China’s military expenditure in 2010 was officially reported at 162 Billion USD, roughly 30% of the current U.S. defense budget. That budget is expected to grow a whopping 85% to 300 Billion USD by 2018.
With China surging ahead to achieve parity with U.S. defense spending, other Asian nations are making significant increasing to their defense capabilities. As wisely noted by Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations, this buildup is in direct proportion to China’s increasingly aggressive militarization program:
This arms race has proceeded despite the fact that most Southeast Asian nations have no obvious near enemies and, if they are involved in conflicts, they tend to be local insurgencies like the conflict in Papua, the southern Philippines, or southern Thailand – hardly battles that require the kind of sophisticated air, sea and missile weaponry that states are buying up.
The real answer, then, is that countries like Vietnam and Malaysia are arming up to send a signal to a rising China that they will continue to protect their strategic interests and their claims to energy resources in areas like the South China Sea, the Mekong basin, and other regions.
