United States

United States: Unmatched Spending, Strained Balance Sheet

Economic base

World Bank WDI data put US gross domestic product at roughly $28.8 trillion in 2024, spread across a population of about 340.1 million that year — some $84,534 per head. That income base underwrites the country's global military posture, but the public finances behind it are heavily leveraged: IMF World Economic Outlook figures show general government debt at 125.8 percent of GDP in 2026.

Official reserve assets are small against that economy. IMF International Financial Statistics report $243.3 billion in 2025, well under 1 percent of the 2024 GDP figure above. For an issuer of the principal reserve currency, low reserves reflect how the system works rather than a liquidity problem, though the supplied data contain no current-account, external-debt or exchange-rate series with which to test that reading.

Military weight

SIPRI's 2025 figures record US military expenditure of $954.4 billion, equal to 3.117 percent of GDP on SIPRI's own national-accounts series. That share should not be recalculated against the 2024 World Bank GDP figure cited above; the two series are differently dated and differently constructed.

Manpower data are considerably older. The Correlates of War National Material Capabilities dataset records 1.36 million active personnel in 2022, with a Composite Index of National Capability score of 0.1236 for the same year. No post-2022 personnel count is supplied, leaving a three-year gap between the spending and manpower pictures — relevant because recruitment and force structure can move substantially over that span.

The FAS Nuclear Notebook puts the US warhead inventory at 5,177 in 2025. The supplied data give no breakdown into deployed, reserve and awaiting-dismantlement stocks, so the figure should be read as a total inventory rather than as fielded capability.

Governance

V-Dem v15 scores for 2025 show electoral democracy at 0.735 and liberal democracy at 0.571 on a zero-to-one scale. The liberal score sits markedly below the electoral one, indicating that constraints on executive power and rule-of-law protections are rated weaker than the conduct of elections themselves. State capacity is scored 0.924, among the higher end of the index range, pointing to an administrative apparatus that remains effective.

Energy

Our World in Data records 95.5 exajoules of US primary energy consumption in 2024 and 4,519.79 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. Domestic hydrocarbon output is substantial on the same source's 2024 figures: 9,977.4 TWh of oil and 10,330.0 TWh of gas. The dataset supplies no import, export or net-balance figures, so self-sufficiency cannot be assessed from these numbers alone.

Data gaps

Nothing here covers trade exposure, alliance commitments, defense-industrial output or conflict events. Any judgment on those dimensions would require data not in this file.

Sources: World Bank WDI, IMF WEO, IMF IFS, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, COW National Material Capabilities, FAS Nuclear Notebook, V-Dem v15, Our World in Data (Energy).