“Spain will fulfill the commitment with NATO and with the European Union to allocate 2% of the Gross Domestic Product to the Defense budget & rdquor ;. This promise of Pedro Sánchez the last day of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Madrid would mean doubling military spending relative to GDP, which today represents 1.01%, before 2029. Spain is the second country in the alliance with the lowest military spending. Given the uncertainty of what will happen if United We can finally reject the proposal, politicians and social network users have speculated on how this will affect Spain. Let’s look at the data:
Currently, NATO calculates that Spain spends more than 13,000 million euros a year on Defense, 1.01% of GDP. Although this figure has increased in recent years -in 2016, it was 0.81%-, during the first half of the 1990s it was 1.6% of GDP, and ten years earlier, in a Cold War context, it reached at 2.4%, according to NATO data.
If you want to achieve the NATO goal, with current GDP, military spending would amount to 26,000 million. By way of comparison, unemployment benefits cost the state about 25 billion last year. The Ministry of Defense budget It is about 10,150 million, but the military alliance includes in its calculation military items that the government distributes among other ministries.
In absolute figures, the budget of the current Ministry of Defense is the highest in the Spanish democracy. During the first years of the popular government of Mariano Rajoy, it was around 6,000 million euros – during the 2008 crisis, the then socialist president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, reduced it by a quarter – but in 2017 an increase began that Pedro Sánchez has continued.
This is due to growth, above all, in material costs, which have quadrupled since 2016, while personnel costs have remained stable, according to Ministry budgets (p. 53). This data reflects the investments in state-of-the-art weapons made years ago, which have left a trail of credits that the ministry still has to pay.
NATO agreements
The 2% threshold dates back to 2006, when NATO defense ministers agreed allocate this percentage of GDP to the army (the alliance does not have its own resources, beyond a command structure, so it depends on the national armies). After the worst of the economic crisis, which slowed down the increase in spending, in 2014 he recovered the goal that the defense budget of all member states reach 2% of their GDP before 2024.
But today, only nine countries match or exceed this threshold. Among them, Greece (3.76%), the United States (3.47%) and Poland (2.42%). Spain is in the bottom, with 1.01%, ahead only of Luxembourg (0.58%).
In fact, the The United States spends more than twice as much resources on the military than all other NATO states combined. Although the GDP of the United States is similar to the sum of the GDP of the European members and Canada (about 20 billion dollars), the North American country allocated in 2022 more than 820,000 million dollars in its army, compared to 370,000 million of the Rest of the countries. Some data that illustrate the immense influence of Biden with his NATO partners.
Where does the defense money go?
Another of NATO’s demands of its member states is that 20% of their military budgets are directed to modernizing its armed forces, buying new weapons and investing in research and development.
Of the 10,150 million available to the Spanish Ministry of Defense, at least 2,850 of them (28%) are intended for Special Modernization Programs (PEM), that have increased their budget by 22% compared to 2021 to deal with debts from previous years. This is about 2,850 million dedicated explicitly to acquire and produce state-of-the-art weapons to meet commitments to NATO and the EU. The most expensive investments include Eurofighter fighters, military Airbuses, ‘Leopard’ tanks, missile systems, S-80 submarines, multipurpose helicopters and F-110 frigates.
In reality, not all EMP games are that modern or state of the art. In fact, several of them already appeared in the 2012 program budget. The contracts for the S-80 submarines, for example, have existed since 1997. But the economic crisis and the cuts in Defense made payments difficult, which have dragged on until today.
The Russian offensive and the reconfiguration of the international order
After years of failing to meet the Atlantic demand to allocate 2% of GDP to defense, Pedro Sánchez has promised that Spain will reach this threshold in 2029, motivated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his speech, the Prime Minister assured that “security is not guaranteed& rdquor ;, a fact that would justify, according to him, this increase in the Spanish military force.
Even so, the military budget of Vladimir Putin’s Russia is not even a tenth of that of Joe Biden’s United States. The army of the greatest world power has more than 750,000 million dollars, compared to 63,000 million of the Russian Federation. They indicate it calculations by the Stockholm International Peace Research Instituteone of the main think tanks on conflicts and defense policies.
Related news
as we count in this verification, the European Union is also far above Russia: the member states add 230,000 million in defense spending. In fact, if the Russian military budget can be compared with that of other states, we would be talking about India, the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia, which are also around 60 billion.
Within the framework of the reinforcement of the eastern front of the Atlantic Alliance in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Spain sent 150 soldiers to Latviawho joined the 350 who were already there since 2017. Altogether, the NATO has 4,000 troops in this country, with Canada being the country with the greatest presence. According to the ministrySpain is also part of the Baltic Air Police with F-18 fighters and Eurofighters, and contributes various warships to NATO’s Standing Naval Forces, deployed throughout the European seas. She also has an anti-aircraft battery Patriot on the border between Turkey and Syria.