Defense Stocks Soar: War Is Good for Business (and Washington)
President Trump's plan to dramatically hike the U.S. military budget is, predictably, great news for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, whose stock prices jumped (Bloomberg, 2026). This isn't groundbreaking journalism; it's practically a constitutional amendment for American capitalism. While Bloomberg focuses on the market's 'optimism,' they conveniently sidestep the elephant in the newsroom:
a perpetually inflating military budget has never made the world safer, only wealthier for a select few. The U.S. already spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined, a figure that dwarfs even times of active war. (See SIPRI data, 2023). Instead of inquiring about the efficacy of throwing more money at the Pentagon, or the domestic programs choked by these allocations, the
narrative is framed as geopolitical inevitability. One might wonder if the 'geopolitics' isn't simply a convenient smokescreen for sustained corporate profits. How much clearer can it be: war, or the constant threat of it, is a feature, not a bug, of this economic model?