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World Military Spending. The global financial and economic crisis resulted in many nations cutting back on all sorts of public spending, and yet military spending continued to increase. Only in 2012 was a fall in world military expenditure noted — and it was a small fall. How would continued spending be justified in such an era? Before the crisis hit, many nations were enjoying either high economic growth or far easier access to credit without any knowledge of what was to come. A combination of factors explained increased military spending in recent years before the economic crisis as earlier SIPRI reports had also noted, for example: Foreign policy objectivesReal or perceived threatsArmed conflict and policies to contribute to multilateral peacekeeping operationsAvailability of economic resources The last point refers to rapidly developing nations like China and India that have seen their economies boom in recent years.

China, for the first time, ranked number 2 in spending in 2008. United States Department of Defense. The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense. The Department of Defense (Defense Department, USDOD, DOD, DoD or the Pentagon[4]) is the executive department of the government of the United States charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States Armed Forces.

The Department is also the largest employer in the world,[5] with more than 2.13 million active duty soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and civilian workers, and over 1.1 million National Guardsmen and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Reserves. The grand total is just over 3.2 million servicemen, servicewomen, and civilians.

The Department – headed by the Secretary of Defense – has three subordinate military departments: the U.S. Department of the Army, the U.S. Department of the Navy, and the U.S. History[edit] President Harry Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949. List of countries by military expenditures. This article is a list of countries by military expenditure, the amount spent by a nation on its military in a given year. Military expenditure figures[2] are presented in US$ based on either constant or current exchange rates. These results can vary greatly from one year to another based on fluctuations in the exchange rates of each country's currency. Such fluctuations may change a country's ranking from one year to the next.

Currently, the world's six largest military spenders are the United States, China,[3] Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan and France, all of whom are recognized as world powers. The UK, US, Russia, China and France are all veto-wielding permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The first list is based on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Yearbook 2013 which includes a list on the world's top 15 military spenders in 2012, based on current market exchange rates.

SIPRI Yearbook 2013 – World's top 15 military spenders[edit] Military budget of the United States. The military budget is that portion of the discretionary United States federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense, or more broadly, the portion of the budget that goes to any military-related expenditures. This military budget pays the salaries, training, and health care of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new equipment. The budget funds all branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard.

Budget for 2011[edit] For the 2011 fiscal year, the president's base budget of the Department of spending on "overseas contingency operations" brings the sum to $664.84 billion.[1][dead link][2] Emergency and supplemental spending[edit] By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By title[edit] By entity[edit] Programs spending more than $1.5 billion[edit] Audit of 2011 budget[edit] The U.S. US Defense Budget: US Budget Breakdown for FY11 - Charts. Federal Budget *** FY2015 Budget data loaded *** Click to view FY11 Federal Budget Spending Estimatesfor Fiscal Years 2010 - 2015 The table shows overall budgeted federal outlays for major functions for the next five years, as estimated in the historical tables in the current presidential budget. You can change the budget to be analyzed or drill down to view more detailed spending information.

But. Notes Data Sources: Federal spending from Budget of the United States Government. For a discussion of the sources of the government spending data used here read How We Got the Data for usgovernmentspending.com. Budget Updates: The president’s budget is typically published each year in February. Download Federal Budget Data for 2010-2015 You can download budget data as a CSV file or directly as a tab-delimited table. Download Data as CSV File Click button to download CSV file of data in table Tab-delimited Table Here is the budget table with columns tab-delimited.

Spending Data Sources Win Cash for Bugs. USA - Budget Woes, Class Wars. In an act of symbolic vandalism, Maine’s governor proposes has removed the mural depicting the state’s labor history and will purge the name of Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal-era Secretary of Labor, from the state’s labor department building. In Wisconsin and Michigan, neo-McCarthyite rightwingers are demanding “Freedom of Information” mass disclosures of pro-labor university faculty’s email messages.

Some state struggles are covered in this issue of Against the Current, and Kim Moody’s essay “Wisconsin and Beyond” sets out the background. Even a brief summary is impossible to give here. In our home state of Michigan alone, 40 anti-labor laws have been enacted or are pending. The scale of the empowered right wing’s war on labor and the poor, always under the lying pretext that “the state is broke,” provokes several questions for consideration.

We can’t necessarily give definitive answers, but we’ll offer some ideas in hopes of provoking discussion. Serving Their Masters.