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This is an adapted part of a longer article on pacifism available here; there is also another article on military spending here.

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There is rightly a spotlight on the rates of military spending, both in the UK and globally. This article discusses what war and violence might really be costing us, in more ways than one.

What would you do with $2.9trillion? Hold that thought.

There is obviously a cost to war and violence, both in human lives and cold hard cash, so it’s right that we take a look.

The cost of harm

The total number of military and civilian casualties during WWI is estimated to be 15-22 million deaths – 9 to 11 million military personnel and about 6 to 13 million civilians – with an additional 21 million wounded military personnel. 

There were three times as many British forces died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (19,240) than have been killed in every combat operation since the end of WWII. Had the Prime Minister read out their names in the House of Commons, as has been done since 2003, it would have taken at least 11 hours.**

In WWII there were 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, and a higher civilian death toll (70,000, as opposed to 2,000 in WWI), largely attributed to German bombing raids during the Blitz: 40,000 civilians died in the seven-month period between September 1940 and May 1941, almost half of them in London**. [**Source: UK Parliament]. 

It’s also worth highlighting that the harm didn’t just happen as a result of combat. An estimated additional 19 to 28 million people died from war-related diseases and malnutrition/famine as a result of World War II, and that is, in significant part, attributed to the oppressor’s direct strategic tactic known as “The Hunger Plan“.

Demographers and historians typically suggest that there were 70 to 85 million total deaths of World War II.

In the Falklands Conflict, 255 UK Armed Forces personnel died during the 1982 campaign, plus another 95 veterans’ death was recorded as suicide (some argue there were way more than this). Since then, official records document more than 2,000 British military fatalities from operations in Northern Ireland, Iraq, and Afghanistan over the past forty years. When accounting for broader in-service and veteran mortality, the total rises by thousands more – figures that underscore the human cost of conflicts that frequently drew intense political and legal scrutiny.

For the 20-year period 1999-2018, it was recorded that there were 310 suicides in the UK Regular Armed Forces. (A further 19 deaths were referred to a coroner (or for Scotland, the Procurator Fiscal) where the mechanism of injury indicated possible suicide, which may be returned as suicide). 292 of these suicides were men, 18 were women. 

This is before we get to the horrors in other parts and the world, including Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and the cost of atomic weapons.

May they all rest in peace.

Military Spending

In 2025 alone, the UK was the sixth highest military spender globally (only the U.S., China, Russia, Germany and India spent more than the UK).

Global military spending hit $2.9trillion in 2025 – that’s $92,000 a second – according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and is projected to reach $6.6trillion if current trends persist. 

According to Scientists for Global Responsibility, the latest UK military spending figures show an annual figure of £60.2billionwith a planned rise to £67.7billion by 2029.

This is before we calculate what it costs to rebuild national infrastructure after war, or the impact on an already present cost of living crisis, exacerbated by recent conflict. But militarism seems to prioritise spending on armaments (for example) over things like community and individual welfare (see What isMilitarism? below).

So it’s worth mentioning that a significant threat to national security currently, at least in the UK and according to various reports including Britain Under Strain, is the slow erosion of social cohesion – not just the threat of war from a “foreign” invader.

It seems fair to say, then, at least some of this money might be better spent on peace education and intervention (like skills of Upstandership), along with alternatives to militarism that seek to build community wellbeing and cohesion, while reducing hate and harm locally, nationally and internationally. Violence is not the answer. When we put peace into the world, the world will bring us peace.

But what would you do with all that money?

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© The Peace Gap 2026 – All rights reserved. This is an opinion post which may have appeared on other, affiliated websites. For full terms about accessing this content, click here or to find out more about this website click here. This article was checked for accuracy on 11/8/26