Military Expenditure Dynamics and a World Model

This chapter reports the first results of a research project aiming to construct a world computer model which explicitly includes a conventional military production sector and ‘arms race’ dynamics to determine the size of military expenditures. Such a model is considered important because, as part of a ‘model set’, it can assist the high-level policy-maker, whether he is primarily responsible, for example, for economic policy, national security policy, foreign policy, etc., in recognising the full repercussions of his decisions on the world system. Based on an enhanced version of an existing world computer model called SARUM, and using an arms dynamics equation based on the ‘Richardson Process’ for which coefficients were estimated using ACDA data on military expenditures, a series of illustrative scenarios are compared. These simulations, which embody different assumptions about the way regions react to one another and determine the level of military expenditures, show that SARUM is a suitable candidate for the construction of such a world model, although more work is required before it can be used in actual decision processes.