> As a result of a sharp economic recovery in 2021, the global military burden—world military expenditure as a share of world gross domestic product (GDP)—fell

> As a result of a sharp economic recovery in 2021, the global military burden—world military expenditure as a share of world gross domestic product (GDP)—fell by 0.1 percentage points, from 2.3 per cent in 2020 to 2.2 per cent in 2021. Indeed, this is continuing a long general trend of decreased military spending by both the US and the world since the end of WW2: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-as-a-share-of-gdp?time=1951..2016&country=USA~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-as-a... Major buildups like Vietnam and the Cold War were in fact only mild bumps: https://media.defense.gov/2019/Mar/12/2002099941/-1/-1/0/190312-D-ZZ999-001.JPG https://media.defense.gov/2019/Mar/12/2002099941/-1/-1/0/190... 2.2% seems like a very bearable price, especially in light of ~3% annual real GDP growth. Wanting/expecting military spending to be much less than a percentage point of GDP doesn't make any more sense to me than wanting/expecting similar for other expenditures on law and order like police and courts. The better criticism of our current military order is that peace largely relies on the threat of nuclear annihilation, and each year we incur a small chance of this horrific outcome, which is not reflected in spending. Naively, I'd like to see more spending on conventional weaponry insofar as it is allows us to reduce strategic nuclear weapon counts and cut down the long tail of truly terrible scenarios.