If you want some real comparisons, compare military spending not against GDP, but budget. Anything GDP-related just serves the aim to delude people, you need to know what exactly contributes to GDP, how exactly budget correlates to GDP, taxtion, laws... omg, my head already hurts. But if compared against budget it makes the picture not perfectly but clear enough, the US spend smth like 20-25% of budget on military, this's high. As high as Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, India, but less than UAE (your ally). Not exactly the dove of peace, lol.
Though the initial point as I understand the TS was not how big the military budget is, but what political consequences pumping up US military presence, supported by said military budget, in different regions might have. And the idea of evil Chinese occupying "the land of the free and the home of the brave" just cracks me up :D Oh well, this's maybe too much even for American conspirologists, yet the notion of China investing into Africa is smth like political "hegemony" is just funny. Yeah, the Chinese are investing in Africa, so what? Everyone have ambitions. And they are being pushed from Africa by everyone else pretty easily since Lybian conflict. Why? Their hands are too short, that's not very superpowerish. Even in recent Syrian confilct they're playing only supporting role and being bullied by everyone in South China Sea.
Meanwhile in the real world the biggest political hegemony, military precense and military infrastructure around the world "are belong to US" :D Size matters after all. Remember reading Peter Hopkirk on the Great Game, when being asked isn't Russian Empire is way too much expansionist and threatening national interests of British crown, he answered "Well, in order to able to threat British interests in Central Asia, the British should be somewhere near, isn't it? So I'm gonna ask: where's Kent and where's Tashkent?" :D
SickleSigh, there're a lot of factors contributing to false information. Some countries have their state militia and reserve being reported under different categories rather than military, some do not. Depending on the country some report part of army personel salaries again somehow differently rather than military spendings. There could be a lot of army programs that do not get qualified as military spendings, say, cheap mortgage credits for army personel etc. Some even fake documents on purpose in order to lower military spendings. Making smth useful out of this (i.e. not fancy graphs for lazy people) is a titanic work. Are you people really want take on this job? This's not what's important for this thread anyway.
