Since 1945, one country has carried out a conventional military buildup unmatched in scale, cost and global reach. Claims about recent rivals distract from the historical record of how modern military dominance was built.
It’s become commonplace for western politicians – the latest being Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles at the Munich Security Conference – to argue that for the last two decades, China has been undertaking the biggest conventional military build-up that we’ve seen in the world since the end of the Second World War.
How the United States built the world’s biggest military machine