100 billion out of 785 billion birr is 13% of the country's budget to be spent on military! Compare and Contrast Ethiopian security status under the leadership of TPLF.
Ethiopia: Small Defense Budget, Mighty Military RealClearDefense.com
By Robert Beckhusen
March 11, 2015
There’s a few unusual things about Ethiopia. First, it has a pretty small military budget. Second, it’s in a dangerous neighborhood. Addis Ababa is in a cold war with its heavily-armed neighbor Eritrea and shares a border with Somalia—home to the terror group Al Shabaab.
At the same time, the
Ethiopian military is pretty good.
“In part due to previous lessons learned, to date Ethiopia has been able to foil any significant terrorist attacks by Al Shabaab, though not for lack of tryingby the terrorist organization,” OE Watch, the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office monthly newsletter, recently noted.
The Ethiopians “scare the Hell out of everybody,” Alexander Rondos, the European Union’s representative for the Horn of Africa, said in 2014.
By global standards, Ethiopia’s military spending as a percentage of its GDP is low—only around 0.8 percent—which puts it in the bottom half of countries.
By African standards, the dollar amount spent—around $330 million per year or so depending on the source—is middling. Ethiopia is one of the few countries on the continent that decreased its defense budget during the past decade, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Despite this, Ethiopia has one of the strongest armies in Africa, arguably outmatched only by Egypt, Algeria and South Africa. And these three countries spend far more on their militaries, both in per capita terms and in actual dollars, than Ethiopia.
Ethiopia fields more than 135,000 soldiers and hundreds of T-55 and T-72 tanks. Boosting this firepower, Ethiopia bought 200 more T-72 tanks from Ukraine in 2011.
Its air force is tiny, but fields a diverse group of older Russian fighters and more capable Su-27s and Czech-made L-39 trainers. The landlocked country, to be sure, has no navy.
The Ethiopian army is currently the fourth largest contributor to peacekeeping missions in the world when it comes to raw manpower. In short—don’t mess with Ethiopia.
So what is Addis Ababa doing right? Here’s a few tips. Focus on training, try to build weapons yourself and learn from experience.
A lot the country’s success derives from hard lessons learned during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War in the late 1990s. The badly-equipped Ethiopians took heavy losses and tens of thousands of soldiers died.
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