Israel exports 6 times more arms per capita than US, 19 times more than Russia

Israeli arms exports per capita in 2025 were roughly six times greater than the United States and 19 times greater than Russia, a new study has found, revealing the extraordinary scale of Israel’s weapons industry relative to its population.

The latest study by Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa found that Israel exported arms at a rate equivalent to roughly $263 per citizen in 2025, compared with $41 per person in the US and $14 in Russia. Calculated against Israel’s Jewish population alone, the figure rises to $340 per person, around eight times the US rate and 25 times Russia’s.  

The findings are based primarily on figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), whose Arms Transfers Database tracks major conventional weapons. Although the US remains by far the largest weapons exporter in absolute terms, Abulhawa found that adjusting exports for population produces a dramatically different picture.

Israel ranked seventh in total arms exports between 2020 and 2025, behind the US, France, Russia, Germany, China and Italy. But once the same data is divided by population, Israel moves far ahead of every major weapons-exporting country. Its per-capita arms exports were roughly 2.5 times those of Norway, the nearest competitor, and more than three times those of the US.  

The study found that this dominance is not the result of a single exceptional year. Israel has been either the world’s largest arms exporter per capita, usually by a considerable margin, or close to the top in every year of the past 25 years.

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Looking across the entire 1960-2025 period covered by the database, Israel also recorded the highest average arms exports per capita of any country, at the equivalent of $56 per person every year over 65 years. The study found that Israel’s lead over competing arms exporters has widened particularly sharply during the past decade.  

Abulhawa also examined arms exports against the size of national economies, showing how deeply the weapons trade is embedded in Israel’s economic model.

Using SIPRI figures, Israeli arms exports amounted to around 0.25 per cent of GDP in 2023, more than three times the equivalent proportion in France and more than six times that of the US.

But SIPRI does not count much of Israel’s lucrative trade in drones, ammunition, small arms, cyber technology, surveillance equipment, services and training. Using governments’ own wider figures for defence contracts instead, Israel reported $13 billion in arms-export agreements in 2023, equivalent to around 2.5 per cent of its GDP.

Proportionally, that makes Israel’s arms-export economy around eight and a half times larger than that of the US and almost nine times larger than France’s, according to the study.  

The figures suggest that while larger powers make more money from weapons in absolute terms, no comparable country derives as much arms-export business relative to the size of its population and economy as Israel.

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