'Arsenal of democracy'? Arms makers the only winners in Ukraine

This article is part of a special series recognizing the four-year anniversary of the Ukraine War.

Helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion was an appropriate policy, and sending Kyiv the weapons to carry out the task itself made sense. Unlike cases like Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza or Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Yemen, it could be reasonably argued that in Ukraine at least, U.S. arms supplies were being used for defensive purposes.

But the arms lobby and the Biden and Trump administrations weren’t content to leave it at that. On May 3, 2022, less than three months after the original Russian incursion into Ukraine, President Biden visited a Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, Arkansas where Javelin missiles that were being sent to the Ukrainian armed forces were being built, and called the workers there part of the “arsenal of democracy.” The president failed to explain how other U.S. arms exports to undemocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, and the Philippines fit that framing.

Not only was supplying Ukraine good branding for the U.S. weapons industry, it was good business. Transfers have totaled over $70 billion. In some cases, companies like RTX and Lockheed Martin had to wait to get paid, as initial transfers to Ukraine came from U.S. government stocks, and the companies were then paid to build new weapons to replace them.

The Ukraine war also gave fuel to longstanding industry arguments about the need to dramatically expand U.S. arms making capabilities to keep a steady flow of weapons and ammunition flowing to Kyiv while sustaining adequate stocks for a potential conflict with China. To a significant degree this was a case of comparing apples and oranges. Ukraine is a ground war supplemented by intensive use of drones. A U.S.-China conflict would rely more on naval power and long-range strikes, not artillery barrages. But the argument worked, and the Pentagon budget is now soaring past $1 trillion per year based on arguments for a bulked up weapons industrial base to address contingencies like Ukraine and China, and, to the everlasting shame of the U.S. government, Gaza.

Industry executives were not shy in talking about how supplying Ukraine would boost their bottom lines. For example, A few months into the war RTX (formerly Raytheon) CEO Greg Hayes said the following:

“Look, we don’t apologize for making these systems, making these weapons. The fact is, they are incredibly effective in deterring and dealing with the threat that the Ukrainians are seeing today. … I think again recognizing that we are there to defend democracy and the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time.”

And in May of 2022, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet received the star treatment in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS News’ Sunday interview show Face the Nation. Taiclet was treated with such respect — verging on adulation — by Brennan for his company’s role in arming Ukraine that media critic Dan Froomkin described the segment as the equivalent of an “infomercial” for Lockheed.

In its case, the military tech sector claimed — falsely, in some instances — that Silicon Valley products used in Ukraine were showing their value for the wars of the future. But as a Wall Street Journal investigation showed, Silicon Valley produced drones that often proved to be too brittle and too costly for the task at hand. Instead, Kyiv has turned to a massive DIY production program that uses commercial drones — often purchased from China. Since they are often used as suicide drones, the Ukrainian-assembled systems are adequate to the task, absent the costly bells and whistles incorporated into many U.S. systems.

The ultimate benefit of the Ukraine war for the weapons industry was for propaganda purposes. They have exploited the war to push longstanding policy desires like faster vetting and production of weapons destined for foreign clients, reducing human rights reviews and attempting to gut independent testing and safeguards against price gouging and shoddy work. The industry is focused on speeding weapons out the door, and when it comes to arming the kinds of regimes on the U.S. client list, speed kills.

The conflict in Ukraine needs to be resolved in a fashion acceptable to the Ukrainian people, one that stops the killing and protects their nation from future Russian aggression. But much of the new Pentagon spending justified by the arms lobby’s skewed “lessons” from the war will do nothing to defend Ukraine now or in the future, and everything to line the pockets of weapons makers, their executives, their lobbyists, and their financiers. That is a path to endless war, not peace and stability.