How Does U.S. Defense Spending Compare with Other Countries?

Conn Carroll / April 05, 2010

In 2008, the United States spent $607 billion on our military. Far more than any other country as British author David McCandless illustrates in the graphic to the right. But as McCandless goes on to show in the rest of this Datablog post, focusing on spending totals alone doe not provide an accurate context to judge U.S. military spending by. The U.S. is a wealthy country with a larger Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than Japan, Germany, and China combined. McCandless compensated for this fact and you can see the result after the jump: (more…)