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I found a (North America proxy) graph of US military spending in absolute real terms (i.e. adjusted for inflation).

enter image description here

As you can see, in absolute terms, even adjusting for inflation, the US has spent more in the 2nd Gulf War aftermath than during the Cold War.

Similar (WaPo) graph isolating some (recent) war budgets (but not older ones like Vietnam etc.):

enter image description here

But this (neither of these) graphs accounts for the growth in GDP. So, is there a graph of US military spending as percentage of GDP (and does it look substantially different than the above)?

N.B. I found one (relative to GDP) that stops in 2004, so not really helpful for a comparison after that, i.e. the post Gulf War II peak is not visible in this one...

enter image description here

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The World Bank seems to have military spending as a percentage of GDP for very country, including the US since year 1960:

enter image description here

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  • Their data also comes from SIPRI, so hopefully the (raw) spending is the same as in the first graph in my question, which seems to answer my underlying question as to whether the most recent peak spending is less than during the cold war as a affirmative in GDP terms.
    – 264 champagne bottles on ice
    Commented Feb 1, 2020 at 14:59

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