In 2023, the Armed Forces spent four times more on military pensions than on investments
247 - The Armed Forces spent 85% of their 2023 budget on personnel payments, driven by rising expenses for active, inactive, and pensioned military personnel, with only 5% of their expenses dedicated to investments (R$ 5.8 billion) and 10% for operating costs (R$ 11.3 billion).
According to Folha de S. Paulo, "the Armed Forces spent four times more on military pension payments (R$ 25.7 billion) than on investments — a scenario that should be mitigated by the new Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), which allocated R$ 52.8 billion to Defense projects until 2030."
For comparison, the general defense spending profile of the 29 NATO member countries differs from Brazil's expenditure. Only nine countries in the military alliance have a budget consumed by personnel equal to or exceeding 50%, and only 3 countries (Portugal, Canada, and Belgium) spend less than 20% on investments.
In 2023, the Brazilian Armed Forces spent R$ 32.4 billion on active military salaries and R$ 31.2 billion on reserve and retired personnel. The expense is led by the Army, the force with the largest number of personnel, which consumed R$ 47.3 billion in personnel expenses.
The Army has about 212,000 active military personnel and 145,000 inactive. Another 112,800 are beneficiaries of military pensions — including 3,734 relatives of marshals. The last military personnel in the Force to reach this rank was Waldemar Levy Cardoso, who died in 2009.
The Force has, since 2019, invested in a plan to reduce personnel, which lowered the number of active military personnel by 9,017 until 2023. "The Army fully complies with its rationalization planning [...], which translates effectively into an annual reduction of its contingent by 10% until 2029," says the institution in a note. The Army also stated that other measures, adopted after a 2019 law, have reduced its costs, such as increasing the service time of military personnel from 30 to 35 years, reducing the number of dependents, and limiting economic rights arising from military pensions.
In the Navy, the reduction in personnel was almost 5,000 military personnel from 2018 to 2023 — a decrease of 6%, from 80,485 military personnel to 75,482. "[The Force] continuously endeavors to improve its human resources management, through a planned and balanced readjustment in its personnel, in order to increase its efficiency and reduce costs for the Brazilian State," it says.
The Air Force maintains the smallest number of active personnel, with 67,605 military personnel, with the group almost halved by career and temporary personnel. "In addition to reducing the annual payroll, efforts were made to economize on hierarchical promotions, movements, occupation of National Residential Property, number of inactive and pensioners, and users of the Air Force health system," states the Air Force regarding the policy of increasing the number of temporary personnel.
However, these measures have not yet been able to modify the spending profile of the Armed Forces. To reverse the scenario of low investments, commanders Marcos Olsen (Navy), Tomás Paiva (Army), and Marcelo Damasceno (Air Force) began to defend the approval of a PEC (Constitutional Amendment Proposal) to ensure that the Defense Ministry's budget is set at 2% of the GDP.
The percentage was defined based on the budgetary goal set by NATO for its 29 member countries. Despite this, only 7 nations that integrate the western military organization reached the desired levels: Greece (3.54%), the United States (3.46%), Lithuania (2.47%), Poland (2.42%), the United Kingdom (2.16%), Estonia (2.12%), and Latvia (2.07%).
