In his FY 2020 budget plan, Trump proposes allocating $750 billion dollars to national defense spending (whitehouse.gov). It is difficult to even begin deconstructing that value to what it means on a material level, as the defense budget is used to cover basically any expenditures that accrue in the maintenance of the military-industrial complex, ranging from health insurance to construction companies. One particularly infuriating report details $150 million dollars being spent on building contracts - for the construction of private villas in Afghanistan for a few select Pentagon employees (McGrath, 2015). A few months ago, the editorial board of the New York Time released an op-ed reporting that, after finally submitting to decades-long requests for audit, the Pentagon was deemed by a majority of outside auditors to have largely lost control of its finances (NYT, 2018). After resisting the auditing process for so long, it has turned out that the Pentagon bureaucracy as a whole appears to have lost all incentive for bookkeeping, despite, as the article reports, accounting for more than half of the US federal government’s discretionary spending.
However, one significant sector that this money definitely goes to is towards contracts with private and public arms manufacturers. According to the SIPRI’s records, the US companies who are most involved in arms sales include Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. At the global level, these 5 companies have established hegemony in the realm of weapons manufacturing, the closest non-US competitor being the UK company BAE systems.This can be clearly shown when US companies are unselected on the graph - the upper bounds for the total sales axis drops from $500 billion to $190 billion.
When studying global weapons transfer, it is almost tempting to toss the US out of the equation because its values tend to be so incredibly high as to hide the trends of other countries. While there appears to be a relative decline of arms sales globally, outside of the US they have been steadily rising overall. This comes across very clearly in the case of Russia, which has made significant gains over the past decade, with nine companies making the top 100 in 2017, as opposed to three in 2002.
The modus operandi of these global arms manufacturing companies are, for obvious reasons, largely invisible. Increasingly, however, when they do become visible, it is generally to public outlash. For example, in late 2018, a group of five students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo staged a protest against Raytheon at a campus career fair due to the company’s donation ties to the university’s journalism department and golf team (Wilson, 2018). A few months earlier, activists used a bus to block the entrance to a Boeing facility in St. Louis, Missouri (Wicentowski, 2018).
