent of global military spending, were the United States, China, India, Russia and the United Kingdom, in that order, according to its organization in Sweden.

“We can safely say that the pandemic in 2020 did not have a significant impact on global military spending,” said Diego Lopes da Silva, a SIPRI researcher and one of the authors of the report.

As the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell, as a result of a global health emergency, military spending reached a global average of 2.4 per cent of GDP in 2020, up 2.2 per cent from 2019.

The jump was the biggest year-on-year growth since the 2009 financial crisis.

As a result of the increase, more NATO members have secured a transatlantic security alliance with the aim of spending at least two percent of their GDP on military service, compared to 12 in 2019 compared to nine in 2019.

However, some countries such as Chile and South Korea focused part of their planned military spending on pandemic response.

Many others including Brazil and Russia spent considerably less than the initial military budget for 2020.

The largest spenders in the US, China

The two largest expenditures in the world were the United States and China, with Washington accounting for 39% of total global military spending in 2020, and Beijing accounting for 13 percent.

U.S. military spending reached about $ 778 billion last year, 4.4 percent more than in 2019.

It was growing for the third year in a row in U.S. military spending, in line with the tenure of former President Donald Trump, which had previously been steadily declining for seven years.

“This reflects growing concerns about perceived threats from strategic competitors such as China and Russia, as well as reinforcing what the Trump administration saw as a depleted U.S. military,” Alexandra Marksteiner, one of the report’s authors, said in a statement.

China’s military spending, the world’s second-largest, was estimated to reach $ 252 billion by 2020, 1.9% more than the previous year.

China’s military spending has risen for 26 consecutive years, the longest uninterrupted rise in any country in the SIPRI database.