July 10,
2008: For the first time since the early
1960s, India's defense spending has fallen to less than two percent of national
GDP. But that's mainly because GDP has been growing at such a rapid clip for
the last decade. Twenty years ago, India spent about 3.3 percent of GDP on
defense.
China,
whose economy has been growing even faster (9-10 percent a year) for three
decades, has official defense spending that is about 1.5 percent of GDP. But
real Chinese defense spending is believed to be two to three times that.
Communist states have, for a long time, hidden many military expenses in the
civilian side of the government budget.
Both China
and India are building up to something of an Asian arms race, with Chinese
encroachment into the Indian Ocean seen, by India, as justification for trying
to keep up. China's defense spending is
believed to be $50-100 billion a year. India is spending 30-40 percent of that. India and China are devoting a
lot of their additional spending to just bringing their troops up to date. Both
nations have lots of gear that was new in the 1960s and 1970s. They don't expect to be as up-to-date as the
U.S., which spends over $500 million a
year, but there's plenty of newer, much better, and often quite inexpensive
stuff to be had.
