Oyewole O. Sarumi PhD
Digital Transformation Architect and Leadership Specialist
There is a particular kind of silence that follows a missile strike. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of aftermath — of rubble, of grief, of children who will never come home. But somewhere else, far removed from that silence, there is another sound entirely: the gentle chime of a stock ticker climbing upward. A boardroom conversation about Q3 projections. The quiet satisfaction of a portfolio manager reviewing overnight gains. These two worlds — the world of devastation and the world of dividend — are not separate. They are deeply, structurally, and deliberately connected.
This is what seasoned observers of global conflict have long understood, and what most of the rest of us are only beginning to see: war is not merely a political failure or a humanitarian catastrophe. War is, above all else, an industry. And like any industry, it has investors, shareholders, supply chains, profit margins, and quarterly results. The bombs and the balance sheets belong to the same ecosystem. Understanding that is not cynicism. It is clarity.
“War is not emotion; it is economics. The F-35 flies. The stock market smiles. Peace is bad for business. War is good for investors.”
— Charles Awuzie, Finance and Policy Commentator
This article sets out to make that case — not to diminish the suffering of those caught in conflict, but to help readers across every continent see the full picture of what is actually happening when the guns begin to fire. Because you cannot address a problem you have been trained not to look at directly.
The Numbers Do Not Lie: War Is a $679 Billion Industry
Let us begin with facts, because facts are the most uncomfortable thing in this conversation. In 2024, the world’s 100 largest arms manufacturers generated a combined $679 billion in revenue from arms sales and military services — the highest figure ever recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). This was a 5.9 per cent increase over the previous year, driven directly by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, rising global military spending, and the escalating tensions across East Asia and the Middle East.
$679 BILLION — Global Arms Revenue in 2024 (SIPRI) Highest figure ever recorded in history
American companies dominate this landscape with stunning authority. Thirty-nine United States firms appear in the SIPRI Top 100, and their combined revenue from military orders reached $334 billion — exactly half of the global total. The three giants at the top of this hierarchy, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and Northrop Grumman, are publicly listed corporations whose shareholders receive dividends calculated, in part, on how many conflicts are active at any given moment on the globe.
Lockheed Martin alone — the manufacturer of the celebrated F-35 fighter jet and a vast array of precision missiles and air defence systems — carries an order backlog of $194 billion. That is not a backlog of orders for consumer products. It is a forward-looking ledger of anticipated destruction. Northrop Grumman’s backlog stood at $83.9 billion. General Dynamics, which specialises in naval systems and armoured vehicles, reported full-year revenue of $52.6 billion in 2025, a 10 per cent increase over the prior year.
Europe has entered this growth story with new urgency. Alarmed by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and the continent’s historical dependence on American security guarantees, European governments have been dramatically expanding their defence budgets. Germany, for instance, saw its arms manufacturers record a 36 per cent revenue increase in 2024. The Czech company Czechoslovak Group surged 193 per cent through artillery shell sales to Ukraine. Twenty-three of Europe’s 26 firms in the SIPRI ranking reported gains, bringing the regional total to $151 billion.
“Last year global arms revenues reached the highest level ever recorded by SIPRI as producers capitalised on high demand.”
— Lorenzo Scarazzato, Researcher, SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme
Global military expenditure itself reached an estimated $2.63 trillion in 2025. Defence spending is now projected to exceed $3.6 trillion by 2030. In the United States, the defence budget is on course to surpass one trillion dollars as early as fiscal year 2026 — years ahead of congressional projections. NATO allies have committed to raising their spending target from 2 per cent to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. The aerospace and defence market, valued at $885 billion in 2024, is projected to reach $2.03 trillion by 2034, growing at an annual rate of 8.64 per cent.
These are not the numbers of an industry reluctantly supplying a security need. They are the numbers of an industry that has perfected the art of ensuring that the security need never quite goes away.
Eisenhower Saw It Coming: The Warning That Was Never Heeded
On the evening of January 17, 1961, a man who had spent his life commanding armies sat in the Oval Office and delivered what would become one of the most prophetic speeches in the history of the modern world. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander who had led the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny, used his farewell address not to celebrate his military legacy, but to warn the American people of a threat he believed was already eating at the foundations of their democracy.
He called it the military-industrial complex — that “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” that was, in his words, entirely new in the American experience. He acknowledged its necessity in the nuclear age, but he was unambiguous about its dangers. In a sentence that deserves to be memorised by every citizen of every nation on earth, he said:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961
Eisenhower was a soldier who had seen enough wars to know that the greatest threat to peace was not always an enemy general. It was sometimes the arms manufacturer who needed a conflict to justify next year’s production run. It was the lobbyist who needed a senator to approve a procurement bill. It was the politician who needed a defence contractor’s campaign donation more than he needed a peaceful world.
What is particularly revealing is that Eisenhower’s original draft included the word “congressional” in his coinage — the military-industrial-congressional complex — because he understood from the outset that the influence of these corporations on legislative decision-making was central to the problem. He removed the word before delivering the speech, reportedly because he felt it was not fitting. But the concept remained, and history has proven him entirely correct.
The revolving door between the Pentagon and defence contractors has become one of the most consistent features of American governance. William J. Lynn III, to name just one documented example, left his role as a Raytheon lobbyist to serve as the second-highest official in the Pentagon in 2010. Lockheed Martin donated $75,000 to House Armed Services Committee Chair Representative Mac Thornberry, who subsequently passed legislation directly benefiting the company. As of January 2020, 51 members of the United States Congress and their spouses held between $2.3 and $5.8 million in stock in the top 30 corporations supplying goods and services to the US military. The conflict of interest is not concealed. It is institutionalised.
51 US Congress members hold up to $5.8 billion in defence contractor stock While voting on military budgets
The Investors Behind the Bombs: When Wall Street Loves War
To understand how deeply the war economy is embedded in the financial architecture of modern capitalism, consider this: Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defence contractor, counts Vanguard and BlackRock among its biggest investors. These are the same investment management giants that hold dominant stakes in Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, Pfizer, Moderna, ExxonMobil, Chevron, JP Morgan, Facebook, and McDonald’s. The money that funds your retirement account, your pension, your index fund, may well be riding, in part, on the performance of Lockheed Martin’s precision missile division.
In the six months following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, aerospace and defence stocks spiked approximately seven per cent as both institutional and retail investors bought in. A drone strike in the Middle East can send oil prices upward and defence stocks skyward within hours. The market does not grieve. It calculates. And what it has calculated, with ruthless precision, is that geopolitical instability is, on balance, good for returns.
Reports indicate that former President Donald Trump holds approximately 52,000 shares of Lockheed Martin currently valued around $32 million, as well as substantial investments in RTX. This is worth pausing over. When a sitting or former president makes decisions about military deployments, strike authorisations, or arms export approvals, and that individual holds tens of millions of dollars in defence contractor equity, the line between national interest and personal financial interest becomes not just blurred but potentially erased. The observation is not partisan. It is structural.
“When war breaks out, defence companies tend to make money. That means aerospace and defence stocks tend to rise during geopolitical unrest.”
— CNN Business
Finance analyst and policy commentator Charles Awuzie articulated this architecture plainly in a widely-shared commentary: the moment you understand that every missile launched makes a market smile, and every peace agreement threatens a revenue stream, you stop analysing wars through the lens of ideology and begin to see them as economic events. It is a perspective that the financial press, curiously, rarely applies to military conflict with the same rigour it brings to, say, semiconductor supply chains.
The ABCD commodity-trading companies — ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus — recorded large profits as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and rising food prices. LNG exporters from the United States struck new long-term deals with Europe as it scrambled to replace Russian gas. Grain traders in Chicago made billions from food insecurity in Sudan. The economic logic is, as one analysis noted, cold but efficient: instability in one region translates into opportunity in another.
The Wider Ecosystem: Aid, Reconstruction, and the IDP Camp Economy
It would be a mistake, however, to confine the business of war to the arms industry alone. The war economy is vastly broader, and it extends into spaces that are supposed to be the antithesis of conflict: humanitarian relief, reconstruction, peacekeeping, and refugee services.
In Somalia, three interclan cartels were paid hundreds of millions of dollars every year in World Food Programme transport contracts and reportedly skimmed 30 to 50 per cent of the cargo. Once aid reached camps for internally displaced persons, it passed through so-called gatekeepers who collected it on behalf of genuine refugees, family members of local armed groups, and entirely fictitious individuals — fewer than half of registered beneficiaries were found to actually exist. Genuine beneficiaries were often taxed by these gatekeepers up to half of whatever aid they received.
In Syria, a study by the Syria Legal Development Programme and the OPEN Network found that the United Nations paid tens of millions of dollars to Syrian companies linked to war profiteers, human rights abusers, and figures sanctioned by Western governments for their connections to the Assad regime. Since 2011, over $40 billion of aid money has flowed into Syria, more than half of it through the UN. The irony is almost too painful to process: money donated by ordinary taxpayers in London, Oslo, Ottawa, and Tokyo to feed displaced Syrian families, ending up in the accounts of the very regime that displaced them.
“When humanitarian assistance is systematically abused and distorted, it may become a dangerous weapon in the hands of the government against its people.”
— Syria Legal Development Programme & OPEN Network
In Yemen, trucks carrying medical supplies were hijacked by Houthi fighters, with some supplies reportedly used on the frontline and others sold in pharmacies in areas under their control, with UN staff suspecting insider collusion. In Afghanistan, the United States Agency for International Development admitted it could not account for $3 billion in cash disbursements made through the United Nations. Reconstruction companies in conflict zones are known to sign contracts before the bombs have stopped falling.
This is not the exception. It is the operating model of the war economy at its most dispersed and pervasive level. As one seasoned commentator described from personal observation in Nigeria: during the crises in Jos and the Benue Valley, someone was always in charge of supplying rice, beans, and provisions to the internally displaced persons camps. Someone else held the contracts for security services at those camps. The suffering created a supply chain. The supply chain created commerce. And commerce, as always, created beneficiaries — none of whom had any particular interest in the suffering ending too soon.
117 MILLION people forcibly displaced worldwide in 2023 A direct consequence of wars and political violence — and a market for suppliers
Africa’s Particular Wound: Wars by Proxy, Profits by Outsiders
For the African continent, the economics of war carry a particularly bitter flavour. Africa has been, for the better part of a century, the world’s most reliable testing ground for weapons developed elsewhere, the most convenient theatre for proxy conflicts funded by external powers, and the most profitable source of the natural resources that fuel both the war economy and the civilian economies of the industrialised world.
In East and Central Africa, armed conflict has created some of the fastest-growing refugee flows in the world. Control over lucrative resources — gold, coltan, timber, oil — is frequently not the consequence of conflict but its cause. Foreign business networks aid armed factions in the extraction, transportation, and laundering of criminally derived profits, receiving weapons, financial services, and international market access in return. The value of those stolen materials is only as high as the price a foreign buyer in Geneva, London, or Dubai is willing to pay.
During the Nuremberg trials of 1948, this principle was briefly, astonishingly, given legal force. Thirteen executives from the German chemical company IG Farben were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their role in the Holocaust — including the manufacturing of Zyklon B gas. It remains one of the very few occasions in modern history when commercial actors who facilitated atrocities were held accountable in court. The precedent was set. It has been almost entirely ignored ever since.
In Nigeria, the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast has, for over a decade, generated enormous economic activity — most of it invisible to mainstream analysis. Private security contracts, food supply agreements, construction of IDP camps, international humanitarian funding, counter-insurgency equipment procurement: all of this represents, in economic terms, a business cluster. The insurgency is, among other things, a stimulus package for certain categories of supplier. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an incentive structure. And incentive structures, left unexamined, persist.
The Merchants of Death and Their Modern Successors
History is not short of warnings about this dynamic. Before the First World War, Basil Zaharoff — a Greek-born arms dealer who became one of the most powerful men in Europe — perfected what became known as the escalation sales technique: sell weapons to one side of a conflict, then use that sale to alarm the opposing side into purchasing an equal or greater arsenal from the same supplier. The conflict between the buyers thus became the engine of profit for the seller. Zaharoff’s company, Vickers, sold weapons to all parties in the Chaco War. He was knighted by the British Crown and decorated by the French Republic.
The Senate Committee on Munitions, chaired by Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, launched a three-year investigation in the 1930s into the relationship between the arms industry and American entry into the First World War. The findings were damning enough that the term “Merchants of Death” entered the public lexicon as a descriptor for arms manufacturers who profit from human suffering. Presidents Wilson, Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt all spoke publicly against excessive wartime profiteering. Senator Harry Truman, who would later command the only nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, denounced war profiteering as, in his words, nothing short of treason.
The language has softened. The practice has not. Today’s merchants of death wear tailored suits, present at Davos, and release sustainability reports. Their companies are listed on stock exchanges, rated by environmental, social, and governance frameworks, and praised by analysts for their efficient management of complex global supply chains. What has changed is not the moral architecture of the enterprise. What has changed is the sophistication with which it is disguised.
“War profiteers are not protectors of nations — they are predators of humanity. They do not build peace. They build markets.”
— Dissident Voice, January 2026
Private military contractors (PMCs) represent the newest and perhaps most troubling iteration of this tradition. From 2007, there were regularly more private contractors than US government forces in Afghanistan. By 2016, private contractors outnumbered US state personnel three to one. In 2016, the Harris Corporation was awarded a $1.7 billion contract to supply communications equipment to Afghan security forces. These companies operate with minimal oversight, no democratic accountability, and an inherent interest in the continuation of the instability from which their contracts flow.
The Poverty Tax: How War’s Profits Fund the World’s Poor’s Suffering
The cruelty at the heart of the war economy is that its costs are not borne by those who profit from it. They are borne, overwhelmingly, by the poor, the displaced, the rural, the young, and the female. When defence stocks surge, food insecurity grows. When sanctions tighten global supply chains, the price of basic goods rises. The inflation that families face at their local market is inseparable from decisions made in defence committees. Cost overruns in weapons systems, often reaching hundreds of billions of dollars, are not errors in the system. They are features of a system designed to reward the retention of public money in private hands.
In 2023, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide reached 117 million — a direct consequence of wars and political violence. That number represents 117 million human beings removed from their homes, their communities, their livelihoods, and their futures, so that somebody else could exercise power or generate profit. Meanwhile, the companies that manufactured the weapons used to displace them reported record revenues. The companies contracted to provide humanitarian services to those displaced people were awarded multi-million-dollar contracts. The reconstruction companies began planning their bids before the shooting had stopped.
The world’s rising military burden — the share of global GDP spent on defence — reached a record 2.5 per cent in 2024. Global military expenditures have climbed for ten consecutive years. There were 61 active state-based conflicts in 2024, the highest number since the Second World War. These are not coincidences. They are correlated data points in the same story.
61 active state-based conflicts in 2024 The most since World War II — as global arms revenue hits a record $679 billion
What This Means for Leaders, Policymakers, and Citizens
None of this means that every armed conflict is manufactured for profit, or that every politician who authorises military force is acting primarily from financial interest. The world is more complex than that, and moral oversimplification serves nobody. But it does mean that any analysis of conflict that does not account for the economic incentives of the parties involved — including parties far from the battlefield — is incomplete and therefore inadequate as a basis for policy.
For African leaders and policymakers in particular, this understanding carries urgent practical implications. When a foreign power offers military assistance, or when a multinational consortium bids to supply security equipment, or when an international NGO arrives to provide humanitarian relief, the question must always be asked: what is the economic architecture of this intervention? Who profits if the conflict continues? Who loses if it ends? These are not cynical questions. They are the foundational questions of sovereign governance.
Business leaders, too, need to reckon with the supply chains they are embedded in. The financial system is interconnected enough that passive investment in index funds may constitute indirect investment in weapons manufacturers whose products are active in conflict zones. This does not mean that every investor is morally equivalent to a combatant. But it does mean that the comfortable distance that financial abstraction provides from the consequences of investment decisions is a kind of ethical anaesthesia.
And for citizens across the world, from Lagos to London, from Nairobi to New York, the message is this: when you see a war, do not stop at the surface of the narrative being offered to you. Ask who is being armed, by whom, and at what price. Ask who is supplying the food to the IDP camps, and who holds the contract for the security perimeter. Ask who owns the reconstruction company that will be awarded the post-conflict rebuilding contracts. Ask why certain conflicts receive sustained international attention and others are allowed to smoulder for decades. The answers will tell you more about the economics of the situation than any official statement ever will.
Conclusion: Seeing the World as It Is
There is a kind of moral courage required to look at the business of war without blinking. It is much easier — and certainly more comfortable — to see conflict purely through the lens of ideology, religion, ethnicity, or geopolitics. Those lenses are not wrong. They are simply incomplete. The full picture includes the stock tickers, the order backlogs, the lobbying budgets, the revolving doors, the aid contracts, and the reconstruction bids.
President Eisenhower understood this over sixty years ago and said so plainly on national television. The world nodded, and then proceeded to build the most elaborate war economy in human history. Global military expenditure is now approaching three trillion dollars annually. The top 100 arms companies generated a record $679 billion in a single year. Defence spending is projected to reach $3.6 trillion by 2030. And the number of active conflicts, at 61 in 2024, is at its highest since the Second World War.
The bombers fly. The markets smile. The poor bury their dead. And somewhere, a portfolio manager reviews overnight gains with quiet satisfaction. This is the world as it is. Understanding it — clearly, unflinchingly, without the anaesthesia of sentiment or the distortion of ideology — is the first and most important step toward changing it.
Because war will remain a business for exactly as long as it remains profitable. And it will remain profitable for exactly as long as citizens, leaders, investors, and policymakers choose not to look at it directly.
“The war economy is not inevitable. It is a choice. And choices can be unmade.”
— Dissident Voice, January 2026
About the Author
Prof. Sarumi, a digital transformation architect and leadership strategist with over 40 years of cross-sector experience across Nigeria and the African continent, writes from Lagos.
