Lockheed Martin CEO: wartime Trump Pentagon a "golden opportunity"
Late last month, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet
lavished praise on the
Trump administration for rolling out the red carpet to the defense industry.
“This is a golden opportunity right now based on who’s in government,” Taiclet told investors during an earnings call. He cited in particular officials’ “willingness to change” and “the demand that they have for what we do and what our partners in our industry do.”
That
“demand” of course is war, and the administration has pretty much been in it since Trump’s 2025 inauguration, from supporting
Israel in its Gaza and Lebanon operations, firefights with the Houthis, and now Iran. Lockheed has
signed billions in
contracts with the Pentagon since the beginning of the year, mostly to replenish missiles. Lockheed Martin also has an
agreement with the Pentagon to quadruple its production of THAAD interceptors by 2027.
And the U.S. has used many of them both. As the Center for Strategic and International Studies
found late last month, the U.S. has
burned up over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles (PrSMs) and roughly half of its THAAD and Patriot missile defense interceptors.
To refill these stocks, the U.S. is
mulling a possible Iran war supplemental package — slated to cost an estimated
$80 to $100 billion — to replace lost munitions and other military equipment. According to Mike Fredenburg in his
reporting for RS in 2024, the U.S. pays way too much for each missile, a lot more than it should for say, a SM-2 missile ($1.2 million-$2 million a piece) or SM-6 (upwards of $5 million each), but since there are only a handful of prime contractors in the business, they can charge whatever they want.
As Stephen Semler, journalist and co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, tells RS, “The interceptor shortage will be addressed in the military-industrial-congressional complex's favorite way: throw money at the problem.”
Defense-contractor funded think tanker: Iran war is a bargain!
Last week, the Pentagon estimated that the Iran war has cost about $25 billion. Matthew Kroenig, a senior director at
the defense contractor-funded Atlantic Council, called the
low-ball price tag a “very good value.”
“The entire U.S. defense budget is roughly $1 trillion and designed to deal with
China,
Russia, North Korea, and Iran,” Kroenig wrote
on X. “It only cost 2.5% of the annual defense budget to seriously degrade one of the four.”
But others have to pay for Kroenig’s bargain.
"I'm sure the farmers, trucking companies, and other small businesses that are going belly up because of soaring gas prices won't be surprised to hear that a war industry funded think tank believes the Iran war is a ‘very good value,’” Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute, told RS.
The total cost of the Iran war has been a point of contention. Critics
challenged the Pentagon’s $25 billion estimate; U.S. officials have since
told CBS the conflict has cost around $50 billion. Last month, Harvard economist Linda Bilmes
predicted taxpayers will pay at least $1 trillion for it in the long term. And none of these estimates include the broader impact of the war on the global economy.
According to the Quincy Institute’s Think Tank Funding
Tracker, the Atlantic Council has received
nearly $13 million from Pentagon contractors since 2019.
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