by Joshua J. Watterton, EUC PhD candidate
As global military spending and production surge, war bells again ring.[1],[2] In fact, military spending has risen steadily over the past 25 years, at the global level and in the case of many individual countries.[3] This spending is unevenly distributed across the world system: the top 15 countries account for over 80% of global military spending, while the top spender, accounting for nearly 40% of global military expenditure, with only four and a quarter percent of the global population, is the United States (SPIRI 2025).[4]
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2014 target call on all 32 official member states to spend a minimum of 2% national wealth (measured in germs of gross domestic product) on their military might by 2024, said to be unrealistic for many allied countries, was not met by the majority of them. Seven years later in 2021, six countries met the target; three years later in 2024, the number almost quadrupled to 23 just as the long-term spending target more than doubled in summer 2025 to 5% of GDP by 2035.[5]
Is it possible to have both “guns and butter”? Canada’s new Prime Minister is eager to strategically re-orientate the country’s political economy to show us that “yes, we can!”[6] Canada, originally poised to miss NATO’s 2% call by 2030,[7] will now meet it this fiscal year, five years ahead of schedule, through what appears as a wholesale resurrection of Military Keynesianism – what the notorious Cambridge economist Joan Robinson once called ‘Bastardized Keynesianism’. How exactly billions will be channelled into the system remains unclear and options are limited.[8] For example, growth in military budgets tend to ‘crowd-out’ other forms of government spending (Raymond and Hyatt Jr. 2007; Ikegami and Wang 2022) – the welfare-warfare trade-off central to the famous guns versus butter debate – which includes spending on promoting ecological wellbeing.[9] Nonetheless, what is clear is that the so-called ‘peace dividend’ is over and larger military budgets will haunt us for some time.
The post-9/11 global rearmament and militarization, including its geographical unevenness, raise questions around the economic burden and social opportunity cost it carries in the short-term as well as its impact on future economic development. Doctoral Candidate Joshua Watterton explores these questions in his dissertation through a mixed-method investigation into the specific economic effects of military spending and production at multiple geographic scales.
Drawing on scholarship from the sub-fields of classical and Marxist political economy, economic geography, and security and defense economics, Josh aims to contribute to literature on geographic uneven development, production networks, Marxist value and crisis theory – including long forgotten, relatively esoteric and non-academic debates once known as the permanent war and arms economy – and more contemporary debates revolving around economic renewal and regional economic resilience.
A major overarching goal of Josh’s research is to widen our understanding of the economic system and its dynamics through a critical resuscitation of what Elena Louisia Lange (2019; 2021) calls the “Turing Bombe”of classical political economy and decipher of modern economic science: the ‘twofold’ labour theory of value as a form-content and qualitative-quantitative methodological device and theory of the socio-historical constitution of the ‘value forms’ and, ultimately, the ‘money form’.[10] As Elisa Greco (2015) explains, Marx’s much-misunderstood labour theory of value – which, contra David Harvey (2006, 36-37; 2018; 2020), is not a value theory of labour – transforms political economy into the critical practice of tracing the linkages between particular economic phenomena (i.e., the empirical value forms such as the commodity, exchange-value, rent, interest, money, etc.) back to their socio-historical roots in social relations between people in production – i.e., in the social structure of abstract social labour, measured in terms of socially necessary labour-time.
The question of ‘what kind’ of economic growth or ‘what backs’ accumulation and money matters. By focusing on production- and exploitation-driven accumulation, the twofold labour theory of value sets the stage for a unique and powerful theory of economic macrodynamics and crisis formation – one regarded by many geographers as out-dated and unusable for economic analysis and diagnosis.[11] By privileging the relation between two central macroeconomic variables – the composition of capital (ratio of non-labour to labour input) and the average rate of profit (ratio of total surplus value to total systemic costs) – this theory, what Marx (1973; 1981) called the falling rate of profit, reframes how economic dynamics and crisis are understood on the basis of long-term structural change. An economy-wide rise in the ratio of non-labour input to labour input (“the OCC” in the chart below) induces a corresponding fall in the economy-wide rate of profit (the “ARP” in the chart below) – a fall that often precedes recession and a fall that always rebounds with recession. (The shaded areas in Figure 2 demarcate recessionary periods as per the NBER.)
To carry out this research project, Josh, drawing on classical dialectical philosophy and also critical realism, is employing a combination of methods: he is constructing a data set for purposes of analyzing macroeconomic trends – a kind of “extensive analysis” at a high level of generality – and, in contrast, he is conducting a case study on the US economy.
Using Penn World Tables and national incoming and accounting data, his extensive research is operationalized at multiple geographic scales: the global, supra-national and national scales. The first two levels of extensive analysis are concerned with world-historical economic trends – primarily trends in global state and military spending, global profitability, and global exploitation. The second level of extensive analysis is concerned with world-geographic trends, i.e., variations in trends in the above economic variables at the level of individual countries. Beyond the variables mentioned here, some additional economic statistics are utilized as well.
The US has by far the best macroeconomic data available, and with the most lavish military budget it makes for the ideal “intensive analysis” and case study.[14] This case study first looks to examine the direct causal effects of changes in federal military spending on the vicissitudes in US rate of profit and, moreover, to open up this metric to consider the monetary cost of environmental degradation (as a cost subtracted from the GDP categories of net operating surplus and net corporate profits that make up the numerator of the Marxian rate of profit).
There are limitations with this kind of general and abstract inquiry that necessitate another kind: the study therefore scales down from the macroscopic to the relatively microscopic sub-national and local levels. The purposes of this “on-the-ground” qualitative-orientated research is to not only investigate the geographic instantization or spatial manifestation of federal military spending in particular places but to put it in the context of economic resilience and renewal: i.e., the degree that federal military spending has contributed to regional economic stability in the wake of decades of economic decline and in the face of mounting crises.
The specific research site for this project is the New London region of Connecticut. As a top recipient of federal military funds, the state houses some of the top military contractors in the world such as RTX Corporation (Pratt and Whitney), Lockheed Martin (Sikorsky), and General Electric (Electric Boat). With the highest geographic concentration of military-oriented industry in the entire country with a defense industry locational quotient five times the national average and second to only Virgina as the number one recipient of federal defense funds in the US when calculated on a per capita basis, military spending clearly has an outsized impact across Connecticut (Sonnenfeld et al 2024). After decades of weak post-cold war spending, New London is at the heart of the biggest naval expansion in the US in four decades. Here, along the Thames River, is the city of Groton, home to the first US submarine base and houses over a dozen ballistic missile launching nuclear-powered submarines. New London was poised to receive more than $16bn in funding over the next year, much of which is allocated to funding an increase in the production cadence of Virginia-class attack submarines from one to two per year. However, gaps in funding have now emerged, potentially undermining the development and stability that many local residents have been long hopeful for.[15]
Josh’s research is more at home in the relatively esoteric corners of the discipline, such as the ‘peace studies’ research program associated with Walter Isard’s Peace Science Society – a kind of sub-field of political and economic geography and extension of regional science that has never received much attention. Certainly, at the present juncture, it seems like the right time for it to receive the attention it has always deserved.[16]
Working under the supervision of Professor Raju J. Das, Josh, who holds a BA (Hons.) in Criminology and MA in Sociology from Brock University, is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at York University, in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.
[1] Governments around the world are upping the ante by not only increasing their military budgets but in some cases also through conscription policies: by ‘bringing back the draft’. From Latvia to the UK to Germany, even to the US and talks by Canadian conservatives about brining the draft in anticipation of the 2025 election, to Taiwan’s recent lengthening of their mandatory draft service and to Denmark’s shift to include women in their mandatory draft by year-end 2025 – mandatory military service is “back in the debate” (Cohen 2024).
[2] Not to mention more recent escalations in the Middle East, a 2024 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies finds the total number of armed conflicts multiplied between 2011 and 2023, reaching a three-decade high of 183 regional and local conflicts around the world in 2023: “the world is experiencing an unprecedented number of conflicts, which appear increasingly intractable due to the growing involvement of both domestic and external actors, a complex array of underlying drivers, and escalating geopolitical tensions. The conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine – arguably the most consequential of 2023–24 due to their geopolitical significance and human impact – are amplified examples of these broader trends. Meanwhile, the intensity and human cost of armed conflicts continue to surge …” (ISS 2024). Documented fatalities from violent para/militarized events, which range anywhere from 3-15 times below actual fatalities as Brown’s Watson Institute for Internation & Public Affairs reports, rose by 37% during the reporting period (1 July 2023–30 June 2024).
[3] After reaching its post-Cold War low in 1996, global military spending doubled between 1997 and 2020. Global military spending increased for its 10th consecutive year in 2024 to an all time high of $2.7tr USD and for the second year it has risen in all five regions defined by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute – an overall increase of 7.1 percent in real terms compared to 2023 (SIPRI 2025). The nine nuclear states defined by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War spent over $100bn on their nuclear arsenals in 2024, an 11 percent increase from 2023 (ICAN 2025). Besides their obvious terrifying character, these figures are particularly striking when considering that a mere $6.6bn USD could feed the world’s most vulnerable 42 million people in famine-like conditions and that according to the World Food Programme $300bn USD over a 10-year period could address the hunger of over 800 million people (Watterton 2023, 5).
[4] Between 1998 and 2011, the pentagon’s budget increased by 91 percent in real terms and domestic defense industry profits nearly quadrupled (Robinson 2018, 4); in this period, the US was responsible for supplying more than a third of global arms exports (Tan 2014, 4). Jumps in defense or war industry profits coincide with regional conflicts around the world. “Within hours of the 6 April 2017 US tomahawk missile bombardment of Syria, the company that builds those missiles, Raytheon, reported an increase in its stock value by $1 billion” (Robinson 2018, 10). The war in Afghanistan was both costly (as Stiglitz has shown) and prosperous: e.g., an investment of $10,000 USD in the S&P 500 index fund in September 2001, and faithfully reinvested over 20 years, would be worth roughly $62,000 in 2021, compared to this $10,000 investment spread evenly across the top five US defense contractors for this 20-year period would be worth $97,000 (theintercept.com/2021/08/16/afghanistan-war-defense-stocks/).
[5] Falkenek 2025: www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/whos-at-2-percent-look-how-nato-allies-have-increased-their-defense-spending-since-russias-invasion-of-ukraine. NATO members, save Spain, are now expected to spend at levels similar to the Cold War – the benchmark of which is set for a minimum 3.5% of GDP on core defense related activities and another 1.5% on broader security-related activities such as the adaptation ports and bridges, protecting energy pipelines, etc.: www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/what-is-natos-new-5-defence-spending-target-2025-06-23/.
[6] Lange 2025: www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-can-canada-have-both-guns-and-butter-carney-shows-us-yes-we-can.
[7] Penney 2024: www.pbo-dpb.ca/en/publications/RP-2425-020-S–fiscal-implications-meeting-nato-military-spending-target–repercussions-financieres-atteinte-cible-depenses-militaires-fixee-otan.
[8] Any sort of ‘multiplier effect’ associated with forms of governmental spending should not be assumed to be universally applicable, possessing the same dynamism as it once did: the ‘temporal fix’ from Keynes’ multiplier that would serve to spark some virtuous circle of growth between spending, employment and production is historically limited. While the short-term (and relatively small scale) benefits associated with military spending may be observable, the long-term economic effects are not known. Robinson’s remarks flow from Keynes, himself noting the limitations of spending on means of war, as there are other more socially useful forms of state spending. As Seymour Melman and Ron Smith each argued in the 1970s and 1980s that the goods and services (such as, e.g., the “services” soldiers provide) are not basic commodities bought and sold on markets. This kind of economic activity amounted to a leakage or burden that negatively weighed on economic growth, and one manifestation of this burden was inflation. Though, it is possible that the economic effects of NATO’s militaristic frenzy will turn beneficial: war with China, annexation and regime changes, a shift away from multipolarity and cheap oil, could all prove prosperous for instance, at least for a period of time in the strictly economic sense and for some national economies, and definitely not in the wider global sense of social and ecological well-being.
[9] Nearly a decade before his 1961 farewell address and warning of the growing undemocratic influence of the ‘military-industrial-complex’, former NATO Commander and then US President D.D. Eisenhower (1953) highlighted the forgone costs of producing ‘means of destruction’: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals …We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” (Eisenhower, quoted in Watterton 2023:1).
[10] Put differently, economic value is understood as much more than the regulator of proportional market exchange (i.e., x of commodity A = y of commodity B, etc.) and hence more than the common social denomination on which commodity exchange occurs: value is social form – not simply market exchange but value and the ‘law of value’ at the level of production act as a social nexus, more accurately a value-money nexus, that is one major and dominant lever that connects, integrates and even homogenizing social difference (Lange 2021a; 2021b).
[11] See, for instance, Harvey 1982/2006, chapter one and the appendix to it and Harvey 2015; also, in the same sense but on the law of value see Massey 1995, Hudson 2005, and Mark Harvey and Normal Geras 2018.
[12] Put differently, economic value is understood as much more than the regulator of proportional market exchange (i.e., x of commodity A = y of commodity B, etc.) and hence more than the common social denomination on which commodity exchange occurs: value is social form – not simply market exchange but value and the ‘law of value’ at the level of production act as a social nexus, more accurately a value-money nexus, that is one major and dominant lever that connects, integrates and even homogenizing social difference (Lange 2021a; 2021b).
[13] See, for instance, Harvey 1982/2006, chapter one and the appendix to it and Harvey 2015; also, in the same sense but on the law of value see Massey 1995, Hudson 2005, and Mark Harvey and Normal Geras 2018.
[14] See Sayer 2010 and Danermark et al 2002 on extensive-intensive research design.
[15] Mahony 2024: portal.ct.gov/in-the-news/2024-news/ct-gets-billions-under-2025-defense-bill-house-approved-what-it-means-for-jobs-education; Hagen 2025: https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2025-08-05/ct-submarines-virginia-class-congress-joe-courtney.
[16] As the world faces a ‘triple crisis’ (Smith 2019) – 1) a crisis of the global capitalist order (widespread economic crisis and stagnation, historically low rates of profit, historic levels of wealth and income inequality, falling living standards, etc.), 2) a crisis of international relations (antiquation of the nation-state system, rising geopolitical tensions, displacement, armed conflicts, and even wars), and 3) a crisis of the natural environment (which in the long run is the most life threatening of all) – the most vital of all questions is what is at the heart of this triple crisis and what we together are going to do about it.
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