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War for profit: How trillions of dollars are being transferred to arms companies...
A new study of Department of Defense spending, presented exclusively to The Guardian, shows that the majority of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to external military contractors, creating a $2.4 trillion benefit for private companies, a “continuous and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons production.”
The report, compiled by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Brown University's "Costs of War" project, notes that the new Pentagon budget proposed by the Trump administration will push annual US military spending beyond the $1 trillion threshold.
This will bring a projected benefit of more than $500 billion that will be distributed among arms industry giants such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as well as the military technology sector that has close ties to the administration, including figures such as JD Vance.
The report is based on Pentagon contract statistics from 2020 to 2024, during which the five major contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman) received $771 billion in contracts. In total, private companies received about 54% of the Department of Defense's $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending during that period.
Including additional funds approved by Congress under Trump's "Big, Beautiful Package" law, the report shows that the US military budget has almost doubled since 2000, a 99% increase.
The rapid increase in military spending, which began after September 11 during the Bush administration, has now continued with a focus on China as the US's main rival in the 21st century, as well as record arms sales to Israel and Ukraine.
“The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not yield a ‘peace dividend,’” the report’s authors write. “Instead, President Biden requested – and Congress authorized – even higher budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is pursuing the same aggressive path of increasing military spending.”
This contradicts Trump's statements in February, when he suggested he might cut military spending in half, saying: "There's no reason why we should be spending almost $1 trillion on the military... and I'll say we could spend that money on other things." However, the budget bill Trump pushed through Congress included an additional $157 billion for the Pentagon.
The budget increase is expected to increasingly benefit the military technology sector, with companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril that are "deeply integrated into the Trump administration," according to the report - and are expected to have an advantage in future budget battles.
“The Pentagon’s sky-high budgets are often justified as helping the troops,” said William D. Hartung, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute and a co-author of the report. “But as this report shows, most of the budget goes to corporations—money that has more to do with lobbying and special interests than with rational defense planning. Much of this money has been wasted on failed or overpriced weapons systems and inflated compensation packages.”
"These figures represent a continued and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons production," said Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project.
Adjusted for inflation, military spending far exceeds the approximately $356 billion that Congress has approved for American diplomacy, development, and humanitarian assistance.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to slash funding for international aid. Last month, The Guardian revealed that a White House funding review recommended near-total cuts to democracy promotion programs. / Adapted from “Pamphlet”
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