According to the recently released SIPRI Yearbook 2005, the current edition of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's annual survey of trends in military spending and disarmament, world military expenditures topped $1 trillion in 2004 with the United States accounting for 47 percent of the total. In fact, the $238 billion in supplementary appropriations for the Department of Defense from 2003 to 2005 to pay for the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq--money not included in the Pentagon's annual budgets--exceeded the 2004 military expenditures of the entire developing world.
If $1 trillion is too big a number to get your head around, think of it this way: in 2004, global defense spending amounted to $162 for every man, woman, and child on the planet.