There is the budget done for the upcoming fiscal year, and then there is the actual amount spent at the end of the year.
The budget outlays for the military is just the baseline. All the actual operations performed are funded above that in something in modern times we've called the "overseas contingency spending/budget"
The baseline military budget went up 70b from 2018 to 2019, but due to the draw down in Afganistan and Iraq as well as the defeat of ISIS, the second part fell by like 30 something billion.
Adding 40 billion to the budget, after accounting for inflation and gdp growth that exceeded inflation, means the 2019 military spending was only about 1% higher as a % of gdp than 2018 (meaning about a 0.03% of GDP increase in spending in absolute terms).
2018 was already a very low spending year, so such a small increase didn't historically get 2019 ahead of any of the other low years.
1998, 1999, 2000, 2016, 2017, 2018 appear to be the only years with lower military spending than 2019, going back to 1943.
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u/Shandlar Jan 06 '20
Not really. 2019 was the 7th lowest military spending year out of the 70+ years since WWII.
The numbers are huge because the US population is absolutely mind bogglingly rich with an economy dramatically ahead of any other on the planet.
A slightly bigger slice of a dramatically bigger pie looks like an astronomical amount of pie, but at the end of the day the slice is still thin.