![]() ![]() Ronald Reagan and the defeat of the Soviet empire. Farm to factory: a reinterpretation of the Soviet industrial revolution. Here someone got a figure that looks like mine, and it also shows that the Soviet increase in spending came way before Reagan:Īllen, R. Reagan's increase from valley to peak was of 62.5% while the Soviet answer to that was a mere 12%. If this is so, then Reagan's buildup didn't really increase the Soviet's military burden. Population for the US comes from the US Census, population for the USSR comes from the UN. For that, I multiply my values above by GDP as measured by Maddison (I assume 18% of GDP spending for the Soviets in the 78-85 period), and then I multiply by population. We can also look at military spending on a per capita basis, and see also the absolute amount of spending. Rather, The Soviet Union committed suicide by virtue of the deterioration of its economic system in the late 70s. In that sense, he didn't win the Cold War. For more, see the AskHistorians subreddit) Reagan's policies were at much a secondary factor in explaining why the Soviet economy crashed. Being street bayesians, let's conclude that it was 18% for now.īonus: Was US military technology more advanced than the Soviet's? Yes, but not by a large margin (Perry, 1973)īonus2: Did Reagan induce a Soviet increase in military spending that in turn lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union? (For the thesis see Busch 1997, against the thesis Dobson 2005. However, Harrison 2003 leads some support to the idea that actual military spending was around 20%, at the upper range of the Cold War estimates. Given my chart, one would say that military spending was around 10-20% of Soviet GDP, so perhaps a compromise figure of 15%, around twice USA spending. During the Cold War there was a whole literature (Dudkin & Vasilevsky 1987, Noren 1995, Steinberg 1990) devoted to these estimates. The huge dispersion in 1980 comes from Harrison (2003), where he collects many different estimates.Įven today we don't have fully reliable numbers on Soviet military spending. I used % of National Income (GDP for usa, and NMP converted to GDP for the Soviet Union) for both countries, but different procedures for computing Soviet GDP will yield different estimates. Notice that this chart is put together from different sources. Apart from financial aid, the UK has provided Ukraine with equipment such as the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank, a number of armored fighting vehicles, and missiles, including long-range Storm Shadow cruise-missiles.This one is easier than the previous ones Along with a coalition of other countries, the UK has been one of the key backers of the Ukrainian military effort, providing significant military aid over the course of the war. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 completely altered the European security landscape for the UK. As of 2021, UK defense spending was slightly above this target, at 2.3 percent of GDP. Prior to 2016 the United Kingdom’s defense spending was always above this target and was higher than three percent of GDP before the mid-1990s. Members of NATO are expected to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defense, a target which the United Kingdom just missed between 2015//18 when it was 1.9 percent. The UK is a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO) a military and political alliance initiated on the principle that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Between 2010/11 and and 2016/17 defense expenditure was gradually reduced from 51.6 billion pounds, to just 44.3 billion pounds, and reflected the policy of austerity implemented by the government at that time. This was the highest defense spending for the UK during this provided time period and the second consecutive year of increased defense expenditure. In 2022/23, the United Kingdom spent approximately 55.5 billion British pounds on defense, compared with 51.9 billion pounds in the previous year.
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