Military spending in the US by regional mean rank

Ever since a quarter of a century ago when I read Trotskyist magazines arguing that if all military spending were scrapped and the rich properly taxed there would be far more than enough money to solve all the social problems facing the world today, I have taken an interest in US military spending, in part because I found a lot of information from a late-1970s textbook at Latrobe University.

A Six-Way Division of the US

Since reading the late James Löwen’s Sundown Towns, I have come to propose a six-way division of US states according to the map below:

A six-region map of the United States. An alternative divide of the two western regions is also possible, as well as splitting the into three or four; however, the four more easterly regions are relatively clear even for seven- and eight-way divisions

Comparing Regions’ Military Spending

In the following brief analysis, I hope to look at how these six regions compare in terms of military spending. My first experience with variation in US military spending by region occurred from reading R.W. DeGrasse’s Military Expansion, Economic Decline: Impact of Military Spending on United States Economic Performance as a Melbourne University student exploring the Latrobe library over two decades ago. DeGrasse developed a system of dividing US states slightly different from the conventional one, but one which I have come to see as the most logical available. However, the Southern and Western regions of DeGrasse are sufficiently varied that I have split them into two, as shown in the map above. Löwen’s work from a quarter-century after DeGrasse further supports such a division.

In the table below, I have assessed and compared the ranks of each state in defence spending from, firstly, the latest available state-by-state report (from 2024), and secondly, from DeGrasse’s 1981 work. Comparing DeGrasse’s work with the latest available can, of course, show continuities and changes in how states and regions compare.

US Military Spending By State and Region — 2024 and 1981

2024 Rank	State	1981 Rank
1	Virginia	4
2	Hawaii	3
3	Connecticut	5
4	District of Columbia	1
5	Alaska	2
6	Maryland	13
7	Kentucky	32
8	Alabama	22
9	Maine	23
10	Mississippi	7
11	New Mexico	9
12	Arizona	14
13	Oklahoma	17
14	Colorado	21
15	Texas	16
16	Utah	6
17	Rhode Island	29
18	Missouri	8
19	Massachusetts	15
20	Florida	24
21	South Carolina	19
22	Washington	12
23	Pennsylvania	44
24	Indiana	35
25	North Carolina	27
26	Georgia	18
27	Kansas	25
28	South Dakota	33
29	California	10
30	New Hampshire	20
31	Nevada	31
32	New York	37
33	Vermont	30
34	Wyoming	36
35	New Jersey	40
36	North Dakota	26
37	Michigan	48
38	Louisiana	11
39	Ohio	41
40	Nebraska	39
41	Montana	45
42	Illinois	50
43	Iowa	47
44	Wisconsin	46
45	Delaware	28
46	Idaho	42
47	Arkansas	34
48	Tennessee	38
49	West Virginia	49
50	Minnesota	43
51	Oregon	51
17.00	Southwest Average	13.40
18.63	Lowland (Plantation) South Average	16.50
21.33	Northeast Average	23.75
28.14	Upland (Nonplantation) South average	27.71
30.00	Northwest Average	28.16
39.86	Midwest Average	44.57

Results and Conclusion:

What the table shows is that:

1. with a few exceptions, the states of high and low relative military spending in 1981 and 2024 are the same:
1. seven of the ten states with lowest defence dependence are the same in both years
2. six of the ten states with highest defence dependence are the same in both years
2. military spending in the US is heavily concentrated in the lowland South and the Southwest, and to a lesser degree in the Northeast
3. almost no state in the Midwest (only Indiana in 2024) is outside the bottom third in defence spending
4. eight of twelve states in the Northwest are also consistently below average in military dependence
1. this is more significant than it looks before the four “defence dependent” states in the Northwest, alongside Kansas — the next most dependent in the region — form a periphery either:
1. substantially part of the Southwest at a local level (Colorado, Utah) or
2. peripheral to the Northwest region
2. we can perhaps define a “core Northwest” consisting of Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota and Wyoming
1. this “core Northwest”
5. three of the seven states in the Upland South are also consistently amongst the least defence-dependent

In Sundown Towns, Löwen demonstrated that racial segregation has tended to be less in military towns than almost anywhere else in the United States. Löwen also showed that virtually the entire “core Northwest” has historically absolutely excluded blacks, with the exception of a small number of the largest cities. The Midwest was almost as rigid. Löwen’s observation stands in complete agreement with the observation that military spending is concentrated in the lowland South and Southwest, where blacks (and, often, other nonwhites) were valued as sources of labour rather than feared as competitors for land. In the Northeast, whilst blacks were not valued, they were feared less than in the Midwest, Northwest or upland South because land was less abundant.

How I got “pet room Archie’s”!

This evening looking at my unfortunate — if at times hilarious as when “Dick Tyldesley” was corrected to a body part — history of tampering with AutoCorrect, I asked AI about why on earth “petromonarchies” could and would be corrected to the ludicrous “pet room Archie’s”!

AI: That is a perfect example of a "mondegreen" error—where the software tries to turn a complex technical term into several simpler, common words [Mondegreen and phonetic errors in software]. 

It’s easy to see how the algorithm got there:

1. Petro- becomes Pet room 
2. -monarchies (which sounds like “mon-ark-ees”) gets mangled into the name Archie’s [Common AutoCorrect linguistic error].

While hilarious, it highlights why AutoCorrect struggles with academic or geopolitical terms; it’s programmed to prioritise everyday language over niche vocabulary [1]. If you use that term often, you can usually “teach” your phone to stop by adding petromonarchies to your Personal Dictionary or Text Replacement settings [4].

AI: Do you have any other ridiculous corrections saved in your phone's history?

I did not answer on that one, but I do not have any other ridiculous AutoCorrect corrections since I stopped trying to tamper with AutoCorrect out of outrage at toilet wall graffiti [and in fact toilet wall graffiti as I have seen it today is not nearly so horrible as I recall in the Richard Berry Building or in Monash’s Hargrave–Andrew Library].

A parody and a true cricket tale

Over recent months, I have repeatedly sang this song (or variations) to my brother:

“Modern batsmen have a pitch
Ninety percent rigged
And on that pitch they score many runs
But deserve very few
With a cross-bat here
And a cross-bat there
Here a cross
There a cross
Everywhere a cross-bat
Modern batsmen have a pitch
Ninety percent rigged”

I have often thought of writing further lines about how covered pitches plainly constitute kangaroo courts for the spin bowler, but have never sung them.

Me and my brother have fiercely debated whether covered or uncovered pitches are fairer. The facts, at least judging from English first-class bowling data, firmly suggest covered pitches on average are more difficult for spin bowlers than even abnormally bad “sticky” wickets were for batsmen. Plainly put:

1. many batsmen managed to consistently cope with the most difficult uncovered pitches and achieve averages comparable to what the best batsmen under covering achieve
2. on covered pitches, zero spin bowlers achieve consistently anything like the same averages that old spin bowlers expected on uncovered pitches
• even overseas spinners — over most of history superior to English ones under unfavourable conditions — have never consistently come close to either the averages of the old spinners nor those of the best fast bowlers

My brother consistently says that with proper coaching spin bowlers can master covered pitches properly. He also said that the effort required to bowl spin effectively outside England was accepted there and ought to have been accepted in England. However, so early as the 1956 Wisden — when concern at the declining appeal of first-class cricket was becoming serious — it was noted that the emphatic finger spin needed outside England was the most difficult method of bowling to master, and fewer and fewer were developing it over easily mastered seam and pace. My brother also ignores how in many countries where “rollers” [a term used by Ashley Mallett in opposition to genuine “tweakers” in one 1996 Wisden article] were unable to turn the ball genuine finger spinners disappeared so completely as in England. This was especially true in the West Indies and South Africa, and suggests two things:

1. by 1960, the “tweaker” was already viewed as an extravagant luxury both in runs conceded and in cost of training.
1. John Woodcock would note in 1963 how the “tweaker” was already viewed too expensive in runs to compete against constantly improving fast and even medium-pace bowlers
2. it was undoubtedly clear, though never discussed, that improving the “tweaker” to be less costly in runs was constantly becoming less and less financially viable as pace bowling became better and better
2. development of spin bowling even partly able to cope with fundamentally rigged conditions is possible only under very restricted social conditions:
1. in pre-war Australia, leisure was sufficiently abundant that young boys had the time to develop the abnormal effort to develop “real finger spin” that might turn on fundamentally unfair pitches
2. in the Indian subcontinent, extreme abundance of labour means that young boys could be trained to develop genuine finger spin at relatively low cost vis-à-vis the rest of the cricket world

Hence, Clive Lloyd’s discovery, in Vic Marks’ word, that

“spin bowling was a luxury if four genuinely fast bowlers were available”

was entirely consistent with earlier captains’ experience over the past quarter-century as the extreme difficulty of bowling spin on well-prepared covered pitches became less and less affordable for young boys. The problem is that once spin bowling becomes viewed as an extravagant luxury first-class cricket is financially doomed in the long term, and its problems have been noted by Huw Turberville in his recent The Final Test. Virtually all historical instances where first-class cricket was economically self-supporting correlate practically perfectly with the greatest weaknesses in fast and medium-pace bowling, and exclusive reliance upon spin of whatever quality. Nonetheless, it is tempting to say that the greatest spin attacks in history — circa 1934 Australia and circa 1970 India — are fundamentally so costly to develop that first-class cricket becomes unprofitable once those costs are factored in, although attendance figures imply first-class cricket would always be profitable if the quantity and quality of spin developed in those two cases could be maintained. History shows that those standards of spin were never maintained, and the logical explanation is that maintaining the extreme effort involved in developing the bowlers was always too expensive and difficult. This further supports the contention that covered pitches are, fundamentally, rigged against the spinner incomparably more than uncovered pitches are against batsmen.