What A Connected Civilization Does With Its Military Budgets

On the morning of June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. Within six weeks, most of Europe was at war. Within four years, approximately 20 million people were dead — soldiers and civilians — in what was then called the Great War.

The war was not inevitable. It emerged from a specific configuration of alliance obligations, military planning assumptions, communication failures, leadership miscalculation, and institutional momentum that collectively made a regional crisis catastrophic. But underlying all of this was a security architecture built entirely on military deterrence: every major power had built armies and navies as their primary security guarantee, and the plans those armies and navies had developed assumed that the only relevant question was how to fight most effectively.

No one in June 1914 asked whether the conflict could be prevented by addressing the underlying conditions that were generating it. There were no adequate international institutions through which such a question could have been processed. There was no framework for understanding security in terms of anything other than military balance. The tools available were the tools built; the tools built were military.

One hundred and ten years later, global military spending is at its highest level since World War II. The tools we are building are still primarily military. The question that was not asked in 1914 is still not being asked at the institutional level: what would it cost to invest in the conditions that prevent conflict, and how does that compare to the cost of the conflicts that result when those conditions are absent?

The Security Value of Connection

The empirical case for connection as security is now extensive.

Trade and conflict. The liberal peace thesis — that economically interdependent states are less likely to fight each other — has been debated among political scientists since Norman Angell articulated it in 1910. The debate has largely been resolved in favor of the thesis, with important qualifications. Countries that trade extensively with each other are significantly less likely to engage in militarized conflicts. The mechanism is not primarily that traders love peace — it is that extensive trade creates constituencies within each country with strong material interests in maintaining the relationship, creates economic costs for conflict that raise the threshold for political decisions to fight, and builds the institutional relationships and mutual knowledge that make diplomatic conflict resolution more tractable.

The qualification is important: trade alone does not prevent conflict in all circumstances, and highly asymmetric trade relationships can generate rather than reduce tension. But the basic finding is robust. The extraordinary peace among Western European nations since 1945 is inseparable from the progressive economic integration that began with the Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and developed into the European Union.

Institutional connection. Beyond trade, the density of international institutional connections — shared membership in international organizations, treaty regimes, diplomatic relationships, cultural and educational exchanges — reduces conflict probability. Countries with dense institutional ties have more communication channels, more mutual knowledge, more invested in the relationship's continuation, and more frameworks for resolving disputes short of violence.

The Concert of Europe — the system of diplomatic consultation that managed European great power conflicts after the Napoleonic Wars — preserved a relative peace among the major powers for almost a century, from 1815 to 1914. Its collapse was not inevitable; it was the product of specific failures of institutional adaptation to the changing power configuration of late nineteenth-century Europe. The lesson is not that institutional connection always works but that it works for long periods under the right conditions — and that its collapse has catastrophic consequences.

Development and conflict. The relationship between poverty, resource scarcity, governance failure, and conflict is well-established. The World Bank's research consistently finds that countries below certain income thresholds are dramatically more likely to experience civil conflict. Countries experiencing severe resource stress — water scarcity, land degradation, food insecurity — are more likely to generate the political conditions that lead to both internal and external conflict. Governance failure and ethnic exclusion are among the strongest predictors of civil war onset.

This means that investment in development — in reducing poverty, improving governance, expanding access to resources, building inclusive political institutions — is security investment. Not military security investment, but the prevention of the conditions that generate the need for military response. The development economics literature consistently finds that the cost of prevention is far lower than the cost of military intervention after conflict onset, and that military intervention frequently fails to address the underlying conditions in ways that prevent conflict recurrence.

The Actual Cost Distribution

The global security budget is overwhelmingly allocated to military capacity. Of the $2.2 trillion in global military spending in 2023, the amount spent on conflict prevention through development, diplomacy, and institution-building is a small fraction.

The United States military budget in 2023 was approximately $858 billion. The State Department and USAID budget — the primary instruments of American diplomatic and development engagement — was approximately $60 billion, of which a significant portion was military assistance. Total American spending on the kinds of programs that development economics identifies as conflict-preventive was perhaps $20-30 billion.

The ratio is roughly 30:1 in favor of military response over prevention. This ratio would be widely recognized as dysfunctional in any other domain. A health system that allocated $30 of treatment resources for every $1 of prevention resources, in a domain where prevention is demonstrably cheaper and more effective than treatment, would be considered badly designed. The security system's equivalent allocation is rarely examined with similar scrutiny.

What Would Reallocation Actually Buy

The literature on specific interventions is helpful for making this concrete.

Pandemic preparedness: The COVID-19 pandemic cost the global economy an estimated $12.5 trillion in lost output over 2020-2021, plus direct health system costs and incalculable social costs. Pre-pandemic estimates of the cost of adequate global pandemic preparedness — the surveillance systems, stockpile capacity, rapid response infrastructure, and international coordination mechanisms — ranged from $10-20 billion per year. The ratio of prevention cost to consequence cost was roughly 1:600 or better. A single aircraft carrier costs approximately $13 billion to build and hundreds of millions annually to operate. The global pandemic preparedness system has been chronically underfunded for decades.

Water security: Water scarcity is identified by the World Economic Forum and various security agencies as among the top conflict risks globally. Investment in water security infrastructure — efficiency, storage, transboundary management institutions — in high-risk regions is direct security investment. The cost of comprehensive water security in the most water-stressed regions is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars annually. This is a fraction of the military spending of countries in those same regions.

Early warning and conflict prevention: The UN Secretary-General's 2021 report on conflict prevention found that early warning systems, preventive diplomacy, and mediation cost roughly $600 million per year globally. The cost of a single military intervention — leaving aside reconstruction costs — routinely exceeds $100 billion. The leverage ratio of prevention to intervention is extraordinary.

Education: The research on education's conflict-preventive effects is extensive. Education, particularly of women and girls, is among the strongest predictors of reduced fertility rates, improved child health, reduced political violence, and more stable governance. UNESCO estimates the annual financing gap for achieving universal quality education globally at approximately $39 billion. The United States alone spends more than twenty times that on its military annually.

The Political Economy of Military Spending

If the security return on prevention investment is so dramatically higher than on military spending, why does military spending dominate?

The political economy is straightforward. Military spending is concentrated and organizationally powerful. The defense industrial complex — the network of contractors, military institutions, and political interests that depend on continued military expenditure — is among the most effective lobbying and political influence systems in the world. Development spending is diffuse and generates no comparable political constituency. There is no equivalent of Lockheed Martin lobbying for pandemic preparedness.

Additionally, the benefits of prevention are invisible and hypothetical. Politicians cannot point to a war that did not happen because of an investment in conflict prevention. They can point to military hardware. The visibility asymmetry systematically biases political decisions toward military spending even where the prevention investment would generate higher security value.

There is also the temporal mismatch. Conflict prevention investments pay off over years or decades. Political cycles run on years. The decision-maker who invests in pandemic preparedness in 2005 will not be in office when the preparedness infrastructure proves its value in 2020. The decision-maker who authorizes a military spending increase generates visible political benefits immediately.

What a Connected Civilization's Security Architecture Looks Like

A civilization that had internalized the evidence on conflict causation and prevention would organize its security spending very differently.

The primary security investment would be in the conditions for connection: economic development, institutional capacity, governance quality, resource access, diplomatic infrastructure, international institutions for dispute resolution. Military capacity would remain as insurance against specific threat scenarios, not as the primary security guarantee.

The rough outline might look like: for every dollar spent on military hardware and personnel, a comparable or larger amount would be spent on development assistance, diplomatic engagement, international institution-building, pandemic preparedness, climate adaptation assistance, and the other conflict-preventive investments for which the evidence of security value is strong.

This does not eliminate military spending. It changes what that spending is for: not the primary security guarantee, but the backstop for failure of the preventive system — the residual capacity to respond when prevention fails, sized appropriately for that function rather than for the obsolete function of winning wars against near-peers.

The European Union is again the useful existence proof. European security spending, per capita, is dramatically lower than American spending, but European security outcomes — measured in conflict incidence, population stability, governance quality — are equally good or better in most dimensions. The EU's security investment is heavily weighted toward institutional connection, economic integration, and diplomatic engagement. Military spending is treated as a supplementary rather than primary instrument.

The civilizational argument is this: the world that human beings actually need to build — one capable of managing climate change, pandemic risk, resource scarcity, and the other genuinely civilizational challenges of the coming century — cannot be built by nations whose primary security investment is in their capacity to fight each other. The resources allocated to military competition are resources not available for cooperative management of shared threats. And the threat-perceiving mindset that military investment produces actively undermines the cooperative institutions and relationships through which shared threats must be managed.

A connected civilization would recognize that its most important security investment is in the depth and resilience of its connections — the economic ties, institutional relationships, cultural bonds, and mutual knowledge that make conflict costly and cooperative problem-solving tractable. Military capacity would remain, because the transition from the world we have to the world we need will be long and imperfect. But it would be means rather than end — a hedge against the failure of the primary security strategy, not the primary security strategy itself.

The $2.2 trillion question is not whether to spend zero on security. It is what security actually buys, and whether the current portfolio of investments is remotely optimized for the security outcomes that matter most. The honest answer, for most of the world's major powers, is that it is not. And the cost of that misallocation is visible in every pandemic that went uncontained, every climate disruption that went unmitigated, and every conflict that was managed militarily at catastrophic cost when prevention at a fraction of that cost was available.