Contemporary security challenges and their impact on the increase of the military spending and the budget for the development and procurement of weapons and military equipment

Abstract

The topic of this paper is contemporary security challenges and their impact on the increase of the military spending and the budget for the development and procurement of weapons and military equipment. It has been explained how the current events on the geopolitical scene, i.e. the accelerated dynamics of the confrontation of the main centres of power, which has moved from the phase of "competition" to the phase of "crisis" and "proxy wars" and is rapidly approaching the "kinetic phase", i.e. direct military conflict, dictates the need for accelerated equipping with state-of-the-art weapons and military equipment, especially the one based on the so-called "disruptive technology". The genesis of the geopolitical image in the context of security threats and trends in the development and equipping with weapons and military equipment has been presented, characteristic threats to security, forms of conflict and dominant weapons and military equipment have been explained, and then the military spending has been discussed and the budget funds for the development and procurement of weapons and military equipment in general have been analysed. The research focus of this paper is aimed at interpreting the state of the military spending by the key global actors and countries in the immediate vicinity of the Republic of Serbia.

Keywords

• security challenges
• military spending
• weapons development
• weapons production
• defence system
• military-industrial complex