Direction () : Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.
Defence expenditure is an important component of national security and every country allocates a significant portion of its resources for this purpose. However, given the scarcity of resources and the competing demands from other sectors, a nation’s ability to meet all its Defence requirements is not unlimited. Even the United States, the only military superpower, is unable to afford many of its major programmes, forcing it to scale down the number of items to be procured. The sheer size of the Defence budget and its impact on other sectors of the economy thus, more often raises the question as to how much a country can afford for its Defence.
In the absence of any clear framework of evaluating affordability of Defence spending, many analysts tend to view the same from the perspective of a country’s share of Defence in gross domestic product (GDP) over a period of time, or by comparing these shares with those of other countries. This method of relative measurement, however, suffers from ambiguities as it does not take into account a country’s specific security concerns and the economic compulsions in its totality. In the global context, the affordability of military spending of some of the world’s major military spenders varies not only in degree but also from time to time. While the variation in the degree of affordability indicates the changing security threats that are perceived differently by countries, the fluctuation in affordability over time points to the fact that what may be affordable at one point in time, may not be so at another time. Among the major powers, except for Japan, no other country has been able to sustain consistently high level of Defence spending (in percentage of GDP) over a length of time. The macro economy, which guides major spending heads of the government, could be a factor in controlling Defence spending over a period of time. In the US, the present level of military spending has contributed to fiscal distress, raising doubts whether such large-scale military spending is affordable or sustainable in the future.