The United States accounts for 43% of global arms exports and recorded $238 billion in weapons sales in 2023. The financial structure of the largest contractors is, by construction, a revenue model whose top line rises when conflicts widen and falls when they narrow. That isn't an ethical reading; it's how the contracts are priced.
How the revenue model works
-
Lockheed Martin. The largest US defence contractor; nearly all revenue derives from military contracts. Global News reported that the company recorded record earnings across 2024 as orders linked to the Ukraine war, Middle East operations, and Indo-Pacific posture moved through the books. CNN documented that a Lockheed Martin–made laser-guided bomb was used in the August 2018 Saudi airstrike on a school bus in Dahyan, Yemen, that killed 40 children and 11 adults; the US Secretary of Defense at the time acknowledged American assistance with targeting.
-
Raytheon. The second-largest US contractor; investor materials position military escalation as a tailwind. Amnesty International has documented Raytheon-manufactured munitions used in repeated strikes by Israeli forces on densely populated parts of Gaza and the West Bank, including infrastructure strikes during periods of broadly recognised humanitarian blockade.
-
Lobbying. A 2024 SEC filing recorded over $14 million in Lockheed Martin lobbying expenditure in a single reporting period, concentrated on defence appropriations and foreign-military-sales authorisations.
Every line item is on the public record. The financial pipeline from contract through munition through documented strike isn't speculative.
Why the structural problem is hard
It's difficult to identify a fully "ethical" position inside a business whose product is, by design, lethal. The constraints that would meaningfully limit civilian harm — refusing sales to states with active patterns of civilian casualties, capping volume against documented end-use, building protective and non-lethal systems as a meaningful share of revenue, contracting end-use audits — would compress margins against any contractor unwilling to apply them in lockstep. The standards exist in NGO frameworks; few large incumbents apply them at material scale.
There's a corollary worth being honest about: not all weapons are equivalent. Small-scale hunting and self-defence firearms exist on different terms than industrial munitions sold to active state belligerents.
A small-arms counterexample with disclosure
Alpine Riflecraft (Canada)
- Ultralight mountain hunting rifles, fully designed and manufactured in Canada.
- A stated revenue allocation to wildlife-science and habitat-protection partners.
- Disclosed end-use is recreational and conservation hunting.
Salaaz hasn't independently audited the wildlife-science contribution ledger; the company's published commitment is the source. The scale here is several orders of magnitude smaller than the contractor names above — that's precisely why a single small operator can answer the audit questions where a global defence prime cannot.
What follows
The Yemen and Gaza citations above aren't activist claims; they're CNN, Amnesty, and the contractors' own investor disclosures. A more honest defence sector would require structural reform — export-control regimes with teeth, contracting transparency rules, end-use auditing — none of which a single consumer choice can deliver. What a consumer can do is read the procurement record alongside the brand narrative; they often tell different stories.
For adjacent reading, see our piece on the diamond industry and state-actor exclusions in the Kimberley Process, our look at how AI is being grafted onto military targeting workflows, and our piece on indigenous land rights and extractive industries.