Georgia Positions 49th in Global Militarization Index
Georgia ranks 49th out of 154 nations in the Global Militarisation Index-2019. The Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) has issued the report.
It is worth mentioning that in the previous 2018 assessment, Georgia took 52nd place among the countries.
The Militarization Index evaluates the resources provided for the military of the country while pulling out assets from other sectors of the economy. As the Report states, the top ten rankings countries that overflowed their military expenditure in 2019 are Israel, Singapore, Armenia, Cyprus, South Korea, Russia, Greece, Jordan, Belarus and Azerbaijan.
The report puts the regional focus on Europe, specifically Eastern Europe/NATO and EU countries; the Middle East and Asia. As said by the report, Russia who takes 6th place resumes maintaining one of the largest military powers in the world.
The European NATO countries, particularly the Baltic states and the eastern European states, are ceaselessly persistent to arm themselves, indicating the ongoing frictions with Russia. The unsettled ‘secessionist conflict’ between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which re-instigated briefly last year, regenerates militarization in the South Caucasus at the very extreme, (on top of that the Georgian breakaway regions remain in stalemate).
The Middle East countries are all exceedingly militarized by the GMI global standards. Because of the twitchy security setting, Israel, who is number 1 in the issued Index, is at the top of the global rankings. The list of highly militarized countries in Asia is once again headed by Singapore since the Chinese threat is becoming overwhelming. Other states in the region are also gradually financing in their armed forces, naming different conflicts with China.
The authors of the report write comprehensively about Russia: “Russia continues to sustain one of the largest military forces in the world. It has modernized its equipment and expanded its defense technological capabilities comprehensively in the past few years. The state has a large number of military personnel and more than 70,000 heavy weapons systems. Nevertheless, the difficult economic situation, resulting from low commodity prices and sanctions imposed by the West, now appears to be having an impact on Russian defense spending, which fell from the US $ 82.6 billion in 2016 to the US $ 64.2 billion in 2018. As a result of this decline, which led to the reduction of the share of GDP from 5.5 to 3.9 percent, a slight fall in the still very high level of militarisation in Russia was recorded”, the report reads.
By Beka Alexishvili