Threats to the rules-based order have intensified over the past year, prompting governments to reassess security priorities, defence spending and equipment plans. They have also raised concerns about defence-industrial capacities and driven the realisation that modernisation efforts need to balance maintaining traditional capacities, such as artillery, with embracing newer technologies, such as uninhabited systems and high-speed weapons.
The deteriorating security environment is exemplified by mounting conflicts – such as the Hamas– Israel war, Russia’s continued aggression against Ukraine, and Azerbaijan’s takeover of the Nagorno-Karabakh region; coups in Niger and Gabon; China’s more assertive manoeuvres around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and elsewhere; and attacks on critical national infrastructure, including a gas pipeline and data cables in the Baltic Sea. The Military Balance 2024 captures these developments and how they are influencing defence budgets and equipment inventories.
Russia has lost over 2,900 main battle tanks since launching its full-scale war on Ukraine, about as many as it had in active inventory at the outset of the operation. Moscow has been able to trade quality for quantity though, by pulling thousands of older tanks out of storage at a rate that may, at times, have reached 90 tanks per month. Russia’s stored equipment inventories mean Moscow could potentially sustain around three more years of heavy losses and replenish tanks from stocks, even if at lower technical standard, irrespective of its ability to produce new equipment.
Ukraine also has suffered heavy losses, though Western replenishments have allowed the country to broadly sustain its inventory size while upgrading equipment quality. The situation underscored a growing feeling of a stalemate in the fighting that may persist through 2024.
Russia’s aggression spurred European countries to boost defence spending and has strengthened NATO, with Finland adding combat power and experience in societal-resilience plans. NATO member states’ defence spending, dominated by the United States, has risen to about 50% of the global total. Adding the defence budgets of China, Russia and India brings the collective total to more than 70% of global military spending.
Although several European countries are spending more, the extra money is often going to fix old problems and is somewhat eroded by high inflation. The pace of ammunition expenditure in the war between Russia and Ukraine has also caused a reckoning in the West that production capacities have atrophied, with countries scrambling to rectify shortcomings from years of underinvestment and a misplaced focus on just-in-time rather than just-in-case.
The war in Europe has left its mark in other ways, too. Ukraine’s use of inexpensive uninhabited maritime vehicles (UMVs) to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has given others greater urgency in pursuing such equipment; this year UMVs feature in The Military Balance for the first time. And while uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been a staple of modern armed forces for some time, recent conflicts have demonstrated the utility of a far greater range of such systems, such as direct-attack munitions, quadcopters, and more traditional medium- and high-altitude platforms. Demand has spurred a wave of export deals, with Turkiye and Iran providing UAVs to various actors.
Elsewhere, China is upgrading its strategic forces. It continues work on the DF-27 (CH-SS-X-24) intermediate-range ballistic missile armed with a hypersonic glide vehicle aimed at overcoming missile defences. Chinese efforts to turn the People’s Liberation Army into a power-projection force also advanced. The navy exercised closer to Guam and, with Russian vessels, near the coast of Alaska. The country’s third and most capable aircraft carrier, the Fujian (Type-003), neared sea trials. Meanwhile, China sent an alleged spy balloon across the US (it was downed by a US Air Force F-22 Raptor).
China demonstrates why The Military Balance’s focus on forces and equipment in this, its 65th edition, remains a key element of assessing state power. Nevertheless, The International Institute for Strategic Studies continues to expand its research focus to capture developments in areas such as cyber, artificial intelligence and defence-industrial capacity to capture these increasingly important qualitative factors shaping conflict.