Mapping Militarism 2025

By David Swanson, reprinted with permission; first published for World BEYOND War, May 22, 2025

 https://worldbeyondwar.org/mapping-militarism-2025/?

 World BEYOND War has just released its 2025 edition of Mapping Militarism, which uses 24 interactive maps to highlight the state of war and peace on our planet. Each map allows the viewer to spin the globe, zoom in and out, scroll the timeline back through the years, or switch from map view to list view. Try it. (Editor's Note:  the interactive maps are only available on the worldbeyondwar.org link)

 

In 2024, unbeknownst to many people living in luckier parts of the world, there were not just two or three wars happening, but 16 involving 45 nations. Wars here are defined as conflicts between two or more organized armed groups, governmental or non-governmental, in which 1,000 or more people are killed per year. In the cases of 6 wars involving 28 nations, the immediate war-caused deaths were 10,000 or more in 2024. Not included here are nations sending weapons or small numbers of troops to join in distant wars. Wars that are also genocides and/or occupations and/or ethnic cleansings, etc., are not excluded. While most wars kill mostly civilians, and many wars are very one-sided, phenomena like killings by police in the United States are not included because they lack two or more organized armed groups.

 Those six worst wars in 2024, all still raging, include the war in Myanmar, the war in Ethiopia, the war in Ukraine, and the war in South Sudan and Sudan, as well as two wars that could arguably each be defined as multiple wars, one being the wars of Palestine, Syria, Yemen, and the rest of Western Asia, and the other being the wars across over a dozen nations of Northern Africa.

 Not updated are our maps of numbers of U.S. missile strikes in nations around the globe, because the U.S. Air Force has not even pretended to report on those since 2021, and researchers who used to document them are no longer working on those projects

 

 

There are two stunning facts about nations that export the weapons of war.

 

One is that the United States alone exports about as much as all the rest of the world combined. U.S. weapons exports in 2024 were $13.51 billion. No other nation topped $2.5 billion. The leaders were France at $2.27b, Germany at $2.05b, and Italy at $1.38b. Then came Russia at $1.34b and China at $1.13b. Israel was the only other country to top $1b in weapons exports. Of 46 nations exporting $1 million or more in weapons, 43 were aligned with the United States. Iran was at $0.2b.

 The other fact worth noticing is that there is very little overlap between where weapons are made (at least in quantity for export) and where wars are waged. In the Americas, the two maps are almost mirror images of each other. The same is true for the northern half of Africa. In Western Asia, there are exceptions: Israel, Jordan, and Iran make both lists. In the rest of Eurasia, so do Russia and Ukraine.

 

 

Still, to a great extent, weapons are sent to wars and future wars far from where they are made. Above are maps of the nations that imported U.S. weapons in 2024. Openly brutal dictatorships are clearly welcome customers, although Saudi Arabia has slipped from its customary spot in first place, falling to second in 2022, third in 2023, and sixth in 2024 — though it seems poised to reclaim the throne in 2025.

 

 

Then there’s the question of where the U.S. tosses around U.S. tax dollars for other nations’ militaries (and then records the expenses as “aid”). Above are images from 2022, 2023, and 2024, showing U.S. funds supporting some horrific governments’ militaries.

 

 

The U.S. military also maintains hundreds of its own bases in other people’s countries. Above are the countries with the most U.S. bases in them. Some other nations have much smaller numbers of foreign military bases. The U.S. military is unique in this and many other regards, including in the amount of money spent on it. See the maps on spending money, and on spending money per capita (in which Israel beats out the United States for first place, while the United States gives weapons funding to Israel).

 U.S. military spending is still rapidly on the rise, with the U.S. House just having voted to increase it by $150 billion a year. Understood comprehensively, it is already well over $1 trillion per year. Here’s a look at how Trump’s proposed budget breaks down,

 

                                 Data:  OMB FY 2026 discretionary funding request.  Pentagon amt=budget                                                 function 050.

                                    Chart:  Stephen Semler (@stephensemler/ stephensemler.com)  Created with                                          datawrapper.  M ore;  stephensemler.com

 

….

Mapping Militarism includes, as always, numerous maps of positive steps taken for peace. These usually show slow progress. Sometimes they show retrogression. The 2025 map of nations party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions shows the removal of Lithuania from that list.

 

We’ve added one new map, showing (in blue) nations whose governments recognize the existence of the nation of Palestine:

 

 

 

 

David Swanson is an author, speaker, and founder of World BEYOND War.