Sniffer planes, anyone? The tough calls militaries face in planning for future wars

Rapid technological changes heighten the difficulties of deciding where to place huge bets in defence spending.

- Jonathan Eyal

The trend is unmistakable: whether it's in the US, Europe, Russia, China or elsewhere throughout the Indo-Pacific region, spending on the military is going up.

US President Donald Trump promises America's first US$1 trillion (S$1.28 trillion) annual budget by 2026, a 12 per cent increase on current spending levels. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen talks of €850 billion (S$1.24 trillion) in total extra spending – on top of existing defence budgets – for acquiring European weapons over the coming decade.

One needs to have access to highly classified intelligence material to know precisely how much Russia or China spends on the military, but the trajectory is clearly upwards.

The resources devoted to the military are rising very fast, partly because Europe and the Middle East have been shaken to the core by the biggest wars in generations and partly because the global balance of power and geopolitical structure created at the end of World War II is melting. The arms race is now a worldwide phenomenon and won't be reversed soon because it is fuelled by historic shifts in the world's strategic tectonic plates.

But while governments are scrambling to find the necessary funds for this massive military investment, they also face an increasingly acute dilemma: a constantly shifting debate over which defence technologies they should invest in and promote and which capabilities they must have.

Of course, this dilemma is almost as old as warfare. An opponent almost immediately matches every technological innovation or invention by one side. Every military technology is rendered obsolete at some point; the only variable is how soon this dive into irrelevance comes.