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On December 6, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published its annual list of the world’s highest-earning arms manufacturers. The Swedish think tank disclosed that in 2020, as hospitals overflowed, morgues filled up, stores shuttered, and the global economy contracted by 3.1 percent, the top 100 weapons makers earned a record total of $531 billion, a 1.3 percent increase from 2019.
“No officials or lawmakers have spelled out why the budget . . . needs to be quite this huge.”
Military sales require military buyers, and last year many governments were happy to double down on defense-related expenditures even as gross domestic products (GDPs) shrank and populations were sick, unemployed, or locked indoors. Global military spending in 2020 hit $1.98 trillion, the highest since the institute started calculating totals in 1988.
“In much of the world, military spending grew and some governments even accelerated payments to the arms industry in order to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis,” institute researcher Alexandra Marksteiner said in a press release.
Unsurprisingly, one country led the world in both producing and buying military equipment. Since 2018, the United States has housed the five largest weapons manufacturers worldwide. This year, forty-one of the top 100 arms companies were from the United States, with cumulative sales of $285 billion, more than the GDP of Finland.
Lockeed Martin topped the list for the twelfth time, making $58.2 billion, or 11 percent, of the list’s total sales. Rounding out the top five were Raytheon Technologies (the result of Raytheon and United Technologies’s merger last year), Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics.
On the purchasing side, the U.S. government during the pandemic continued its decades-long reign as arms buyer-in-chief, spending $778 billion on its military, roughly as much as the next twelve countries combined.
According to the Pentagon’s public database, in 2020 the U.S. government awarded Lockheed Martin about 270 short-term and long-term contracts totaling about $42.1 billion—or 72.3 percent of Lockheed’s total sales.
The source of Lockheed’s remaining revenue probably isn’t very surprising either. The United States exports more arms than the next eight countries combined, and the four biggest global arms importers are dutiful U.S. allies (and thus customers): Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, and Australia.
In 2020, the U.S. government authorized $50.78 billion in foreign military sales. The largest U.S. arms manufacturers each operate dozens of entities in other countries, which helps boost foreign contracts. Ten of Lockheed’s twenty-eight foreign subsidiaries, for example, are based in the Middle East; it even launched a joint venture with Saudi Arabia’s defense department in 2018 to build Black Hawk helicopters and other military equipment.
As the U.S. government doles out increasingly lucrative contracts to U.S. weapons makers in the name of security, stability, and “the greatest military in the world,” the industry is defined by quid pro quo that looks very much like legalized corruption.
According to an OpenSecrets report published on December 9, the defense industry has spent $98.9 million on lobbying so far in 2021, an eight-year high, to woo Congressional committee members and candidates, and officials from the White House, State Department, and the Defense Department.
The business of making planes, drones, and bombs is synonymous with the bombardment of civilians, destruction of towns, occupations of countries, and mass displacement.
After months of slick mingling and backroom deals, the sector is poised for a gold rush. The Senate just passed a $778 billion defense budget—tens of billions more than President Joe Biden requested and the largest budget since World War II (even when accounting for inflation).
“No officials or lawmakers have spelled out why the budget . . . needs to be quite this huge,” Slate columnist Fred Kaplan wrote last week, in one of his typically thorough policy analyses. Yet, in wondering why “there was strikingly little examination . . . of whether all this money was allocated in quite the right way,” Kaplan appeared surprisingly naive about the Pentagon’s intentions, which for decades have had little to do with honorable allocations and bona fide national security.
Senator Bernie Sanders’s rhetorical question in November was more canny: “Isn’t it strange how even as we end the longest war in our nation’s history, concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful Military Industrial Complex?”
Of course, it’s not really strange that the House passed the defense budget by a 363-70 vote, and the Senate by 89-10—both bipartisan blockbusters. Since 2001, according to another OpenSecrets report, members of Congress have received an average of $179,000 in campaign contributions from defense firms.
This election cycle, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, received $147,000 in such contributions. In fact, six of the top ten Congressional recipients of defense funds over the past twenty years are Democrats. One of them is Representative Adam Smith of Washington State, current Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who told The New York Times on December 7 that “one of the major challenges our military faces right now . . . is getting the Pentagon to better and more quickly adopt the innovative technologies that we need to meet our national security threats.”
Smith, who has received nearly $2 million in defense contributions while a member of the committee, gravely added, “Those threats are very real.”
Last year, among the hundreds of defense companies that lobbied the federal government, the top five spenders shelled out $60 million—accounting for more than half of the industry’s lobbying expenditures. Predictably, these top spenders were the same five companies that topped the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s list of the world’s highest earning arms manufacturers: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Technologies. Together, their $60 million investment netted over $183 billion in defense sales.
The kleptocratic texture of U.S. governance is reflected in the military industrial scheme: Spend a bit of private money and receive full access to the taxpayer’s treasure trove. And the rewards go both ways. In 2020, 73 percent of the 663 defense lobbyists had walked through the revolving door from government service to what were assuredly higher salaries in the private sector. “No other sector has a higher percentage of lobbyists who also worked in the government,” reported OpenSecrets.
Every year, lawmakers cite new “threats” to justify diverting the majority of Congress’s discretionary funds away from health care, education, and social welfare. What really distinguishes the defense industry from other, equally avaricious sectors is how these weapons-selling narratives shape global geopolitical realities rather than the other way around.
Manufactured threats must animate very real geopolitical tension and violence to justify and sustain themselves. The business of making planes, drones, and bombs is thereby synonymous with the bombardment of civilians, destruction of towns, occupations of countries, and mass displacement.
In Yemen, for example, bombs made by Raytheon and sold to Saudi Arabia with the blessing of the U.S. government killed twenty-one people at a wedding in 2018. And a one-ton bomb made by General Dynamics killed ninety-seven civilians, including twenty-five children, at a marketplace in 2016.
On December 13, the Pentagon decided that no U.S. troops would be punished for killing ten civilians, including seven children, with a drone strike in Afghanistan amid a last-minute dash to punish the Taliban.
Until recently, military spending relied heavily for its justification on the “threats” of ISIS and the Taliban. This time, we’re told that the bad guys are Russia and China, both of which have decreased their weapons exports since 2015 and directed their state-owned arms companies to produce more civilian goods than military ones.
A few weeks after the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, pro-Pentagon talking heads appeared on national news outlets to broadcast Ukraine’s desperate need for U.S. troops on its eastern border to ward off “Russian aggression.” It seems to be the latest budget-bloating narrative being peddled to the world by pointedly invested interest groups.
With President Biden likely to sign the defense budget into law, there may not be a happy ending to this story. A tally by the institute in Stockholm predicts that Silicon Valley is certain to become the next frontier of military spending as the Pentagon pivots to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Microsoft, for example, won a $22 billion ten-year contract in 2021 to supply the army with visual augmentation devices. And last year, the CIA awarded a cloud enterprise contract “to a consortium comprising Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle . . . reportedly worth tens of billions of dollars over a fifteen-year period.”
For now, Big Tech hasn’t broken into the Top 100 weapons makers. The list, like Congress itself, is still overrun by the old guard. Together, they continue to champion what President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his prophetic 1961 farewell address, described as “the total influence—economic, political, even spiritual”—of the military-industrial complex.