Richard Seymour, “Global military spending is now an integral part of capitalism,” 7 March 2014, Guardian

There are few surprises about the distribution of military spending: for all the current focus on China’s growing military outlays – and it is significant that they have embarked on a sequence of double-digit increases as a percentage of GDP – the United States still accounts for 40% of such expenditures. However, the distribution is not the only thing that matters; it’s the sheer scale of such investment – $1.756tn in 2012. The “peace dividend” from the end of the cold war has long since bitten the dust. Global military spending has returned to pre-1989 levels, undoubtedly a legacy of the war on terror and the returning salience of military competition in its context. In fact, by 2011 global military spending was higher than at any year since the end of the second world war. …

In a very general sense, militarisation could be seen as an integral aspect of capitalism. … The more deeply companies are intertwined with national states, the more they rely on those states to fight their competitive battles on a global stage. Maintaining a military advantage is arguably an intrinsic part of this. …

Part of the answer has to be located in the way that high levels of military spending became such an entrenched part of the global landscape in the aftermath of two world wars.

In the context of the second world war, and then in the subsequent cold war, one thing about military spending that became abundantly clear is that it is never just about conflict. As in the conduct of wars themselves, the institutionalisation of military spending quickly becomes entangled in a series of incentives that are entirely tangential to the ostensive motive. …

By the same token, it is not clear whether Japan’s rise to becoming a major global economic power would have been possible had its military commitments not been constitutionally limited. …

Barry Rundquist and Thomas Carsey’s study of military procurement in the United States demonstrates that this has a distributive aspect. Such spending in the US helps already wealthy, booming locales become even wealthier, but it does not tend to make poor areas wealthier and nor does it reduce unemployment. This is quite significant, because one of the major arguments governments offer for protecting military spending is that it protects jobs – the one situation in which governments almost always feign an interest in employment. There is actually little evidence for this claim. …

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