The merchants of war are raking it in

In June 2025, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) reported that the number of state-based conflicts had reached its highest point since it began collecting data after the Second World War.

Sixty-one active conflicts were recorded in 2024, eleven of which had escalated into full-scale wars. The world is now witnessing conflict levels unseen since 1945. This alarming trend is not simply a reflection of political instability or failed diplomacy — it also reveals the steady rise of a global war economy, an industrial and financial system that turns death and destruction into extraordinary profit.

War has always been lucrative for some. What distinguishes our era is the scale, sophistication and normalisation, even glorification of that profit. The world’s largest defence corporations, especially those in the US, are earning record revenues as conflicts multiply.

A 2024 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that the top 100 arms and military services companies generated $632 billion in sales in 2023, a 4.2 per cent increase over the previous year. Nearly a third of that came from American firms, and the ‘Big Five’ — Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics — remain the backbone of the Pentagon’s spending.

From 2020 to 2024, these five companies together received $771 billion in contracts, or one-third of all contracts from the US Department of Defense, which has now renamed itself the US Department of War. Their products form the core of US military aid to both Ukraine and Israel, making the wars in Eastern Europe and Gaza not only geopolitical crises but also corporate windfalls.

America’s $95 billion aid bill passed in 2024 was presented as an act of solidarity with allies. Yet much of that money never left American soil. It flowed instead to weapons manufacturers to replenish the stockpiles of missiles, artillery shells and drones sent abroad. Lockheed and RTX both saw their share prices soar.

War, in this model, becomes an investment opportunity — the longer it lasts, the more profitable it becomes. No one else, only weapons producers are winning in all conflicts around the world. When war becomes good business, peace becomes economically irrational.

Across Europe and West Asia, the pattern repeats. The British giant BAE Systems posted record profits in 2024 with a 14 per cent increase in revenue over 2023, crediting renewed demand from the Ukraine and Gaza wars.

Israel’s own defence firms, including Elbit Systems, have expanded exports as regional tensions rise. Every escalation means new procurement orders leading to more corporate optimism. So the idea that weapons companies quietly favour the continuation of war is not a conspiracy theory; it is an economic logic built into the structure of their business.

When governments pour billions into weapons, they inevitably divert funds from healthcare, education and climate adaptation, distorting national budget priorities. Defence contractors reinforce this cycle through lobbying and campaign financing. In Washington, the ‘revolving door’ between Pentagon and the boardrooms of defence firms intertwines the interests of industry and state. Former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower named this nexus the ‘military–industrial complex’, which has evolved into a permanent structure of influence.

The new frontier of this war economy lies in technology, especially data, surveillance and artificial intelligence. Few companies embody this transformation more tellingly than Denver-based Palantir Technologies.

Founded to provide data analytics for counterterrorism, Palantir has positioned itself as the ‘AI arsenal of the West’. Its software integrates battlefield intelligence, logistics and targeting systems, promising to make war more precise. In real terms, it makes killing more efficient and less accountable.

In Gaza, Palantir has enabled Israel’s targeting operations, its predictive models turning decisions of life and death into lines of code. The company posted earnings of $1 billion in the second quarter of 2025, almost half of which came from US government contracts.

Beyond battlefields, Palantir’s technologies have been used in domestic policing and immigration enforcement. The same systems that map enemy combatants in conflict zones have tracked migrants and refugees in the West. The omnibus nature of surveillance, extending beyond military operations into civilian life, shows how the war economy has permeated everyday governance, where citizens have become data points, and society is perennially mobilised against real and imagined ‘security’ threats.

When profits soar as wars escalate, when global stock markets rise on news of airstrikes, when human suffering fuels corporate growth, how does one dodge the unavoidable moral question? The defence industry argues that it merely supplies governments; that it does not frame policies; but how tenable is that logic? The victims of war pay with their lives for the enrichment of those who trade in their deaths.

The global arms economy also deepens inequality. Rich nations produce and export weapons; poorer nations import them at crippling cost, often through loans that bind them to long-term debt. Military expenditure in many developing countries, particularly in India, by far exceeds budgets for health and education.

Even in authoritarian or sanctioned regimes, the same pattern holds. Russia’s state conglomerate Rostec has vastly increased production of missiles, ammunition and armoured vehicles since 2022, with revenue rising by 49 per cent. China’s defence sector continues to expand its exports to Pakistan, Bangladesh and several countries in Africa and West Asia.

The war economy is not an American monopoly — it is a worldwide system of militarised capitalism, but the US remains its centre.

The UCDP data is grim. It reminds us that the world is again drifting towards a wartime order. Conflicts are multiplying, displacement is rising and humanitarian systems are stretched thin. The war economy is not an accident of history — it is a deliberate structure sustained by politics, money and silence. Breaking it will not be easy, but accepting it would mean surrendering the idea that peace is still attainable.

In a world where killing has become profitable, resisting the onslaught begins with the refusal to accept it as normal.

Ashok Swain is a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden. More of his writing may be read here