$4 Billion/year on defense?
Hope they don’t want a modern airforce or navy.
It’s not a huge country, a little smaller than New Mexico.
I think the $4B is an upgrade per year.
The article states that they spend 1.95% of GDP. Their GDP is $514B. Hence they spend $10B a year. Granted this is chicken feed compared to our budget, but not everyone needs the shiniest toys like us. I wonder if the $4B is an increase over current levels? It would appear so, and that would make their GDP % appreciably higher.
Of course we also shell out a lot more as a percentage of GDP.
Our GDP $14.99T
Defense budget $683B
Thus 4.55% of GDP.
It’s nearly as much as Germany is going to spend over the same period of time. There are literally a few countries in the world, which spend over $10 billion a year (on the actual hardware, not personal costs etc. which make majority of every defense budget) and all of them operate things like strategic air force, nuclear submarines etc. these are really expensive toys.