The Impact of Defence and Armament on Sustainable Development

Every rifle bought, every fighter jet commissioned, and every missile stockpiled represents a choice. It is a choice about where a nation’s wealth, talent, and natural resources will flow. In 2024, the world made that choice on a staggering scale, pushing global military spending to a record high even as billions of people lacked adequate healthcare, schooling, and clean water. The relationship between defence and armament on one side, and sustainable development on the other, is one of the sharpest tensions in modern policy. Understanding it means looking honestly at the money, the resources, and the ethics involved.

The scale of military spending today 🔗

The numbers are difficult to ignore. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditure reached $2,718 billion in 2024, a 9.4 per cent jump that was the steepest year-on-year rise since the end of the Cold War. This was the tenth consecutive year of increases, driven by the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, and rising tensions across Asia.

India sits firmly within this picture. SIPRI ranked it as the fifth-largest military spender in the world in 2024, with an outlay of $86.1 billion. Just five nations, the United States, China, Russia, Germany, and India, accounted for 60 per cent of all military spending on the planet. These are vast sums diverted away from other public priorities, and the trend shows little sign of slowing.

The opportunity cost: guns versus development 🔗

Economists use a simple idea to capture this tension: opportunity cost. Money spent on tanks cannot also be spent on hospitals. Every rupee or dollar has only one destination. When defence budgets swell, the resources available for health, education, and poverty reduction shrink, and this trade-off falls hardest on developing nations.

What military budgets could buy 🔗

The United Nations has put hard figures on this trade-off. A 2024 report by the UN Secretary-General found that less than 4 per cent of current global military spending could be enough to eradicate world hunger. The same analysis noted a troubling pattern in developing countries: a 1 per cent increase in military expenditure is linked to an almost equal reduction in publicly financed health services. Meanwhile, the annual financing gap for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) stands at roughly $4 trillion.

Put plainly, the world is not short of money to end hunger or fund schools. It is choosing to spend that money on weapons instead. For countries still working to lift millions out of poverty, this choice carries enormous human consequences.

The ethics of the arms trade 🔗

Beyond the question of how much is spent lies the question of who is selling weapons to whom. The global arms trade is enormous, lucrative, and ethically fraught. Weapons are not ordinary goods. Once sold, they can be used to suppress citizens, fuel wars, and commit atrocities long after the deal is signed.

Selling weapons to oppressive regimes 🔗

A recurring concern is the sale of arms to governments with poor human rights records. Research by the Cato Institute on US arms exports found that weapons sold abroad frequently produce unintended consequences, including enabling oppression, fuelling civil wars, and increasing the likelihood of military coups. Recipient governments have used imported weapons to commit human rights abuses against their own populations.

Amnesty International has long argued that large expenditures on arms leave less money for public health, education, and poverty reduction, trapping some nations near the bottom of the Human Development Index. The irony is stark: many of the world’s largest arms exporters are also the loudest champions of peace and development.

The Arms Trade Treaty and its limits 🔗

To address these problems, the international community adopted the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which seeks to regulate the global trade in conventional weapons and prevent transfers that would fuel atrocities. The treaty connects directly to SDG 16, which promotes peaceful societies and specifically targets the reduction of illicit arms flows by 2030. The catch is enforcement. Many obligations are non-binding, transparency is limited, and powerful exporters often place strategic alliances and commercial profit ahead of treaty commitments. The result is a system that looks robust on paper but leaks badly in practice.

Natural resources, conflict, and the World Bank study 🔗

The link between armament and sustainable development becomes even darker in conflict zones, where natural resources do not merely fund development, they fund war. Oil, diamonds, timber, and minerals can become the financial engines that keep armed conflicts running for years.

How resources finance wars 🔗

The pattern repeats across the globe. Diamonds bankrolled rebel groups in Angola and Sierra Leone. Drugs financed insurgency in Colombia. Timber fuelled conflict in Cambodia. In each case, the ability to seize and sell a valuable commodity gave fighters both a reason to fight and the means to keep fighting. These are sometimes called conflict resources, because their extraction is tied directly to violence.

The greed versus grievance debate 🔗

The most influential study on this question came from the World Bank. In their landmark work, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler asked what really drives civil wars: legitimate grievances such as inequality and oppression, or the simple greed and opportunity created by lootable wealth. Their empirical analysis confirmed that countries dependent on primary commodity exports faced a substantially higher risk of conflict. They found surprisingly little evidence that inequality or political oppression by themselves caused war.

Their explanation was that natural resources provide rebels with an easy source of finance through extortion and predation, lowering the cost of starting a rebellion and making prolonged conflict viable. Notably, the relationship was non-linear: at extremely high levels of resource dependence, conflict risk actually fell, as states found ways to protect and defend their assets.

The study has not gone unchallenged. Critics argue that a statistical correlation between commodity exports and war does not prove that greed causes conflict, and that the proxies used to measure grievance were too crude to capture the real picture. The debate remains alive, but the core insight endures: resource wealth, badly governed, can become a curse rather than a blessing.

Warfare’s toll on economies and the environment 🔗

War does not only destroy lives. It dismantles the foundations of sustainable development. Infrastructure built over decades, roads, power grids, water systems, hospitals, can be flattened in weeks. Investors flee, currencies collapse, and skilled workers emigrate. Agricultural land becomes unusable, and the environmental damage from bombing, fuel spills, and abandoned munitions can poison ecosystems for generations.

There is also a feedback loop worth noting. The destruction caused by conflict deepens poverty, and deep poverty makes societies more vulnerable to renewed conflict. Some nations cycle through war repeatedly, never gaining enough stability to invest in long-term development. The militarisation of the economy crowds out the very industries that could break this cycle.

Rebalancing toward sustainable development 🔗

None of this means defence spending is inherently illegitimate. States have a genuine duty to protect their citizens, and security is itself a precondition for development. The argument is about balance. When the global financing gap for the SDGs is $4 trillion while military budgets hit $2.7 trillion and keep climbing, the priorities seem inverted.

The UN Secretary-General’s report frames the goal as a shift away from arms races and toward what it calls a more balanced approach to military spending and development, underpinned by diplomacy and cooperation rather than confrontation. For developing nations especially, every percentage point shifted from weapons toward health, education, and clean energy is a step toward a more stable and prosperous future. Security and development are not opposites. The challenge is funding both wisely, rather than letting one consume the other.

What do you think? If a small fraction of global military spending could end world hunger, what does our continued choice to prioritise weapons reveal about how we define “security”? And should arms-exporting nations bear moral responsibility for how their weapons are eventually used?

References

1. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges
2. https://www.unrcpd.org/update/iddnpa2026
3. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/risky-business-role-arms-sales-us-foreign-policy
4. https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/act300112004en.pdf
5. https://controlarms.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CA-Practical-measures-SDGs-Final.pdf
6. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/998891468762911498/pdf/28126.pdf
7. https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/milex-sdg-report/report-secretary-general-global-impact-increasing-military-expenditure-sdgs