The world will buy more weapons in 2022

There are queues, long waiting lists, for surgery in hospitals. The public health system is collapsed, overwhelmed by the SARS-CoV-2 emergency, but Russia's invasion of Ukraine has meant that the priority is not health but war. More military spending despite the medical needs of the population. 

More for arms, more for expanding military personnel, while the hospital infrastructure suffers from deficiencies and health personnel again begin to shrink. 

Gabriela Bermúdez has been waiting for several months for a free bed in haematology at the Carlos de Haya Hospital in Malaga. She needs a stem cell transplant in the hope of beating the uterine cancer that has metastasised. She counts every minute waiting for the phone to ring. It doesn't ring and she despairs. 

At the end of February 2020, after several days of haemorrhaging back and forth to the Maternity Hospital in Malaga, in southern Spain, under suspicion of metrorrhagia caused by the menopause and after intense pain, she was admitted to the Carlos de Haya hospital in the emergency room. She was found to have a malignant tumour.

Three days later she underwent emergency surgery. During her recovery, Spain declared an unprecedented state of emergency from 14 March to 21 June. But her ordeal to save her life had only just begun and now she also had to do so in the midst of a pandemic with hospitals overflowing with patients.

Long days of radiation and a waiting list for a stem cell transplant, the last hope for overcoming such a dramatic disease, awaited her. 

She has managed to avoid contracting SARS-CoV-2, although each outbreak, with the different strains, she lives with uncertainty and fear that the new variant could be more lethal.

Even so, She does not lose her smile: "I have faith. The doctors are treating me very well and everything depends on whether there is room for me to continue treatment. Sometimes I don't even want to count the days so that I don't get more worried," she says, her voice nervous.

And as 2021 comes to an end, the number of COVID-19 deaths worldwide exceeds 6 million; the new year has also begun with a new, more contagious strain: Omicron. 
    
Bermúdez spends her time making coping therapy videos to convey positivity, she now has to deal with protecting her health from a more virulent strain at a time when Spain continues to reduce its spending on health investment: from 7.6% of GDP in 2020 to 6.9% in 2021 and 6.6% in 2022 with 5,434 million euros. A per capita expenditure of 114.88 euros per inhabitant.

The State Confederation of Medical Unions (CESM) speaks of a deficit of more than 7,000 doctors and 5,000 nurses needed in the Iberian country, especially in times of pandemic. 

Spain is just the face of other countries which, moreover, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the early hours of 23-24 February 2022, have once again brought the military machine to the table. 

At the end of December 2021, according to the Spanish Ministry of Defence, real military spending in the General State Budget for 2022 rose to 22,796 million euros, a growth of 5.75% in military budgets at an all-time high. Investment in armaments rose by 16.2%. A per capita expenditure of 479 euros per inhabitant.
 

More guns than hospitals. More military equipment than medical equipment and the world is still in the grip of a pandemic with Omicron causing exponential contagions, with many countries deciding to spend more on defence in 2022.

Globally, in the health sector, there is some unease because it was initially believed that the urgency caused by SARS-CoV-2 would make it a priority for governments to strengthen public medical infrastructure by investing more in equipment, spending more on health and medical personnel, as well as channelling more investment into scientific research related to vaccines, treatments and drugs.

The pandemic is still unfolding, but little has changed since then, and to date there has been no global agreement on an International Pandemic Pact, as the WHO is trying to achieve by seeking the consensus of more than 100 countries. 

The coronavirus crisis has exposed the shortcomings of the health sector, the shortage of medical personnel - which was already well known in several emerging countries - and above all it has brought to light the incapacity of the so-called industrialised and developed countries to deal with the problem. Not even Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, Norway or Denmark have been able to avoid being overwhelmed by the number of patients requiring hospital admission and primarily an Intensive Care bed with a ventilator available.

Throughout the pandemic, hospitals, beds, ventilators, medical equipment, primary care staff, doctors, nurses, ambulances, and emergency and telephone workers have been needed. No country, however poor or rich, has been spared these deficiencies.

Nevertheless, the priority is to increase defence spending at a time when rearmament has brought back the spectre of the Cold War as a threat to stability and peace. 

A Cold War 2.0 with various actors in a multi-sided battle with the United States as the main protagonist confronting different countries in geopolitics, geo-economics and in global and regional security.

Already on 5 January, North Korea gave the world a taste of the new year with the launch of a hypersonic missile that set off alarm bells in Japan, South Korea and, of course, the United States. 

But it was not the last: on 11 January, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un oversaw the test of another ballistic missile which, according to the Japanese press, landed in the East Sea or Sea of Japan. In total, he has test-fired seven missiles in a month alone.

There is a clear rearmament in a group of countries. In 2021, global spending on armaments increased by 2.3% and has continued to rise over the last two years, which are also the most complicated in recent memory, and in 2022 it will rise by 2.5%. 

According to William Hartung, it is not understandable that at such a critical time, global military spending should continue to increase, treated as an imminent priority over a series of obvious threats and challenges such as pandemics, climate change, racial and economic injustice. 

For the head of the Centre for International Policy's Arms and Security Programme, the UN fails in every attempt to curb military spending in favour of sustainable development programmes.

"Of all the money spent on military weapons so far in the pandemic, it could have been spent on investments in better public health, environmental protection and programmes to reduce inequality," he says. 

And 2022 will be no different. It is not only North Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Morocco and many others who have decided to spend more on their own defence. Germany, with Russia's war in Ukraine, has changed its traditional defence spending policy of almost always more than 1.57% of GDP.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a rise to 2 % of GDP and an extra 100 billion euros for investment in military equipment.

US President Joe Biden came under pressure from his own members of the Democratic Party to reduce military spending in the 2022 budget and prioritise health care. After months of protracted discussions and following Pentagon and CIA reports that China is the greatest risk to the US, Congress finally approved a 5% increase in defence spending for the fiscal year that has just begun. 

Under President Biden, the military budget has been increased to 760 billion dollars, which represents a per capita defence spending of 2,296.07 dollars. 

At least $7.1 billion will go to improve the capabilities of the US Armed Forces deployed in the Pacific, with special emphasis on the Indo-Pacific area; and $300 million for the military alliance in support of Ukraine. 

The passage of the National Defence Authorisation Act provides for the creation of an independent commission to assess the situation in Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops. 

The current US military budget is historic and places special emphasis on rearming China and Russia and other actors with whom it has frictions such as North Korea and Iran.  As a proportion of GDP it spends 3.7 % on defence.

A report by the consulting firm Deloitte notes that the defence industry has been considerably more insulated from the global impact of the coronavirus than, for example, the commercial aerospace industry.

"With the US military gradually shifting its focus to the Middle East, defence companies must emphasise building enhanced capabilities in fighter aircraft, space resilience, shipbuilding and cyber security to drive growth," according to the UK firm. 

The Pentagon will invest heavily in research and development on several projects such as the fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the B-21 long-range bomber. But investment will also go towards high-end military equipment, as well as unmanned military combat aircraft, cyber, intelligence and hypersonic defences. 

Deloitte's analysis provides data that puts global military spending in 2020 at $1.98 trillion, despite the fact that the world economy fell by 4.4% that year. Even stagnation did not contain war spending.
 

China has also increased its military spending with a percentage that represents 1.7% of its GDP, basically channelling more than 252 billion dollars to meet its strategic priorities this year.

In this respect, Deloitte analysts point out that Beijing has been approving more and more military spending year after year, in a long upward race that is quite striking after decades of restraint. 

"China's military spending has increased for 26 consecutive years, the longest string of uninterrupted years due to its modernisation and expansion plans, in line with a stated desire to catch up with other leading military powers such as the United States," according to the report.

Last year, China was the United States' largest trading partner for goods at $559.2 billion and the Biden Administration has been hesitant to attack Beijing by cutting off its supply of high-tech chips because it would end up impacting via global trade on US companies themselves.

What cannot be ignored are the growing geostrategic frictions: Taiwan recently announced that it had approved additional military spending of $8.6 billion to strengthen its defence capabilities against China after Taipei shared a report with the Pentagon last year, in which it reported several incursions into its airspace by 970 Chinese fighter jets for various periods of time.

Taiwan's containment priorities include the development of Wan Chien cruise missiles, new attack drone systems, the acquisition of a coastal anti-ship missile system and a coastguard ship combat system. 

Another that has followed the trend of more military spending is Russia: military spending in the 2022-24 federal budget will increase by 15 %, with some $43 billion more earmarked for the military and $2.69 billion for armaments. And the three-year budget includes an additional $10 billion. 
 

There is opposition criticism of President Vladimir Putin that at a time when the Russian economy needs an economic injection to grow and maintain stability, social programmes are not being fully addressed, while military spending continues unabated despite the economic downturn. In a decade, Russian military spending has exceeded 300 billion dollars and Putin, with the invasion of Ukraine, is already making calculations to increase investment in new armaments.

Also Japan: Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's government will have a record military budget for 2022 with 47.2 billion dollars; in the coming months it will acquire new and improved military equipment, especially in the face of growing tensions in that part of Asia, not only because of North Korea's military missile manoeuvres but also because of the muscle shown by China in the region. There are tensions in the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea, the South China Sea and the Western Pacific and Indo-Pacific.

Just on 6 of January, Premier Kishida held a virtual meeting with his Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, to seal a mutual alliance to strengthen a new defence and cooperation pact against Chinese threats in the Indo-Pacific. 
    
At the same time, the European Union (EU) has on the table the intention of creating a European Army to ensure its own defence beyond NATO and the American Union. This year's Transatlantic Alliance meeting will be held in Madrid on 29-30 June. 

In recent months there have been growing tensions between Spain and Morocco, which have clashed on several fronts over their position on Western Sahara, the migration crisis in the Maghreb and the recent border closures over the coronavirus.  The Algerian government broke off relations with Rabat, which has even led to the closure of the Maghreb Europe gas pipeline. 

Abdellatif Loudiy, Morocco's Defence Minister, confirmed a 6 % increase in his country's military spending, to 5.2 billion dollars; it represents a 4 % share of his country's GDP. 

The scenario of international tensions and friction weighs heavily on countries' security strategies, as if the current biological warfare were not enough, with 6 million deaths from the coronavirus accumulated so far. Russia's outrage will change everything: countries will further increase their military spending in a collective psychosis to protect themselves. Gabriela Bermudez will have to continue to wait for a bed and like her, hundreds of thousands of people around the world. People need more and better medical care... more hospitals and fewer weapons.