The Dividends of a World in Flames

Abby Martin speaks to Al Jazeera about the nefarious ways the country’s largest weapons manufacturers perpetuate the endless cycle of war

It happened more than 30 years ago, but people are still dying because of a dinner during the summer of 1993.

Dubbed the “Last Supper” by one of the executives who was there, this dinner – hosted by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry – made it known to the CEOs in attendance that the only way to survive the impending post-Cold War budget cuts was to consolidate. This directive laid the groundwork for shrinking the US defense sector from 51 to just a handful of dominant corporations.

While the US did slightly lower the amount it allocated for the Pentagon over the next few years, it reversed course by the end of the 90s, and began a frantic spending spree in the early 2000s. The year before Aspin and Perry’s fateful meeting with the country’s largest weapons manufacturers, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney proposed a military budget totaling $281 billion. By next year, President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is slated to push this figure past $1 trillion for the first time.

In that time, the balance sheets of Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Boeing – known as the Big Five that survived the flurry of mergers that pared the industry down following Aspin and Perry’s warning – have exploded.

As independent antiwar journalist Abby Martin detailed during a recent segment for AJ+, which is owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network, this explosion in spending has been anything but organic. As Martin notes during the short video, the years these five corporations spent buying up dozens of smaller competitors didn’t just consolidate their market share, it also amplified their political power. The pointless wars we’ve fought and the soaring NDAA budgets that have bankrolled them didn’t just fall out of the sky.

The continuity of the US government’s seemingly endless string of threats and conflicts isn’t an accident, it’s engineered; as Martin breaks down for AJ+, the aforementioned companies play a massive role in maintaining this status quo.

“These weapons contractors spend so much money and employ hundreds of lobbyists, 700 or more, per year… that’s more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress,” Martin points out in the video.

According to OpenSecrets, in 2024 the US defense sector employed 950 registered lobbyists, spending $149.4 million to push the agendas of 385 clients on Capitol Hill.

Of course, these weapons makers also fund both sides of most congressional races around the country to ensure that their interests are protected no matter who voters decide to send to Washington. The maddening thing about these numbers is how tiny they are in proportion to the hundreds of billions of dollars that these contractors collectively get back from the government.

This is how the corporations that produce the bullets, howitzers, surface-to-air missile systems, and drones that ravage the world’s warzones ensure that demand for their services never diminishes.

“War profiteers always win, regardless of the outcome,” Martin is quoted as saying in the 12-minute video.

Indeed, contextualizing the defense sector’s financial trajectory over the past three decades alongside any honest examination of the conflicts the industry’s championed makes this a reality that’s hard to deny.

The Big Five is an apt microcosm of just how drastically the weapons industry has grown during the so-called “War on Terror”.

Boeing’s stock has increased more than 400% since the close of trading on September 10, 2001, while shares of RTX and General Dynamics have risen more than 600%. Historical data indicates that Lockheed Martin’s stock has shot up by nearly 1,000%, while Northrop Grumman’s shareholders have enjoyed a surge of more than 1,420%.

These five corporations scooped up 36% of all federal defense contracts in 2020 and combined for nearly a quarter-of-a-trillion dollars in revenue in 2024 alone.

This astronomical growth isn’t the result of the invisible hand of the market. The same contractors that spend millions in lobbying dollars to keep the US government on a permanent war footing then collude with the lawmakers they’ve purchased to inflate the price tag for the hardware that this uninterrupted state of war necessitates. These increases are anything but modest. Because the sector’s consolidation all but eliminated the competitive bidding process for a lot of the hardware and weaponry the Pentagon has spent years buying, the price of just about everything the US military purchases has gone through the roof.

In May 2023, 60 Minutes aired the results of a six-month probe into price gouging by the Pentagon. The report featured Shay Assad, who’d previously spent time as an executive at Raytheon prior to his tenure with the DoD during the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. During the segment, the now retired Assad emphasized that the Pentagon overpays for almost everything. To illustrate this point, he highlighted an oil presser switch that NASA used to purchase for $328. This same component now runs north of $10,000 at the Pentagon.

“In the competitive environment before the companies consolidated, a shoulder-fired Stinger missile cost $25,000 in 1991. With Raytheon, now the sole supplier, it costs more than $400,000 to replace each missile sent to Ukraine,” the segment noted.

Furthermore, a large percentage of the revenue these companies generate is made abroad via organizations like NATO. As the AJ+ video notes, in the 90s these contractors played a significant role in Europe’s decision to expand this pseudo-defensive alliance of Western nations. Because every member state that joined NATO was required to modernize its military, the body’s expansion effectively created a new market for America’s weapons giants.

At the time, the weapons industry worked tirelessly to make sure this happened.

According to a March 1998 article in the New York Times, the six largest defense contractors in the US had spent some $51 million on lobbying during the previous two-year period. This analysis was provided to the paper by Campaign Study Group, a Virginia-based research organization. While these companies certainly had other issues before Congress, the article notes that NATO expansion was at the top of their list of priorities.

The following passages from the article highlight the central role that America’s military contractors played in the growth of the alliance:

The four dozen companies whose main business is arms have showered candidates with $32.3 million since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the decade. By comparison, the tobacco lobby spent $26.9 million in that same period, 1991 to 1997.

The top six American military companies increased their contributions to Federal campaign committees as well, to $2.4 million in 1997 from $1.5 million in 1991.

In the last six years, those six companies -- Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Textron Inc., Raytheon, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas -- have given the committees more than $15 million.

…

The top individual giver to the Democratic Party last year was Bernard L. Schwartz, chairman of Loral Space and Communications, which is partly owned by Lockheed.

He gave $366,000 to Democratic Party committees in 1997, a non-election year. That included $50,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, made shortly after he appeared at a briefing for several senators that was sponsored by the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.

Some additional color on the matter comes courtesy of another article from the Times from the previous summer:

At night, Bruce L. Jackson is president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, giving intimate dinners for Senators and foreign officials. By day, he is director of strategic planning for Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world's biggest weapons maker.

Mr. Jackson says he keeps his two identities separate, but his company and his lobbying group are fighting the same battle. Defense contractors are acting like globe-hopping diplomats to encourage the expansion of NATO, which will create a huge market for their wares.

Billions of dollars are at stake in the next global arms bazaar: weapons sales to Central European nations invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Admission to the Western fraternity will bring political prestige, but at a price: playing by NATO rules, which require Western weapons and equipment.

…

''To make sure the Senate knew this was an important aspect of U.S. security,'' Mr. Jackson said, his U.S. Committee to Expand NATO recently gave a dinner for a dozen Senators at the private Metropolitan Club, two blocks from the White House.

Over lamb chops and red wine, the Senators heard Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright explain NATO expansion. The guest list included Bernard L. Schwartz, chairman of Loral Space and Communications, a company partly owned by Lockheed Martin. Mr. Schwartz personally donated $601,000 to Democratic politicians for the 1996 election. Lockheed Martin itself gave $2.3 million to Congressional and Presidential candidates in the 1996 election, part of a five-fold increase in defense companies' donations to Democrats from 1992 to 1996.

In 1999, NATO welcomed Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into the alliance. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia would also join just five years later. As the years rolled on, the Big Five would make billions as a direct result of these developments.

Earlier this year, data provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) indicated that 64% of the weapons imported by NATO states came from the US during the 2020-2024 timeframe. This is a sharp increase from the 52% figure that was recorded from 2015 to 2019.

And of course, it wasn’t just NATO that America’s corporations were arming.

According to SIPRI, US-headquartered defense corporations accounted for 37% of all arms sold around the world for the five-year timeframe ending in 2020. Selling weapons to an astonishing 96 countries, this total was a 15% increase over the previous five-year interval, from 2011 to 2015.

Early last year, this publication carried the news that a fact sheet from the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs revealed that “in FY2023 the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities conducted under the Foreign Military Sales system was $80.9 billion. This represents a 55.9% increase, up from $51.9 billion in FY2022. This is the highest annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners.”

A year later, the State Department announced that this number had jumped yet again:

In FY2024 the total value of transferred defense articles and services and security cooperation activities conducted under the Foreign Military Sales system was $117.9 billion. This represents a 45.7% increase, up from $80.9 billion in FY2023. This is the highest ever annual total of sales and assistance provided to our allies and partners.

As Issue Chronicle covered in March in great detail, despite the US government’s repeated assurances that Washington only does business with states that prioritize human rights, a significant portion of these sales were made to Bahrain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, as well as a number of other nations for which the exact opposite is true.

This is a reality that’s unlikely to change anytime soon because the lawmakers tasked with providing oversight of the military-industrial complex benefit from the status quo.

The weapons contractors described above don’t just bankroll the campaigns of hundreds of members of Congress, they also directly line their pockets. In December, an analysis conducted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft revealed that 37 members of Congress traded between $24 million and $113 million in defense stocks over the course of the past year. The data show that Nancy Pelosi moved as much as $5 million in defense stocks in 2024. However, there was one lawmaker whose broker was even more active. According to Quincy, last year Congressman Josh Gottheimer reportedly traded between $22 million and $104.4 million in Pentagon stocks.

No matter what they may say, most members of Congress don’t really have the political or the personal incentive to end America’s foreign entanglements or trim the exploding military budgets that they vote for years after year. As this publication has documented on many occasions, the only oversight these lawmakers seem to be capable of providing is of the performance art variety.

Most of the time, when they seek testimony from witnesses, they only do so to agree with them. They also never bother to mention that nearly all of the “experts” that they haul in front of their committees are also bought and paid for by the weapons industry.

These are just some of the ways the defense industry and America’s elected officials rig the game to keep the world at war.