Common assessment of the American military and its adversaries seems to place the United States vastly ahead of other nations. The measure that’s typically used as a sort of superiority heuristic is defense spending, a metric where the U.S. is so overwhelmingly dominant you’d wonder why anyone would bother opposing us in the first place. The U.S. spends $750 billion per year on defense, more than every other country combined in the top 10 of defense-spending nations ($750 billion vs. $653.2 billion). China comes in second at $237 billion, and our other staunch adversary Russia clocks in at eighth ($48 billion).

This evokes a strong connotation of overwhelming American power. While our military capabilities certainly are hegemonic, these spending numbers are deceptive. If you’re truly trying to compare how many resources countries put into their militaries and want to use spending as your touchstone, this data must be adjusted.