Military Spending Since the Cold War, 1991–2025: +84.8%

Military spending across the 98 countries with continuous SIPRI data rose 84.8% since the end of the Cold War, from $1,324.1bn in 1991 to $2,446.4bn in 2025, in constant 2024 US dollars.

01 Global Military Spending Since the Cold War's End: The Headline Number

The most direct answer to "military spending during the Cold War" that SIPRI's Military Expenditure Database can support starts at the war's close, not before it. Tracking the same fixed panel of 98 countries continuously from 1991 through 2025, combined military expenditure grew from $1,324.1bn to $2,446.4bn — an increase of 84.8%. This is our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, not SIPRI's own published total.

02 1991 vs. 2025: What Changed and Why

The 34-year span between 1991 and 2025 covers the drawdown that followed the Soviet collapse, the post-9/11 buildup, and a resurgence in spending tied to renewed great-power competition and regional conflicts in the 2010s and 2020s. The panel figure does not decompose the 84.8% rise into these individual episodes — it is a single start-to-end comparison across the 98 tracked countries — but the direction is unambiguous: total spending across this consistent group of countries is substantially higher today than it was as the Cold War ended.

Because the comparison holds the same 98 countries fixed at both endpoints, the 84.8% figure reflects genuine growth in spending levels rather than an artifact of more countries being added to the dataset over time.

03 Why This Panel Starts in 1991, Not Earlier

Readers searching for "military spending during the Cold War" are often looking for a pre-1991 baseline, but SIPRI's country-level series cannot reliably support one. The Soviet Union, the era's second-largest military spender, has no continuous SIPRI series of its own — Russia's series begins only in 1992, after the dissolution. Earlier Cold War years also cover far fewer countries in SIPRI's data, which would distort any panel comparison anchored before 1991.

For those reasons, 1991 — the Cold War's final year — is the earliest point at which a consistent 98-country panel can be constructed, and it is the baseline used throughout this analysis.

04 Data Coverage and Methodology

The 98-country panel is built by keeping only countries with an unbroken SIPRI expenditure series across every year from 1991 to 2025, then summing their spending in each of the two endpoint years. Figures are expressed in SIPRI constant 2024 US dollars, which strips out the effect of inflation and lets the 1991 and 2025 totals be compared directly. Any years labelled as estimates (2026–2027 in SIPRI's projections) are excluded from this historical comparison, which uses only actual reported figures for 1991 and 2025.

• Panel size — 98 countries, held constant across both endpoint years.
• Currency basis — SIPRI constant 2024 US dollars, removing inflation effects.
• Attribution — the $1,324.1bn and $2,446.4bn totals are our calculation from SIPRI country-level data, not a SIPRI-published aggregate.

05 How to Read the 84.8% Increase in Context

The actual path from 1991 to 2025 was not linear — spending fell through much of the 1990s before climbing again from the early 2000s onward. Readers using this figure for further analysis should keep the panel's composition in mind: it reflects 98 specific countries with unbroken data, not every state that has ever reported military spending to SIPRI, and it says nothing about how spending was distributed among those 98 countries or how any single country's share changed over the period.