Follow us on social

Screen-shot-2021-10-27-at-9.57.56-am

Weapons execs lament losses from Afghanistan exit, tout DOD budget increase

Raytheon's CEO says Congress's military allotment is more ‘aligned’ with the company’s business interests.

Analysis | Military Industrial Complex

Speaking to investors on Tuesday, two of the biggest U.S. weapons manufacturers provided estimates on how the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a war that cost U.S. taxpayers over $2 trillion and took over 243,000 lives, impacted their bottom lines. Both companies also expressed enthusiasm about a bipartisan push to increase the 2022 defense budget by $29.3 billion, a five percent increase over the 2021 budget and more than $10 billion more than President Biden requested.

Approximately half of the defense budget goes to contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, both of whom explained to investors how the end of a 20 year war will impact their profits while still painting a rosy picture of ballooning defense spending driving corporate revenue and padding the bottomline for shareholders.

Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes, who took home nearly $21 million in compensation last year, acknowledged that the end of a war was bad for the bottomline, telling investors:

Yeah. So the lost sales on the defense side, I would category — three categories of issues there. One, I think the pullout in Afghanistan, there's about a $75 million impact to full year revenue, not huge but meaningful.

But Hayes might be bullish on his long-term business prospects, despite the “not huge but meaningful” financial hit from the end of a 20 year war.

Earlier in the call, the weapons executive boasted about bipartisan support for boosting the defense budget above what the White House requested. “[As] we've said, defense spending is nonpartisan, and we're encouraged to see Congress supporting plus ups to the president's budget that are also aligned to our business and our investments in new technologies,” said Hayes, offering an unusual interpretation of the bipartisan motivation to boost defense spending.

Hayes’s assessment that the budget was “aligned” with his business and financial interests instead of national security priorities like climate change, which the Pentagon and the White House identify as existential national security threats, is a moment of candor from the weapons industry. The alignment of the defense budget with the business needs of for-profit-weapons-firms might not be a total coincidence. The weapons industry spent over $1 billion lobbying Congress between 2002 and 2020 while government funding of the top five weapons firms grew by 188 percent

Raytheon’s optimism about future profits fueled by ballooning defense budgets was shared by Lockheed Martin on its own earnings call conducted on the same day. Lockheed’s CFO acknowledged that the Afghanistan withdrawal created “a $200 million year-over-year headwind,” referring to the negative financial impact on the company from the withdrawal.

But Lockheed CEO James Taiclet, who received over $23 million in compensation last year, was quick to pin his company’s future profits to, among other factors, “the size of future defense budgets and the global geopolitical landscape.”

In other words, a defense budget that exceeds the White House’s requests and a geopolitical landscape defined by great power competition — a state of affairs that Taiclet previously used to justify Lockheed’s consolidation of the missile engine market despite concerns by antitrust regulators — is central to the company’s growth. 

Much like Raytheon’s CEO, Lockheed’s CFO spoke optimistically about the defense budget increases, not in terms of U.S. national security, but in relation to the company’s financial wellbeing, telling shareholders, “I'd say we're encouraged about the direction of the various committee markups as they reflect really good support for a number of our programs.”


Images: Casimiro PT and Daniel J. Macy via shutterstock.com
Analysis | Military Industrial Complex
Afghan deportations Iran
Afghan nationals, who were deported from Iran, wait to board a bus upon their arrival at the Islam Qala border crossing in Herat province, Afghanistan, July 22, 2025. REUTERS/Sayed Hassib
signal-2025-08-28-165306_002

Millions of Afghans forced to return to a hellscape the world forgot

Middle East

It’s been a dark summer for Afghans. When Israel launched the 12-day war with Iran on June 13, Tehran used it as a pretext to scapegoat some of its most vulnerable residents.

In its latest wave of deportations, an estimated 700,000 Afghans have returned to Afghanistan since Iran began expulsions that month. Then on July 31, Pakistan launched the third phase of its “Illegal Foreigners Repatriation Plan,” announced in 2023, arresting and detaining Afghans across the country.

keep readingShow less
Thomas Barrack
Top image credit: U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and U.S. special envoy for Syria Thomas Barrack speaks after meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun (not pictured) at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

Tom Barrack has an offer that Lebanon simply can't refuse

Middle East

A tale of two envoys recently unfolded in Beirut, encapsulating the crossroads at which Lebanon now stands. Tanned and sporting a pink tie, the U.S. Envoy Tom Barrack arrived with Deputy Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus in mid-August. Their meetings with top Lebanese officials underscored Washington’s insistence that lasting stability in Lebanon depends on consolidating state authority, and disarming Hezbollah.

Days earlier, Ali Larijani, the head of Iran’s National Security Council, had departed, leaving a message equally blunt but diametrically opposed: Hezbollah’s arms are a red line and are necessary tools for its “resistance” to Israel. These visits represent the opposing magnetic poles pulling at the country.

Lebanon is reeling from a confluence of catastrophes. A devastating scuffle with Israel last year decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership and ravaged its strongholds. Compounding this military blow was a strategic amputation: the swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, which severed the critical land bridge that for decades funneled Iranian arms and support to Iran’s most prized regional proxy. Into this vortex has stepped Barrack, a 40-year friend of Donald Trump and a businessman by trade, embodying a U.S. strategy that is quintessentially Trumpian in its DNA.

keep readingShow less
Afghanistan withdrawal
Lloyd Austin, Kenneth McKenzie, and Mark Milley in 2021. (MSNBC screengrab)

Turns out leaving Afghanistan did not unleash terror on US or region

Military Industrial Complex

It will be four years since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021, ending a nearly 20-year occupation that could serve as a poster child for mission creep.

What began in October 2001 as a narrow intervention to destroy al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and topple the Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, morphed into an open-ended nation-building operation that killed 2,334 U.S. military personnel and wounded over 20,000 more.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.