2026-04-28
7 分钟The world is rearming fast.
Military spending has increased in real terms every year for the past decade.
The leap in 2024 was the largest in inflation-adjusted terms since the Cold War.
By the end of the decade, European members of NATO, their bare armories exposed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
will spend 300 billion euros, that 's 350 billion dollars more a year than in 2025.
China's military spending grows each year by an amount equivalent to Taiwan's entire annual defense budget,
even as the rest of Asia scrambles to keep up.
But it is arms, not budgets, that deter.
And producing those arms requires the right sort of defence industry tailored to the wars of the future.
The wars in Ukraine and Iran appear to hold different lessons.
Ukraine has pioneered the use of low-cost drones,
whose software is updated weekly to stave off a much larger Russian army.
Israel and America have used expensive F-35 jets,
B-2 bombers, air-launched ballistic missiles, and scores of refueling tankers to attack Iran.
In fact, they have much in common.
One message is that Western countries need more defense manufacturing capacity.
In just 40 days of war, America used up half its stocks of high-end air defense munitions.
Another is that armed forces need to balance a few high-end systems and a much larger number of cheaper,
more numerous and easily replaceable weapons.
A third is that, regardless of whether a weapon is big or small,