As far as the military spending goes, it’s long been known that the United States military budget exceeds that of its nearest thirty or so competitors combined, even in “down” years when the military budget wasn’t increased dramatically due to the panic/”police action”-du-jour.

But you wanna know something even more thought-provoking (in the way that “perhaps I shouldn’t have eaten that green mayonnaise which was dated 4-14-93″ could be considered “thought provoking”)? Try this on for size:

Permanent Members of the UN Security Council:

United States
Russian Federation
France
United Kingdom
China

Not exactly news, right? I mean, everybody knows THAT, don’t they? Sure they do. Now, compare that with the top arms dealers in the world (2000-2007, as rated by the web site globalissues.org at this link – check out the handy-dandy chart!). GlobalIssues, in turn, got their data straight from the horse’s mouth, i.e.: our own government – in this case, the Congressional Research Service’s October 23, 2008 report on global arms sales (.pdf). Here’s what we learn from that report: the top five global arms dealers are not, as you might expect, shadowy, wealthy Arabs who buy and sell black-market weapons systems, but large governments, who sell directly (and perfectly legally) to any nation with the green to buy. Specifically, these days, that means the developing world, whose leaders are always interested in better “defense” – meaning more, newer weapons. And the cash to pay for that comes straight out of their country’s treasuries, instead of going to things like, say, universal access to clean drinking water, or modern, redundant sewage systems. Or education. Or….well, you get the idea. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the list of….
The Top Five Arms Dealers In The World:

United States
Russia
France
United Kingdom
China

Heeeyyyy….wait a minute! Why, if I’m not mistaken, there seems to be some, ah….overlap between those two lists. Who’d-a-thunkit? As that old geezer Sting once put it:

How can you say that you’re not responsible?What does it have to do with me?What is my reaction, what should it be?Confronted by this latest atrocity

Driven to tearsDriven to tears

Hide my face in my hands, shame wells in my throatMy comfortable existence is reduced to a shallow meaningless partySeems that when some innocents dieAll we can offer them is a page in some magazineToo many cameras and not enough foodThis is what we’ve seen

Driven to tearsDriven to tears

Yep. And if we turn to page 41 of that CRS pdf I linked to above, we see that not only are the five permanent members of the UN Security council ALSO the world’s largest arms dealers, it actually gives us a nice “percentage of total” breakdown. Here’s the breakdown of sales to the developing world (though the total to the ENTIRE world isn’t much different: all figures averaged over eight-year period 2000-2007):

United States – 34.995%
Russia – 27.969%
United Kingdom – 8.091%
France – 6.259%
China – 4.701%

My goodness! If you’re following along on our lovely home edition of our game (“Global-Earth Total Mutually-Assured Destruction,” or “G.E.T.M.A.D.” for short), you’ll have already totaled up the figures, and discovered that, between the five of them, the five permanent members of the UN “Security” Council account for a rather astonishing 82.015% of all arms sales to the developing world.
Can you see why I put the “Security” part of UN Security Council in scare-quotes?