Editor’s note: Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, one of the authors of this commentary, resigned as president of the Brookings Institution, the think tank announced June 12, 2022. The decision follows news of a federal investigation into whether he illegally lobbied on behalf of Qatar.
Update: This article was originally published April 18, 2016. It is updated with a link to the full PwC report.
The security challenges confronting national defense organizations are both complex and dynamic. Nations around the globe face myriad threats that vary greatly in both scope and scale.
Longstanding threats from neighboring nations, such as the enduring situations on the Korean peninsula and Indian subcontinent, are the types of traditional challenges that most national defense organizations have been organized to confront. Major terrorist attacks such as those of Sept. 11, 2001, and more recently in Paris typify the emergent challenges of adversaries who possess destructive and disruptive capabilities that are more difficult to detect and defeat through conventional means — and thinking.
In many Western nations, budgetary challenges are putting downward pressure on defense spending. Despite aggressive moves to cut overhead costs and efforts to operate with like-minded nations in coalitions, many of these nations continue to struggle to modernize outdated systems and maintain readiness as the security environment facing ministries remains uncertain.
Other nations face different challenges that are no less complex. Some, like Ukraine, face existential security threats that are driving their defense priorities in a severely resource-constrained environment. Other states, such as Japan and Poland, are being confronted by an aggressive China or revanchist Russia, respectively. In the Middle East, the Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain are in the center of a regional neighborhood where stability has been devolving in recent years.
Overt challenges from Iran, instability in neighboring nations such as Iraq and Syria, compounded by declining oil prices, are having a major impact on internal and regional stability. Finally, some other nations, such as Brazil and India, are using defense investments to bolster their respective defense industrial bases, and to help create more indigenous capabilities for the development of technologies that support national security — and national prestige. Brazil's ambitions in this regard are now facing some of the same budgetary constraints that have faced many other nations over the last several years.
These wide-ranging challenges leave defense leaders with tough choices. To examine these challenges, PwC has adopted a unique way to examine 60 nations that include the top 50 defense-spending nations in the world. Additionally, due to their regional and global significance, several other nations were selected for this analysis, regardless of the level of their national defense spending (e.g. Ukraine, Baltic states, Bahrain, Philippines, Qatar, and Vietnam).
Our approach for developing these global defense perspectives looks at recent defense spending trends and the major investment, institutional, structural, and strategic priorities and challenges impacting these nations. Using the insights and unique perspective of PwC's Global Government Defense Network, we developed an overall approach that measured these 60 nations against two metrics: how they prioritize defense spending and how they posture themselves in the global security environment.
Tom Modly is a managing director and the Global Government Defense Network leader for PricewaterwaterhouseCoopers. He is the former US deputy undersecretary of defense for financial management and co-director of the Defense Business Transformation Agency.
Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen is a senior strategic adviser to PricewaterhouseCoopers and a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the former commanding general of the International Security Assistance Force and US Forces Afghanistan. Most recently Allen was the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant).
