A look at the world’s largest military industries
In 1934, a US Senate Committee chaired by the Republican Gerald Nye began eighteen months of hearings on the domestic arms industry, investigating the enormous profits it had generated from World War I, amid speculation that the “merchants of death” might soon drag America into another major conflict. The inquiry channelled a popular contemporary discourse which claimed that wealthy industrialists—executives at firms like DuPont, J. P. Morgan, and Pratt & Whitney—were wilfully stoking inter-state antagonism to drive up their margins. “The arms maker has risen and grown powerful,” noted a prominent study at the time, “until today he is one of the most dangerous factors in world affairs—a hindrance to peace, a promoter of war.” Even the Wall Street Journal, in its defense of the Nye committee, felt able to denounce the “vicious system which both admits and tempts men to the commercial development of bad blood among neighboring peoples.”1
The notion that private interests are creating global volatility has never left circulation, but has newfound relevance as worldwide military spending reached a historic high of $2.9 trillion last year, to the benefit of weaponsmakers from Israel’s Elbit and the American “Big Five” (Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Northrop, and RTX), to Germany’s Rheinmetall and the UK’s BAE Systems.2
Peace activists are correct to point out that the death merchants have been thriving in the 2020s, and that their interests lie in prolonging the destruction in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere—with teams of lobbyists striving to keep policymakers on a constant war-footing. But while the phrase “military industrial complex” was coined to warn that these profiteers could effectively capture the state, and that the primary problem is therefore the privatization of the defense sector, this framework risks neglecting the imbrication of public and private power in the global arms industry today. It is not private actors qua private actors who are responsible for the growth of the armaments industry. Ultimately, military markets are shaped by states: as clients and as owners. Mapping the world’s largest military-industrial complexes, their relationships to one another, and their overlapping structures of corporate ownership suggests that their expansion is, in the final estimation, subtended by the violent functions of statecraft itself.
This exercise also sheds light on how hard power is distributed on a global scale. The US is far and away the world’s largest military spender, military producer, and arms exporter, accounting for more than a third of global military expenditure and 42 percent of all exports, surpassing $1 trillion in 2024. Yet the global military economy is also populated by other actors who can influence the number and variety of weapons that are produced, bought, sold, and used on the battlefield. China is the world’s second largest military spender. Though it trails far behind the US ($335 billion), China’s military spending has increased every year for three decades, such that it now makes up approximately 12 percent of the world’s total. Third is Russia, which, since its invasion of Ukraine, has transformed into a war economy, more than doubling its military expenditure from $69 billion in 2016 to $190 billion in 2025, or 6.3 percent of GDP in 2025—a new high since the end of the Cold War.
Regional powers are also militarizing, with Iran proving itself a formidable armed opponent to Israel and the US, while India and Saudi Arabia are staking out their positions as the world’s largest arms importers. These states form part of a wider cohort, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey, which is now seeking military self-sufficiency through industrial and technological development geared towards domestic arms production. Each of them uses their military apparatuses against subordinated populations—the Kashmiris, the Yemenis, the Kurds—while others have developed arms-import networks beyond the reach of American empire.
Tracing the production and transfer of arms across the globe illuminates structural linkages between the wars ravaging disparate places…
https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/arms-markets/
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After the truth-shower 