Those Who Neglected the Army Complain About the Reduction of the Military Budget

By KRIKOR KHODANIAN

The Government of Armenia has submitted to Parliament the draft budget for 2026, with expenditures set at $9.4 billion and revenues at $8.1 billion. The upcoming year’s state budget will be the largest in Armenia’s history. For comparison, the budget presented by Serzh Sargsyan’s government in 2018 amounted to $3.03 billion. Thus, over the course of seven years, the state budget has more than tripled, thanks to cleaner governance and more efficient tax and customs revenue collection.

As for military spending, the government has allocated about $1.5 billion for 2026, compared to $1.7 billion this year. The opposition has recently made this reduction the target of its criticism, attributing it to “the demands of Baku and Ankara.”

Armenia’s military budget began to rise sharply after the 44-day war and especially during the subsequent period following Azerbaijan’s incursions into Armenian territory. Yerevan first turned to its traditional supplier, Russia, to obtain the necessary defense equipment. However, Russia, for various reasons, failed or refused to fulfill its obligations, even though it had already received $400 million in advance for those arms. To this day, it remains unclear what happened to that sum, since Armenia’s Ministry of Defense, for understandable reasons, keeps all information related to military matters classified.

After this failed experience, Armenia decided not to rely on Russia anymore for its defense needs and began to look for alternative sources of weaponry, mainly India and France, while also promoting domestic arms production.

“We now have new, locally produced weapons — the result of Armenian intellectual and technological effort. In 2022, we signed contracts worth around 5.5 billion drams with local defense-industry companies. As a result of subsequent three-year contracts, that figure has grown to 170 billion drams,” recently announced Defense Minister Suren Babikyan.

Ignoring all these facts and figures, the opposition accuses the government of neglecting the army’s needs and weakening it. They seem unwilling to remember that under their own rule, the military balance with Azerbaijan was broken, leading to Armenia’s defeat in the 44-day war. While Baku was arming itself before their very eyes, they were busy embezzling funds and building mansions. How else, one might ask, can one explain the few hundred million dollars allocated to the army during their tenure, while Azerbaijan was spending ten times more? In their final year in power, around $500 million was allocated to the military — an amount that, even accounting for inflation, remains insignificant and inadequate for a country in a constant state of war.

Returning to the main question — whether the reduction in military spending is justified — the answer is clearly yes, because after the Washington agreement, the situation has changed and peace has become more attainable. Border incidents have ceased, and the rhetoric of the adversary has shifted. Azerbaijan itself has announced that starting in 2027, it too will reduce its military expenditures.

For a country like Armenia, which lacks natural resources, money spent on arms comes at the expense of social needs, and it is impossible to permanently allocate 20 percent of the national budget to the military while the poverty rate remains high. The government is therefore obliged to find a middle ground and approach both security and social needs with equal importance. As for the opposition, had they once acted with similar foresight, the catastrophes that befell the Armenian nation in recent years could have been avoided.
“MASSIS”

Translated with the assistance of ChatGPT