GENEVA
At the start of the 21st century, global military power appeared to be receding. Defense budgets were shrinking after the end of the Cold War, nuclear stockpiles were declining and arms control agreements still formed the backbone of strategic restraint between major powers.
A quarter century later, that trajectory has decisively reversed.
As Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN under-secretary-general and high representative for disarmament affairs, told Anadolu, the current surge in militarization follows a longer arc that began with the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, global military spending fell sharply, declining by nearly 30% as geopolitical tensions eased.
That downturn, she noted, began to reverse by the end of the decade and accelerated after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, as defense budgets expanded in response to the so-called “war on terror.” The result was a broader shift away from cooperative security toward increasingly militarized responses, a trajectory that has continued to intensify over the past decade.
According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military expenditure has risen steadily since 2000, reaching its highest level since records began.
In constant dollars, worldwide defense spending has climbed from about $1.25 trillion at the turn of the millennium to nearly $2.7 trillion by 2024, with increases recorded across nearly every region.
“The world has not arrived at today’s level of militarization by accident. It is rather the product of a long and complex historical trajectory shaped by shifting security perceptions, intensifying geopolitical competition and a series of regional conflicts,” Nakamitsu said. “Today’s militarization is not an overnight phenomenon but the cumulative effect of two decades of prioritizing short-term security over long-term stability.”
Tomas Nagy, a senior research fellow for nuclear, space and missile defense at GLOBSEC, a Bratislava-based think tank, said it is difficult to identify a single starting point for the current trend.
“It’s really a long story, and it’s difficult to find a point when it has all started,” he told Anadolu. “What we can certainly identify is a number of factors that have contributed to the creation of the world that we’re living in currently, which is defined by a very high and increasing level of militarization.”
He points to a convergence of long-term shifts, including renewed great power competition, the spread of regional conflicts, rising perceptions of insecurity and sustained increases in military spending across the world.
Crucially, he added, current trends do not suggest the buildup has peaked.
“It does not seem to be that we are at the end of the trend line,” Nagy said.
Biggest spenders pull further ahead
SIPRI data shows that much of this increase has been driven by the world’s largest military powers, whose defense budgets have expanded sharply over the past two decades.
The United States, already the world’s dominant military spender in 2000, allocated about $566 billion to defense that year. By 2024, US military spending had risen to roughly $968 billion, remaining far ahead of any other country despite the formal end of its post-9/11 wars.
While the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initially drove the increase, spending has remained elevated as Washington shifted its strategic focus toward long-term competition with China and Russia, Nagy said.
China’s rise has been even more dramatic in proportional terms. In 2000, Chinese military spending stood at roughly $43 billion. By 2024, that figure had surged to more than $317 billion, cementing China’s position as the world’s second-largest military spender.
“China is now certainly a much more robust international player than it was 20 years ago,” Nagy said. “In the past couple of years, we have been witnessing an increase in the defense and security posture.”
Russia’s spending has risen even more sharply in recent years. Military expenditure grew from around $24 billion in 2000 to more than $150 billion by 2024, driven largely by the war in Ukraine and Moscow’s broader confrontation with the West.
“It spends today twice as much as has been spent in 2015, and obviously that has created a domino effect,” Nagy said.
That domino effect has been most visible in Europe. Military spending across the continent began rising after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, then accelerated sharply following the new wave of attacks on Ukraine in 2022. By 2024, European defense budgets stood at levels not seen for at least two generations.
NATO’s long-standing pledge to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense has increasingly become a baseline rather than a ceiling. At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies committed to investing 5% of GDP annually on core defense requirements and defense- and security-related spending by 2035.
Nakamitsu said more than 100 countries increased their defense budgets last year, with the 10 largest spenders accounting for 73% of total global military expenditure. Europe alone recorded a 17% increase in 2024, she said, while the Middle East followed at 15%, driven largely by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The 10 largest military spenders include all five permanent members of the UN Security Council and together, they spent roughly $1.6 trillion, "close to 60% of the global total,” she added.
Militarization spreads beyond great powers
What distinguishes today’s militarization from earlier periods is its breadth, experts say. Defense spending has risen not only among major powers, but across the Middle East, Asia beyond China and parts of Africa facing protracted instability.
“Almost everyone around the globe is spending more than they spent a couple of decades ago,” Nagy said.
Nakamitsu said the proliferation of advanced military capabilities beyond a small group of technologically advanced states has contributed to the increasing urbanization of conflict, with devastating consequences for civilians far beyond the battlefield.
“Advanced military capabilities are no longer exclusively held by states,” she said. “The dual-use nature of technological innovation has lowered the barriers to access, enabling non-state actors to employ new methods, including the use of commercial off-the-shelf drones in armed conflict.”
While budgets continue to rise, the way wars are fought is also changing. The war in Ukraine has become a proving ground for modern conflict, particularly in the widespread use of drones.
Russia, Nagy said, has benefited not from superior technology alone, but from its ability to produce and deploy large quantities of relatively simple systems.
“It’s not just about having sophisticated weapons,” he said. “You are OK with the kind of basic level of sophistication as much as you can outproduce your rival and employ these weapons in masses.”
Nakamitsu said that while warfare has been transformed by advances in science and technology over the past 25 years, the primary sources of civilian harm have not fundamentally changed. Conventional weapons, particularly explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas, as well as small arms and light weapons, continue to cause the greatest damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
At the same time, she said, these weapons and platforms are increasingly embedded in digital and networked systems, making them vulnerable to cyber interference. Information and communications technologies, and now artificial intelligence, are being integrated across military functions ranging from logistics and intelligence analysis to targeting and command and control.
Conflicts from Ukraine to the Middle East, she added, illustrate how armed drones are now widely used for intelligence, surveillance and strike operations.
When discussing the growing role of artificial intelligence in warfare, particularly in areas such as data analysis, targeting and battlefield awareness, Nagy cautioned against overstating its decisive impact.
“These are not tools that would in themselves win you a major military conflict,” he said, adding that AI’s impact is more pronounced at the tactical level than the operational one.
Nakamitsu similarly warned that while new technologies are often justified as tools to improve accuracy and reduce collateral damage, they also raise serious legal and ethical concerns.
“Precision technologies can give a perception of certainty, yet the data that feeds into the targeting decision might be outdated, biased or incomplete, leading to misidentification of targets,” she said.
Nuclear weapons regain prominence
Perhaps the most consequential shift is unfolding in the nuclear realm.
Most nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals, and some are expanding them. China, in particular, is increasing its nuclear stockpile at a pace unmatched by any other country, extending its arsenal by about 100 warheads per year, Nagy said.
“Countries start to think of nuclear weapons as very useful tools,” he said, not only as existential deterrents, but as instruments for coercion and managing escalation.
“It’s not just a defensive use of nuclear weapons,” he added, “but a very assertive way of using deterrence.”
Nakamitsu voiced the same concern, adding that the current phase of nuclear competition is defined as much by capability enhancement as by numbers.
“Too often, discussions of ‘nuclear buildup’ are reduced to a simple question of numbers, counting warheads,” she said. “This is a narrow view, and a dangerous one.”
“Major powers are deploying hypersonic glide vehicles, new ballistic missile types and increasingly sophisticated dual-capable systems, with modernization of existing systems at the heart of the arms race currently underway,” she added.
At the same time, the institutional architecture designed to constrain nuclear competition is eroding. The last remaining agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear forces, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, is set to expire in 2026.
“It is very symbolic, and it is very telling about the level of distrust that global powers have with each other,” Nagy said.
“Most worryingly, arms control constraints are fracturing,” Nakamitsu said. “Reductions in weapons have not only plateaued but may be reversing, as dismantlement slows and new warheads are added.”
No clear slowdown ahead
Unlike the Cold War, today’s militarization is no longer purely state-centric. Private companies now dominate critical domains such as space, communications and cyber infrastructure, assets that can have direct military relevance regardless of ownership.
One of the clearest shifts in today’s conflicts, Nagy said, is the erosion of the boundary between civilian and military spheres, as private-sector assets become embedded in modern warfare.
Even when firms insist they are operating on a purely commercial basis, adversaries may still view those assets as legitimate targets, he said.
“The clear division line between civilian and military traditionally gets completely blurred over time,” he said.
At the same time, Nakamitsu acknowledged that setting guardrails is becoming increasingly difficult.
“Reaching agreements in multilateral forums has become increasingly difficult over the past few years,” she said. “The United Nations forums dedicated to disarmament are no exception to this trend, and we must assume there will be challenges for the foreseeable future.”
She added, however, that there is growing recognition among UN member states that rapid technological innovation, including in information and communications technologies (ICTs), artificial intelligence, and lethal autonomous weapons systems, requires urgent attention.
While broader arms control efforts remain strained, Nakamitsu said states have been actively engaged in negotiations on these emerging technologies, with "concrete progress" in particular on ICTs and AI.
Looking ahead, neither the trajectory of global defense spending nor expert assessments suggest a near-term reversal.
Nagy said it is "highly unlikely" that the militarization level is going to decrease.
“The outlook in general is cautiously pessimistic, certainly not alarmistic, but also certainly not about stabilization being around in the next couple of years,” he said.
If current trends continue, global military spending could reach $6.6 trillion by 2035 – nearly five times the level seen at the end of the Cold War, Nakamitsu warned.
“Without a strategic recalibration toward diplomacy, transparency and multilateralism, the world risks locking into a self-perpetuating cycle of militarization that undermines development and deepens global instability,” she said.
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