Lists of military spending are usually done in absolute figures.

Using these, the UK spends more on its military than every other country in the world apart from the USA, China and India. More than Russia, more than Germany. More than France. More than Japan. The sixth largest economy, but the fourth biggest military spender.

When you look at per capita military spending however, that’s the burden that that spending puts on each individual citizen, the UK comes in at number three.

For 2022 that looks like this for the ten countries that spend the most in absolute terms.

Per capita military spending	In US Dollars
USA	2434
Saudi Arabia	1635
UK	1020
South Korea	984
France	870
Germany	674
Russia	455
Japan	425
China	204
India	55

So, the burden of military spending on every UK citizen is more than double that of every Russian citizen, and over five times that on every Chinese citizen. So, to match the Russian level of per capita spending, we could cut our expenditure by half. If we wanted parity with China’s spending per citizen, we could cut down to a fifth of the current level.

It should also be noted 1) that the top six of these countries, plus Japan, are allies of the United States and 2) there is not majority support in the UK to increase military spending. A poll by yougov/datapraxis in May which asked voters to choose between

(a) ‘The war in Ukraine has showed that my country should be spending more on defence, even if that means that we must cut money on other areas like health, education and crime prevention’, and

(b) ‘Despite the war in Ukraine, my country should not be increasing spending on defence as that could require cutting money on other areas like health, education and crime prevention’.

showed 36% against increased expenditure to 25% in favour.

The figures for absolute military spending that these calculations are based on come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for 2022. The figures for population are from UN figures for 2019, so the calculation won’t be exact, but aren’t likely to be significantly different.

Country	military spending in billions of US dollars	Population in millions
USA	801	329
China	293	1433
India	76.6	1366
UK	68.4	67
Russia	65.9	145
France	56.6	65
Germany	56	83
Saudi Arabia	55.6	34
Japan	55.1	126
South Korea	50.2	51