Global Military Spending & Arms Trade
This map shows three dimensions of the global arms landscape for 167 countries, across six five-year periods from 1996 to 2024.
- Military Spending % GDP — each country’s defence budget as a share of its economy, sourced from the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database.
- Arms Imports — the average annual value of major arms imported, in constant US dollars, sourced from the World Bank / SIPRI Arms Transfers Database.
- Arms Exports — the average annual value of major arms exported, in constant US dollars.
Arms figures cover major conventional weapons only — aircraft, ships, armoured vehicles, missiles and artillery. They represent actual deliveries, not licences or orders, and do not include small arms, ammunition, cyber systems or military aid.
Each period button shows the average of five years up to and including that year. The most recent period (2024) covers 2021–2024, as 2025 data is not yet available.
- Click any country to see its figures across all six periods.
- Data: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database & World Bank Arms Transfers.
- Map by KnowWhere Consulting
ABA Wants The White House’s Receipts On The Biglaw Executive Orders
Above The Law: “The ‘law firm intimidation policy’ suit just entered its ‘show us the memos’ phase.
In a Tuesday filing in American Bar Association v. Executive Office of the President, the ABA asked U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to force the White House to hand over internal communications, including those involving Bannon and Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s personal senior counsel. According to reporting, Epshteyn connected two firms that struck deals with the administration, Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, with the Commerce Department on matters related to U.S. trade negotiations.
The ABA sued the administration back in June 2025, arguing that the executive orders, plus the wave of “deals” that spooked firms into capitulating before an order ever came for them, amounted to a coordinated policy, not isolated grievances against a handful of firms. As noted when the suit was first filed, the ABA had reason to worry about standing before it ever got to the merits, given this particular Supreme Court’s track record on associational standing….
The underlying grievance predates the ABA suit by months, of course. Four firms — Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — fought their individual executive orders in court and won, repeatedly, sweeping the district court level on First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment grounds. Nine other firms didn’t fight, cutting deals worth roughly $940 million in pro bono commitments to Trump-approved causes instead.
And DOJ’s posture toward the winning firms has been anything but consistent: in March, the department dropped its appeals of those district court losses, only to reverse course about two weeks later and go back to defending the orders, this time citing the nine capitulating firms as proof the policy worked exactly as designed.
The DOJ, as you’d expect, does not want to produce any of this. The government has argued the requests raise separation-of-powers concerns and are overbroad, and last week, it asked a federal court in New York to block the ABA from deposing Epshteyn altogether. Whether that gambit works is now Judge Ali’s problem; DOJ’s response to the ABA’s Tuesday brief is due July 17…”
