After the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex was only temporarily affected by a reduction in defense spending, following arms disarmament treaties and given the weakening of the Soviet threat. In 2000, a decade after the end of the Cold War, the GDP percentage of defense spending was only 3.7%, a historic low. Nevertheless, US military expenditures have been growing in the last decades. They started to grow again after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The federal defense budget for 2019 is $716 billion.
