While some count the dead, others count the cash. The cannon merchants of old have (probably) swapped their top hats for three-piece suits, but the business of death has never been so flourishing. In 2023, the 100 largest arms companies took in $632bn24, a dizzying figure when you know that a single day of war in Ukraine costs $1.4bn. Enough to build a thousand schools in France25.
At the top of this macabre pyramid sits Lockheed Martin, the undisputed king of the military industry. With $65bn in annual sales, the American giant builds the F-35s that fly over conflict zones and the Patriot missiles meant to protect them. The company handed nearly $9bn back to its shareholders in 2023, among them State Street (15%), Vanguard (9%), BlackRock (7.5%), Charles Schwab (2.3%) and Morgan Stanley (2.1%). Every missile fired becomes a dividend line.
American dominance of this market is crushing: 51% of global arms sales come from the 42 US companies in the Top 100. The Pentagon’s five main suppliers (Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics) saw their shares climb by 25 to 70% between February 2022 and the end of 2023. RTX pocketed $5.2bn in net profit in 2023, thanks in part to sales of Stinger and Javelin missiles. Defence ETFs systematically outperform the market in wartime.
But it was the war in Ukraine that really sent the counters spinning. Global military spending hit an all-time record of $2,443bn in 2023. Europe increased its budgets by 16% in a year: the biggest rise since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany crossed the symbolic threshold of 2% of GDP for the first time, with €70bn. Rheinmetall’s share price rose 6-fold between 2021 and 2024, hitting highs with every arms delivery to Kyiv, then falling back with every rumour of peace. On the Russian side, Rostec, the state conglomerate run by Sergei Chemezov, a Putin ally, saw its arms sales jump by 49%26. This industrial octopus, which owns Kalashnikov and Sukhoi, now earns 70% of its revenue from military orders.
But as we saw a little earlier, the war ecosystem is no longer limited to traditional arms makers. A new fauna has emerged, adapted to the conflicts of the 21st century. Private contractors such as Academi (formerly Blackwater), DynCorp or Constellis deployed up to 160,000 mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times outnumbering the American soldiers themselves. These “security consultants” pocketed up to $1.5K a day, while a GI scraped by on $100-120 in deployment pay. In all, $138bn was paid to these companies in Iraq alone.
Extract from contractor budgets in 2009
More cynical still: the reconstruction industry. Halliburton, once run by Dick Cheney, scooped up $39.5bn through its subsidiary KBR, rebuilding by day what the army destroyed by night27. Today, the vultures are already circling Ukraine: Bechtel (USA), Bouygues (France), Tekfen (Turkey) have already set up subsidiaries dedicated to post-war reconstruction. On the Istanbul stock exchange, construction shares climb every time peace in Syria is mentioned.
But behind every line in the accounts lies a heartbreaking human reality. Since February 2022, the war in Ukraine has left around 500,000 military dead and wounded combined. And sadly, that is only a tiny part of the problem.