This article and video are being co-published with
Responsible Statecraft
.
For the first
time, the Pentagon budget topped
$1 trillion
, and private contractors now receive
more than half
of all the tax dollars flowing to the Pentagon.
Few have profited from this privatization of the U.S. military more than the CEOs of Pentagon contractors.
While these companies often
advertise
their work as supporting the troops, the fact is that many service members live in
appalling
housing conditions, while military–industrial contractors’ profits soar and their CEOs live in luxury.
The lavish lifestyles of these CEOs is laid bare in the new mockumentary “Lords of War,” co-produced by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, that lampoons an industry held aloft by hundreds of billions of public funds every year.
“Lords of War” connects
exorbitant
Pentagon
spending
to the luxury enjoyed by the CEOs of its top contractors. As the film notes, Lockheed Martin is regularly the largest recipient of Pentagon contracts, raking in $75 billion in revenue in 2025 — more than 72 percent of which came from the U.S. government.
As “Lords of War”’s faux real estate aficionado explains, Lockheed’s CEOs have used their $20-million-plus compensation packages to buy luxury real estate from the D.C. suburbs to the shores of Miami.
“The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon
Despite its care-free tone, the film highlights very real problems within the military–industrial complex. As
research
by William Hartung and Stephen Semler for Brown University’s Costs of War Project showed, 54 percent of the Pentagon’s annual spending now goes to private contractors — up from 41 percent in the 1990s.
The top Pentagon contractors’ revenues and
stock prices
also skyrocketed as they’ve begun to devour an ever-larger share of the military budget.
They converted their revenue from the military int
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