The US military budget is larger than the budgets of China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and Australia combined. Our police budget is larger than most countries' military budget. When and how did this happen? Did we always prioritize military spending? Was there a particular president, secretary of defense, or other policymakers that pushed for this? Was there a particular war, event, or movement that caused this?
(Thanks for considering. Big fan. Long time reader, first time poster :)
The modern trend began during the second world war. Though the US had prior periods of vast expenditure on defense (US Civil war and WWI) defense expenditure shrank to low levels during the interwar period.
But there are a couple of things in this question to unpack or clarify. Are you looking at per-capita spending? Spending as a percent of GDP? Inflation-adjusted spending in gross? Non-inflation adjusted spending?
In absolute terms, US defense spending and police spending are high, but the US has 330 million residents, a disproportionately huge economy, and relatively high median wages and standard of living.
Because median wages are high in the US, paying a soldier or police officer is going to be 2-4 times as expensive as doing so even in most other industrialized countries, and 10-20 times as expensive (or more) as median wages in the global south. Personnel costs are around 25% of modern US defense budgets, but were 40% or more of the historical US military budget around 1970. But similarly, the cost per employee of paying companies to develop/manufacture/maintain the equipment and materiel that makes of the rest of the budget is going to be higher than in most other countries.
As a percentage of GDP defense spending in the US in the year 2000 was 2.9%, lower than at any point since WWII. The world average in the year 2000 was 2.2% of GDP. The US was around 36th in the world in defense spending as a percentage of GDP in 2000. (Eritrea in contrast was spending 32.7% of GDP on defense)
The wage effect is even more pronounced for Police. Personnel costs for police departments are around 75% of the budget for the big-city police departments I am familiar with, but I would assume there is significant variance by department size. In absolute dollar terms US spending is very high on police, but as a percentage of GDP it is middle of the pack for industrialized countries.
I wouldn’t completely discount looking at US spending in absolute terms, but as a percentage of GDP US military spending has underwent a punctuated decline for 75 years since WWII ended, upticking with each war in the interim before resuming its slow downward trend.