In this week’s big money data series, we take a closer look at one of the government’s biggest and, perhaps (depending on your viewpoint), one of its most unnecessary annual expenditures; it’s military budget.

So large are the numbers being bandied around when we speak of military budgets and the global arms trade that they quickly lose all meaning. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI,) governments spent $1.74 trillion in 2011 on guns, tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, aircraft, missiles and motor gunboats, with the United States alone accounting for some $711 billion of this figure.

To get a handle on just how much money that is, we need to visualize these budgets in real terms, and this is where big data proves its worth once again.

Global Military Spending

What immediately stands out about SIPRI’s numbers is that, although the $1.73 trillion figure they quote is slightly larger than 2010’s military spend, in real terms the figure has remained more or less constant – the first time in 13 years that military spending hasn’t increased.

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Part of that is due to the fact that, also in real-terms, US Military spending in 2011 declined by 1.2% from 2010 to 2011. But unsurprisingly, the United States still continues to top the military spending charts by some distance, with its weapons budget accounting for 40.9% of the entire global defense budget.

Show me the Money

You’d be forgive for assuming that much of the US military’s $711 billion budget gets spent on weapons – but you’d be wrong. In fact, it’s quite startling to learn that almost half of all that money goes on people – salaries, expenses, housing and so on account for a staggering $327 billion, or 46% of the US military budget.

Another 28.1% of the budget goes on ‘miscellaneous’ expenses, while robotics accounts for roughly $6 billion a year, and $360 million was spent on rebuilding Afghanistan – and most of that ended up getting ‘lost’ due to corruption and bribery.

But perhaps the most shocking statistic is this one – the US spends an awesome $20.2 billion a year in Iraq and Afghanistan on that most essential of military supplies… air conditioning.

And as for the guns and their bombs? Just 24% of the budget, or roughly $177 billion.

What we could buy instead

Our next infographic breaks down some of the basic costs faced by the US military in equipping its forces, and compares these to something that most Americans can relate too.

Starting with one of the cheapest items in the United States military’s tool box, a bog-standard cruise missile costs around $830,000 a pop – roughly the equivalent of 17 average household incomes in the US and enough to send 40 high school graduates to university for four years, or to pay the health insurance of 55 American families. The US doesn’t like to talk about how many cruise missiles it buys, but when you consider that they launched 112 against Libya in just one day last year, it’s pretty safe to assume that it buys quite a lot.

Cruise missiles aside, the US military’s biggest expense by far is its nuclear weapons program, accounting for $52 billion in 2011, not that it ever uses any of them. This much money would pay for a whopping 2.47 million university kid’s educations for four years, or cover the health insurance of no less than 3.44 million families.