This paper analyses the influence of political regimes on the level and the economic composition of military expenditure in Spain over the long run. The results suggest that political and strategic variables exerted a significant effect on both the total and the disaggregated military burden throughout the period. The democratic governments established in the late 1970s and the early 1980s exerted a positive influence on the military burden due to the efforts to reorient the army towards international threats and to involve the armed forces with the newly democratic institutions. These results partially challenge the widely accepted negative relation between democracy and military spending and pose the need for further analyses on political transitions. Additionally, the analysis on the military expenditure composition allows concluding that the international orientation of democratic military policies went along with financial efforts to get a smaller and better equipped army, to confront international military threats.