Negotiations to Reduce Military Expenditures — Problems and Possibilities

The problems of defining, evaluating, measuring, reporting, comparing and verifying military expenditures have attracted a good deal of interest for quite some time. The purposes of dealing with these kinds of questions may, however, be very different. Some may be mainly interested in military expenditures as an instrument for military balance assessments, the results of which might have an impact on the country’s defence policy. Others may want to assess the military expenditures within a group of countries belonging to the same defence organisation in order to arrive at a fair distribution of the social and economic burden imposed by defence obligations. Still others may be interested in military expenditures as an object of disarmament. In this case the main concern may again be to assess a country’s relative military capability by comparing military expenditures in different countries, keeping in mind, of course, that military capability is built up during long periods of time and is affected also by many other factors than those that can be accounted for in monetary terms. Great interest may also be devoted to the linkage between disarmament and development as, for instance, the question of imposing some new kind of tax on military expenditures to be used for the benefit of the developing countries.