Bill Greenwalt argues the US needs to increase its current level of defense spending by 3% to 5% a year in real terms, because China, our principal geostrategic competitor, is already outspending us on defense and time is not on our side.
Greenwalt comes to this conclusion by claiming that in estimating the size of the Chinese defense budget, we should not rely on the analysis by such internationally recognized groups as the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SPRI) or the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), but instead use Purchasing Power Parity (PPP.) On top of that, he says that, when analyzing the size of the US defense budget, we need to eliminate all the money the Pentagon supposedly spends on social programs. Therefore, he concludes that the annual military budget analysis of IISS that the US spends more on defense than the next 13 countries in the world combined, is a trope.
The above excerpt was originally published in Breaking Defense.
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