Tag Archives: Militarism

Military Expenditures as a Percentage of GDP: A 100% Indefensible and Stupid Idea, by Jan Oberg

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INNATE introduction:

Military expenditure is going up whether that be Ireland, the UK, Europe in general, or elsewhere, and various people, including Donald Trump and NATO, set particular (and ridiculous) target figures for others to pay on expenditure as a percentage of GDP. While the Irish government wants to ramp up expenditure considerably there is as yet no attempt to set a percentage target – but that is likely to come in time if Ireland gets closer and closer to NATO and involvement in an EU army.

As Jan Oberg shows in the following piece, this is a nonsense. There is no strategic analysis of risk. In Ireland’s case the government cries ‘wolf’ without proving what risks exist. And, coming from a nonviolent standpoint, there is no examination of what a ‘defensive defence’ might involve let alone consideration of nonviolent civilian defence – the latter being something which the 2023 ‘Consultative Forum on International Security Policy’ refused to consider. This is both morally and intellectually bankrupt. However the ‘percentage of GDP’ argument should be lambasted for what it is; a crude mechanism for bolstering militarism. Now if we had percentage targets for building peace, for establishing social justice at home and abroad, and for providing all citizens with adequate, affordable housing – that would indeed make sense.

by Jan Oberg

For years, NATO’s capacity goal has been for all its members to spend 2% of their GDP on the military. To many, this would be a ceiling, but according to ex-SG Jens Stoltenberg, from the Madrid Summit in 2022 onwards, it was the floor.

This goal is a splendid indicator of the frighteningly low intellectual level on which the alliance and the Western world, in general, operate today – intellectual and moral disarmament coupled with militarist re-armament.

Why?

A defence budget shall be determined by a serious, multi-dimensional and future-oriented analysis based on a series of more or less likely scenarios: What are we challenged by the next x number of years?

Next follows a matching of probability and capacity: Threats that are too big for a country’s capacity to do something about – like being hit by nuclear weapons – or threats that are too unlikely are separated and dropped. So are threats/challenges that are too small to worry about.

Then the threat analysis is left with credible, probable future threats within a resource spectrum that the country in question can do something about. It’s based on such a detailed analysis that a government presents its threat analysis and seeks to allocate, or re-allocate, its resources to achieve optimal security given its resources.

This is the way it was done up until the end of the First Cold War. One could agree or disagree with various governments’ threat analyses and priorities, but they were published in studies of hundreds of pages, were put out for public debate and then – as long as the West practised democracy – decisions were made.

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But what are NATO countries doing today?

They drop all this – intellectually demanding – analytical work based on numerous types of civilian and military expertise and simply set off X% of their GDP no matter what kinds of threats there are in the real world.

Mindbogglingly, they tie their military expenditures to their economic performance: If GDP increases, then military spending grows proportionately! If the GDP slides down, defence expenditures will do so, too, regardless of the perceived or actual threat environment.

It’s like setting off a certain percentage of the family income to health expenditures whether or not any family member is ill.

And absurdly, it is actually a de-coupling of adversaries: We have more to fight Russia and China with whether or not they de facto behave as adversaries. In the long run it will end in the West sinking deeper and deeper into economic crisis – and with a steadily diminished economic performance, there will – according to this counterproductive idea – be less available to the military and warfare.

The more the West spends on militarism, the more its civilian performance and power will decrease, and the less there will be for ‘security.’ But our kakistocratic militarists don’t even think that far!

NATO’s original Military Expenditures As Percentage of GDP idea is a reflection of the Western delusional idea applied in many other fields that, when there is a problem, we set off funds to solve it and pump those funds into a system, whether or not that system is functioning, functioning optimally – or not at all.

In other words, money has become the measure of problem-solving capacity and quality; changes, reforms or completely new thinking and structural reform don’t even enter the equation.

Qualities are expressed in quantitative terms. And it is the end of thinking and common sense.

The 2% goal was meaningless from Day One – Intellectual dwarfs bought it and used it again and again over the last decade or so.

Threats to a country do not move up and down according to that country’s economy. Such thinking points to the intellectual inside-the-box stagnation of an old organisation.

President Trump has just increased it to 5%. When will it be 10% in this incredibly unproductive and parasitic sector that I call the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC ? It is the cancer that eats up civilian creativity, innovation and socio-economic development and militarises us to death – while the rest of the world is whizzing along and surpassing the West.

Be sure that the higher the percentage figure gets, the faster NATO countries’ civilian economy will sink into an even deeper crisis – because the economist’s First Law is that you cannot eat the cake and have it too.

The fact that no one – except this author – has addressed this Military Expenditures As % of GDP as intellectual BS – is, in and of itself, a threat to world security. Where rational, intelligent thinking goes out, militarism and war seep in.

With Trump in the White House, the decline of the West will go even faster. That’s why he wants a Greater American from Panama to the largest possible part of Scandinavia (with 47 US bases) and Arctic.

There may come a day when Europe sees fit to open up to Russia, China, and all the other ‘bad’ guys – if they want to have anything to do with Europe. I mean, with friends like Trump and his greater America – perhaps out of NATO and 5% of economic wealth wasted completely – who will need to point to old enemies in the future?

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Prof. Jan Oberg, Ph.D. is director of the independent Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Sweden and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. This article is taken from the weekly digest of Transcend Media Service for 27 January 2025 https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/01/military-expenditures-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-a-100-indefensible-and-stupid-idea/

Editorial: ‘They’ haven’t gone away, you know

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Although coming at it from very different angles, both peace activists of the nonviolent persuasion and paramilitaries view the legitimacy of state sanctioned violence as inadequate. Those of the nonviolent persuasion do not go along with the legitimacy of state sanctioned lethal force whereas paramilitaries feel that military-type action outside of the state is legitimate. Nonviolent activists would view both state sanctioned violence and paramilitary violence as immoral and/or unnecessary.

That is not to say that state forces should not be held to higher account than paramilitaries. In the North, the announcement of a long promised tribunal of enquiry to look at the circumstances of Pat Finucane’s killing had a reaction from some on the unionist and loyalist side that this was favouritism to republicans and discrimination against other victims. Leaving aside the fact that Pat Finucane as a lawyer represented loyalists as well as republicans, the state had long ago promised an enquiry, a promise it continually reneged on, and the particular circumstances of his murder – with very considerable issues of both state collusion and parliamentary ‘fingering’ of him – fully justifies such an enquiry.

More general questions of the legacy of violence remain, by paramilitaries as well as state. How do we deal with the very real issues for survivors and families of victims? Certainly not by sweeping it all under the carpet as the last British Conservative government tried to do with its Legacy Act (in order to protect former British soldiers and the state). The extent to which current Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn is moving away from that model is still being defined – and challenged.

However paramilitarism and militarism are still major issues in the North. Small republican paramilitary groups still exist and could pose a threat to individuals but they have very little support. However some loyalist paramilitary infrastructure has continued unbroken through the peace process and beyond; it is estimated that there are still well over ten thousand members of loyalist paramilitaries which is a lot – the PSNI has 6,300 officers and 2,200 support staff, in total certainly below the number of loyalist paramilitaries.

The extent to which loyalist paramilitaries are involved in extortion (such as protection rackets) and drug dealing varies but is very significant and a continuing blight on the North. There have been various attempts, more carrots than sticks, to encourage paramilitaries out of crime and militarism but they have largely been unsuccessful and there is also a certain amount of incredulity that, two and a half decades after the Good Friday Agreement, they still exist and still recruit. It is estimated that up to a third of organised crime has paramilitary links. The carrots and sticks need to have a time limit.

The failure of loyalism to gain political traction, in the way Sinn Féin did for republicanism, is certainly regarded as one factor in loyalist paramilitaries having a niche – while the DUP has often had an ambiguous relationship with militant and military loyalism, it cannot be regarded as adequately representing working class loyalism (e.g. on school selection where working class Protestant boys are the lowest achievers). But other factors are simply power, greed, and fear for the future of Northern Ireland.

A recent independent pro-unionist report from the ‘Northern Ireland Development Group’ addressed this whole issue. There are difficulties, obviously, and the report called for more carrots and sticks. Some of the authors stated “A clear distinction between ex-combatants, community workers and criminals is needed to bolster loyalists who are trying to move on, and to distinguish between them and those who want to use fear to maintain their own reputations and self-serving advantage.” (Irish Times 11/10/24). The attention given to the Loyalist Communities Council, representing the views of a variety of paramilitary groups, by some ministers has also caused anger; however it should be a question of what attention is given to them but whether what they say is justified – and you cannot attempt to ‘bring people in from the cold’ by ignoring them.

On a wider scale we need to challenge both paramilitarism and militarism. They might not be two sides of the same coin but they are both stuck in the same hole. Paramilitary and guerrilla fighters (a k a ‘terrorists) typically inflict harm and death in multiples of ten or a hundred; there are occasional exceptions such as 9/11 when the unit was thousands but that is not typical. Deaths and injuries from state forces are typically numbered in ten of thousands or even millions. And yet most of the time people accept the actions of states, even ones as egregious as Israel’s in Gaza where it has slaughtered upwards of 50,000 people and probably caused the deaths of several times that through the effects of the onslaught on health, nutrition, homelessness and fear.

Paramilitarism takes a military model and uses it for its own purposes within a state. Militarism threatens the globe, directly and indirectly through death, misuse of resources, its major contribution to global heating and pollution, and so on including the very real risk of nuclear annihilation. Humanity needs to move on. There are alternatives but militarism, with its associated symbols of statehood, appeal to politicians (and many other people besides) and they fail to even comprehend that there are alternatives, or examine what these are.

The possibilities of nonviolence are endless. They do require work and people but their costs would be tiny compared to the cost of armies and militarism. When will we start to learn?