Cold War Military Spending: 1991–2025, Up 84.8%

Across the 98 countries with continuous SIPRI data since 1991, military spending has risen 84.8%, from $1,324.1bn at the end of the Cold War to $2,446.4bn in 2025, measured in constant 2024 US dollars.

01 The 1991 starting point

1991 marks the formal end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, making it the natural baseline year for any before-and-after comparison of global military spending. Across the fixed panel of 98 countries tracked continuously by SIPRI from that year onward, combined spending stood at $1,324.1bn in constant 2024 US dollars. This figure is not a global total — it reflects only the subset of countries with an unbroken data series across the full 1991–2025 period.

02 A fixed 98-country panel

To compare 1991 spending with 2025 spending on equal terms, the panel used here is held constant: the same 98 countries appear in both the starting and ending year. Holding the country set fixed avoids a common distortion in long-run spending comparisons, where the addition of newly reporting countries can inflate an apparent rise in spending that has nothing to do with actual budget changes. Every country in the panel has a full, continuous SIPRI series running from 1991 to 2025.

03 1991 to 2025: an 84.8% rise

Combined spending across the 98-country panel rose from $1,324.1bn in 1991 to $2,446.4bn in 2025, an increase of 84.8% in constant 2024 US dollars. Because the dollar figures are inflation-adjusted and the country set is unchanged across both endpoints, the increase reflects real growth in military budgets across this panel rather than currency effects or shifts in which countries are counted.

04 Reading a calculated total against SIPRI's own figures

The $1,324.1bn and $2,446.4bn figures are our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, produced by summing the 98-country panel in each year — they are not SIPRI's own published world or regional totals. SIPRI's headline global figures are typically drawn from a different, and often larger, set of countries in any given year, since SIPRI adds countries to its published totals as reporting becomes available rather than holding the panel fixed across decades. Readers comparing this panel figure against SIPRI's own published totals should expect the numbers not to match, since they answer different questions: SIPRI's totals describe global spending in a given year as best it can be measured that year, while the panel figure here isolates the trajectory of a consistent set of countries across 35 years.

That exclusion is deliberate rather than incidental. Including the Soviet Union's pre-1991 spending would require splicing in a fundamentally different reporting regime, and folding in countries that only began reporting to SIPRI partway through the period would break the apples-to-apples comparison that makes the 84.8% figure meaningful. The panel approach trades some completeness for consistency: it cannot say what happened to global military spending as a whole, but it can say with precision what happened to spending among the same 98 countries from the end of the Cold War to today.

05 What the trend means for today's budgets

An 84.8% real-terms rise over 35 years works out to sustained, if uneven, growth rather than a single spike. It spans the post-Cold War drawdown of the 1990s, the post-2001 buildup, and the renewed spending associated with more recent conflicts and great-power competition — all captured within one consistent country panel rather than pieced together from shifting datasets. For anyone using SIPRI figures to compare "then" and "now," the 98-country panel offers a way to state the change with a single, defensible number: spending among these countries is not lower than it was at the Cold War's end, but substantially higher.