Does Brazil Spend Too Much on Military Personnel?
31 Jan 2025 11:23 AM
Brazil’s defence budget is skewed towards personnel expenses, yet the real issue lies in its underfunding of defence.

When discussing Brazil’s military expenditure, it has become commonplace to claim that the share allocated to personnel is too large. In fact, if we examine Congress’s Defence Sector report for the 2025 budgetary law (approved on 11 December 2024), we find that personnel expenditure accounts for 74% of the 2025 budget proposal for the armed forces. Further adjustments to the law by the congressman responsible for the report increased that percentage to nearly 76%, similar to the 2023 and 2024 proposals. (There were no increases in personnel expenditure, but investment was slightly reduced, which marginally altered the percentage.)
Furthermore, on the same day, another congressman presented a proposal to reduce pension benefits for the military, arguing that Brazil spends too much on personnel. According to him, 78% of the defence budget goes on payment and pensions. The author of the proposal contrasts this figure with NATO military personnel expenditure, where it never exceeds 60%. The details of the proposal are not particularly relevant, because the Brazilian Constitution explicitly states that any law concerning military salaries, pensions or related matters can only be presented by the president. Unless he has really poor advisors, the congressman must be aware that his proposal will be rejected on constitutional grounds. Thus, he’s not genuinely attempting to enact change, but is instead making a political statement.
The proposal is not the first to compare Brazil’s military personnel expenditure with that of NATO. A news report published in June 2024 went even further – alarmingly so – claiming that Brazil spends three times more on military personnel than the US.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that defence spending in Brazil is not heavily skewed towards personnel payment and benefits. On the contrary, I’ve heard that, if over three-quarters of Brazil’s defence budget is spent on personnel, the primary role of the country’s armed forces is not defence but nation-building – providing jobs to people. As hard as it is to swallow that pill, it’s even harder to deny it. Warfare is a complicated business, one that requires a particularly expensive set of tools. If all we have are people on the ground, there’s no way we’ll ever be ready to fight. In this regard, I wholeheartedly agree that the share of the defence budget allocated to personnel is too large.
But I think Brazilian society is looking at the problem through the wrong lenses. And, perhaps, there are other militaries around the world that could also benefit from adopting a different perspective.
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