The War Machine: How Governments Spend Trillions on Defence While the World Pays the Price (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798177674179)

SYNOPSIS:
There is a number that governs the modern world more than any election, any treaty, any speech at the United Nations, and almost nobody can picture it. In 2024 the governments of Earth spent $2.7 trillion on their armed forces, the steepest single year rise since the Cold War ended, the tenth consecutive year of increase. That is $7.4 billion every day. That is $334 for every man, woman and child alive, taken in their names and spent on things they will never see and would never choose.
THE WAR MACHINE follows the money.
It opens inside the largest budget on Earth, the nearly one trillion dollars of the United States, where a fighter plane that has never worked properly costs more than the entire medical research enterprise of the richest nation in history, where the Pentagon has failed seven consecutive audits, and where $21 trillion in adjustments float in an accounting smog that no one inside can see the edges of. It crosses the Pacific to China's smooth thirty year staircase of increases, climbs through Russia's wartime economy where one rouble in five of state spending now feeds a war that is consuming the country's youth, its factories and its future, and walks through Europe's sudden rearmament, Germany's hundred billion euro transformation, and the waiting lists lengthening in the hospitals of every capital as the brigades form. It visits the Gulf, where oil money circulates in a closed loop of weapons and fear, and Asia, where India, Japan, South Korea and Australia are running the fastest arms race on the planet, all of it rational, all of it local, and all of it feeding on its own reflection.
Then it does the accounting the defence ministries never do. One aircraft carrier equals fifty thousand schools. One submarine equals two and a half years of the entire global fight against malaria. Ending world hunger costs twelve cents of every defence dollar. Educating every child on Earth costs three and a half days of the war budget. The full climate adaptation gap, the money the rich world has promised and not paid, equals seven weeks. The pandemic the species actually suffered was met with a rounding error, while the wars that never came were met with a trillion dollars a year, and the bill for the omission ran to $16 trillion. Chapter by chapter the book totals the opportunity cost, the taxpayer's burden, the hospitals that lose to howitzers, the classrooms that lose to missiles, the military's hidden carbon bootprint, the refugee factories that every arms export builds downstream, and the science of peace that goes unfunded while the science of war absorbs a research budget larger than every civilian agency combined.
It tests the machine's central premise, that all this spending purchases safety, and finds the evidence wanting. Arms races correlate with the wars they are meant to prevent. The nuclear peace was survived, by its own architects' accounts, through luck and disobedience. The countries that stepped outside the logic, Costa Rica above all, abolishing its army in 1948 with a maul and a constitutional article, have spent three quarters of a century proving the alternative. And it closes with a blueprint assembled entirely from precedents that worked, demobilisation after 1945, the verified elimination of whole weapons classes, the INF inspectors standing in each other's missile fields, a slope of ten per cent a year walked down with ratio locks, conversion contracts for the factory districts, and a rebate on the payslip that could abolish the income tax of nine taxpayers in ten.

Author: Elisabeth Liley,Kevian Liley
ISBN-13: 9798177674179
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 09/28/2026
Pages: 156
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.48lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.33d