The $271 billion question: What if the world disarmed just one-tenth of its arsenal?

By James J. Devine

The numbers arrive on the desks of world leaders every January, bound in leather and stamped with the seals of defense ministries. They list tanks, jets, ships, and warheads. They are presented as the price of safety.

But there is another set of numbers, printed in thinner reports from humanitarian agencies, that tells a different story about what actually kills people.

Nine million human beings died from hunger last year. More than 233,000 perished in armed conflicts. The contrast is not merely tragic. It is a policy choice.

In 2024, the nations of the earth spent an unprecedented $2.718 trillion on their militaries. That is not a typo. Two point seven one eight trillion dollars.

To grasp the scale of that sum, consider this: It equals the entire combined annual budgets of South Africa, Canada, Brazil, and India.

Every tank, every drone, every stealth bomber, every soldier’s salary, every missile that sits in a silo waiting for a war that must never come—all of it adds up to the highest military spending ever recorded, surpassing even the clenched-fist years of the Cold War. The increase from 2023 alone was 9.4%.

Now consider a different figure: $93 billion.

That is the United Nations’ estimate of what it would take to end world hunger by 2030. Not manage it. Not reduce it. End it.

That is less than 3.5% of what the world spent on arms last year. Even the higher estimates, the ones that include rebuilding entire agricultural systems from the soil up, top out at $330 billion annually, or roughly 12% of global military spending.

Here is the proposition, simple enough for a child to understand and radical enough to terrify every defense contractor from Virginia to Vladivostok: What if every nation on Earth reduced its military budget by just 10%?

No nation would lose its relative defensive position. The balance of power would remain exactly as it stands today. But the money freed up would amount to $271 billion every single year.

That is enough to end hunger completely. Every last empty stomach. And still have money left over for half the climate financing needed in the Global South. And still have money left for healthcare, schools, roads, and clean water.

Not as charity. As arithmetic. We could probably avert most wars if the prospective combatants were not suffering from hunger.

The World Food Program reported Tuesday that by 2026, a staggering 318 million people will face crisis levels of hunger or worse—more than double the figure recorded in 2019. Families in Sudan, Gaza, Haiti, Yemen, the Sahel, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are paying for wars they did not start, with bodies they cannot spare.

The agency needs $13 billion to assist 110 million of the most vulnerable. That is less than half of one percent of global military spending. Yet the agency reports that international support remains “slow, fragmented, and underfunded.”

Conflict is the number-one driver of famine because war displaces families, cripples economies, and damages infrastructure.

Amina Mohammed, the UN deputy secretary-general, put it with African plainness: “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

The elephants are the great powers and their proxies, the $2.7 trillion annual parade of hardware and hubris. The grass is the mother in Gaza scooping flour from a bag, the child in Sudan whose ribs show through his shirt, the farmer in the Sahel watching his fields turn to dust.

Critics will say the comparison is naive. They will argue that military spending creates jobs, that the world is dangerous, that hunger is complicated. All of this is true, and none of it is an answer. Because the world is dangerous precisely because of the way it spends its money. More weapons do not create more safety. The $2.7 trillion arms budget has not prevented a single famine, stopped a single climate disaster, or resolved a single refugee crisis. It has, however, made the rich nations feel momentarily secure while the poor nations burn.

The United States alone accounts for 37% of global military expenditure. NATO members collectively account for 55%. These same nations are cutting humanitarian aid, development assistance, and climate financing. They are building walls while the house is on fire. A fair approach—one that acknowledges historical harm and disproportionate responsibility—would require the wealthiest nations to lead the way, reducing their own arsenals and reinvesting half of the savings into local social priorities and half into global ones.

This is not a fantasy. Regional treaties already exist for nuclear-weapon-free zones across Latin America, Oceania, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia. Bilateral agreements between neighboring countries have worked before. Trust can be built. The only thing missing is the will.

The world is grappling with simultaneous famines in Gaza and parts of Sudan. The UN deputy chief says this is completely unacceptable in the 21st century. She is correct, but the word “unacceptable” is a polite fiction. It is accepted. It is accepted every day that defense budgets rise and food aid shrinks. It is accepted every time a politician says there is no money for hungry children but finds billions for a new fighter jet.

Ten percent. That is all it would take. Not disarmament. Not pacifism. Just a tenth of the money we already spend on breaking things, redirected to feeding people. The elephants can keep their tusks. They just have to stop trampling the grass.