Last of the Big Time Spenders:

Proposed Fiscal 1997 U.S. Military Budget
Dwarfs All Others

On March 4, the Clinton Administration released its Fiscal Year 1997 military budget. The President is requesting $242.6 Billion for the Department of Defense. The total "National Defense" budget request, including military programs of the Department of Energy and a few other agencies, amounts to $254.4 Billion.

As the figures here show, no other country is in the same league in military spending as the United States.

• A $254 Billion military budget is four times that of the second largest spender, Russia.
• It is nearly five times as much as our ally Japan's military budget, and more than seven times that of Germany.
• It is nearly seventeen times as large as the combined spending of the six countries often identified by the Pentagon as our most likely adversaries (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Cuba).
• The United States and its close allies spend far more than the rest of the world combined. They spend more than thirty times as much as the six potential "enemies" combined!

Figures are for latest year available, usually 1995. Expenditures are used in a few cases where official budgets are much lower than actual spending.

Table prepared by Center for Defense Information.

Sources: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Department of Defense

Prepared by Martin Calhoun, Senior Research Analyst, March 22, 1996.