Financial Times carried an article on August 26 reporting that the 15 leading military contractors will have doubled their “free cash flow” from 2021 to 2026, reaching $52 billion by that year (or $3.5 billion for each of the companies on average). “The world’s largest aerospace and defense companies are set to take in record levels of cash over the next three years as they benefit from a surge in government orders for new weapons,” the paper observed.
FT commissioned a study of the revenue of companies of the financial-military complex, which was carried out by Vertical Research Partners. Half of the $52 billion will be coming to the United States’ five biggest war merchants—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics—and their dominant stockholders BlackRock, Inc., Vanguard Group, State Street Corp., The Capital Group, etc. In Europe the leaders cited are BAE, Rheinmetall, Saab.
