A striking feature of the modern financial landscape is the growing enthusiasm among wealthy investors for the business of war. Defence stocks have long offered the allure of reliable government contracts and steady cash flows. Historically, however, many institutional investors avoided them due to ethical concerns about profiting from weapons that fuel global violence. In recent years that reluctance has sharply eroded, replaced by a gold-rush mentality that rewards militarisation and overlooks the misery it inflicts.
The turning point coincided with Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Despite branding himself as a “Peace President,” his administration has proven extraordinarily lucrative for arms manufacturers and the wealthy individuals who bankroll them. Defence equities have surged beyond what fundamentals alone would justify. Investors are not simply pricing in stronger earnings. They are paying a premium to participate in a geopolitical climate where conflict is treated as a growth opportunity.
Trump’s rhetoric and actions have been a major catalyst. He has urged European governments to significantly expand military spending. In 2024, NATO members formally endorsed a move toward defence budgets of 2 percent of GDP. Some members, including Poland and the Baltic states, have already moved closer to 4 percent. Trump has publicly pushed for even higher levels. Analysts who track global procurement believe that over the coming decade this could unlock more than one trillion United States dollars in new contracts, much of which would flow to American weapons suppliers such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.
Trump has also supported high-profile kinetic operations and targeted killings that further undermine his peace narrative. While his supporters praise these actions as decisive strength, the financial markets interpret them as evidence of policy that favours rapid militarisation, conflict escalation and expanded weapons procurement.
The last comparable boom for war profits occurred under President George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which preceded the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. That era also saw deep corporate ties between the White House and defence contractors. Vice President Dick Cheney had served as chief executive of Halliburton, a firm that benefited from extensive Iraq war contracts. Yet even that period now appears modest compared with the current surge.
The Billionaire Windfall Behind the War Trade
The current rally is fuelled by two forces. The first is structural. As global security alliances fray, governments in Europe, Asia and the Middle East are raising military budgets at a pace not seen since the Cold War. Japan has committed to doubling defence spending by 2027. South Korea and Taiwan continue to accelerate procurement. Australia has announced its largest military expansion in decades, including participation in AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine programs that are projected to cost at least 368 billion Australian dollars over three decades. Each announcement sends defence stocks higher and attracts more private money from hedge funds and family offices run by the very wealthy.
Earnings forecasts reflect this momentum. Major Wall Street banks project that average earnings per share for leading defence contractors will grow strongly for several years. Share prices already reflect expectations of ballooning profits. Private equity firms have also accelerated acquisitions of smaller weapons manufacturers and emerging military technology firms to profit from rapid consolidation and future sales to governments.
The second force is cultural. War and military dominance have become fashionable among a segment of retail investors who treat the defence sector as a badge of patriotic strength. In the United States this cultural shift has been reinforced by political leaders who glorify martial values while belittling diplomacy. Public discourse is increasingly saturated with the language of force, national power and hostility toward multilateralism.
One of the clearest examples of this cultural shift is the extraordinary valuation of Palantir Technologies, a software company that supplies artificial intelligence tools that enhance battlefield targeting and surveillance. Although not classified as a traditional weapons maker, Palantir markets technology that accelerates the military kill chain. It has been rewarded with a market value that has vastly exceeded near-term earnings, reflecting investor appetite for firms that enable increasingly automated warfare.
The Human Cost Buried Under Profits
The expanding wealth of arms investors has direct consequences for people living in conflict zones. United Nations reports confirm that global civilian deaths from armed conflict have risen steeply over the past decade. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has documented eight consecutive years of rising military expenditure worldwide, reaching a record 2.44 trillion United States dollars in 2023. Conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and Myanmar have demonstrated that spikes in weapons transfers coincide with soaring civilian casualties, extensive displacement, long-term trauma and the destruction of infrastructure essential to human survival.
At the same time, a parallel crisis is emerging. Oxfam estimates that the world’s richest one percent own nearly half of global wealth. Many of the most profitable hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds now hold sizeable stakes in defence companies. These investment vehicles are often structured to obscure ownership, allowing billionaires and political donors to profit quietly from warfare while maintaining a public image of philanthropy or statesmanship.
The beneficiaries are concentrated. The victims are not. Weapons sold for shareholder returns are used in conflicts that devastate hospitals, schools and civilian homes. Cluster munitions and explosive weapons in urban areas have caused tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. The International Committee of the Red Cross continues to warn that the global arms race is worsening humanitarian crises and eroding international humanitarian law.
A Market That Celebrates War
The surge in defence stocks has strengthened the broader United States share market. Analysts estimate that war-linked equities, including aerospace, defence and defence-aligned technology, have contributed a material share of index gains. For investors, this is considered savvy portfolio positioning. For communities caught in bombardment, it is the financialisation of human suffering.
The core ethical dilemma has not changed. Every spike in the share price of a weapons manufacturer represents rising expectations of conflict, destruction or government fear. It rewards leaders for aggression and punishes advocates of diplomacy. The fact that this boom is unfolding under a political figure claiming the mantle of peace makes the contradiction more stark.
The Moral Reckoning Yet to Come
A stock market rally built on instruments of death cannot be divorced from the consequences. The business model of modern defence investment depends on perpetual insecurity. Peace reduces returns. War and the threat of war enrich investors.
The current era demonstrates how easily national security narratives can be manipulated to justify enormous transfers of public wealth to private shareholders in the arms industry. Unless there is a global shift toward transparency, accountability and strict ethical limitations on war-linked investments, the world will continue to drift toward a future in which shareholder profit is placed above civilian life.
The beneficiaries count their gains from private jets and luxury retreats. The victims are nameless families burying their children in rubble. The distance between those two realities is the true measure of this boom.
A Public Stage for War Profiteers, Sponsored by Government
The boom in private wealth linked to war is not confined to Washington. In Australia, the same pattern is unfolding in plain sight. The New South Wales government has stepped into the role of chief patron for a major arms fair, positioning itself as a partner to the global weapons industry despite international legal findings of genocide and widespread public outrage.
The Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition took place in Sydney in early November 2025, hosted at the International Convention Centre on Gadigal land. The State of New South Wales and its trade agency, Investment NSW, were the event’s principal sponsors. The government framed this financial backing as a strategy to promote defence industry growth and support local firms in securing lucrative deals. In reality, the sponsorship signalled a clear willingness to legitimise the business of warfare during a period of mass civilian suffering.
Promotional material for the expo featured Defence Minister Richard Marles welcoming industry participants, while NSW Premier Chris Minns extended civic hospitality to visiting arms executives. His message praised the state’s leadership role in Australia’s defence industrial sector. To the activists, lawyers, human rights observers and civil society groups who have documented the scale of Palestinian civilian casualties, the spectacle resembled a public relations parade for those who profit from destruction.
When Genocide Becomes a Sales Pitch
The timing of the expo exposed the deep moral rupture between government rhetoric and humanitarian principles. A fragile ceasefire in Gaza had not halted periodic air strikes, nor the systematic attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Despite this, Israeli defence firms used the Sydney event to showcase weaponry that had been deployed in Gaza. Both Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems secured exhibitor slots before the official closing date. Their marketing routinely highlights products as combat tested, a phrase that in this context is tied directly to operations that have devastated civilian neighbourhoods and killed large numbers of children.
Leading legal and human rights experts have raised alarms about this normalisation of genocide as a sales tool. Chris Sidoti, an Australian member of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has publicly named Elbit Systems as a key supplier of weaponry used by Israeli forces in actions that the UN has found constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Sidoti stated that no Australian government entity should engage with such a company. The NSW Labor government proceeded regardless.
The normalisation of the arms trade as a standard pillar of the economy is at the core of public anger. Protest organisers argue that the government’s sponsorship functionally launders the reputations of companies accused of supplying tools of ethnic cleansing. It also channels taxpayer money into networking events that increase the capacity of war manufacturers to secure new markets.
Public Rejection of the Industry of Death
Opposition to the expo was swift and broad. Activists, trade unionists, faith groups, First Nations leaders, peace organisations and anti genocide campaigners mobilised for a blockade. The Palestine Action Group coordinated a protest to confront exhibitors and disrupt the event. Their position was unambiguous: war profiteers should not be granted social licence to gather on stolen Indigenous land to promote weapons used in atrocities.
Hannah Thomas, a former Greens candidate and lawyer who has long campaigned for accountability over arms transfers, described the expo as a grotesque festival of war criminals. She highlighted that companies including Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Thales, Elbit and Rafael have all benefited from the mass destruction of Gaza. Her message was blunt. The expo represented the transformation of suffering into business opportunity while civilians are buried under rubble.
The NSW Greens and several independent MPs condemned the event. City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore urged the Premier to withdraw support and side with peace rather than militarisation. Yet the NSW Government maintained its stance, characterising the expo as an opportunity for economic diversification and sovereign industrial capability.
Police response to peaceful protesters revealed the widening gap between public sentiment and state priorities. Hundreds of demonstrators were corralled behind barricades, pepper sprayed and forcibly pushed back when they attempted to block access for exhibitors. Thirteen people were arrested, with police citing safety and security for attendees. The message was unmistakable. The apparatus of government would defend the comfort of arms dealers over the rights of citizens to oppose genocide.
A Growing Market That Depends on Silence
The commercial scale of these events is significant. Defence expos in Australia have grown to attract hundreds of firms from around the world and thousands of military procurement officials seeking new technologies. The 2024 Land Forces exposition in Melbourne saw more than 110 arrests during mass protests. Yet the industry continues to expand with state backing and minimal regulatory constraint. The Australian Defence Department regularly participates as a key stakeholder, a decision that Sidoti has criticised as government complicity in enabling suspected genocide.
The moral contradictions are stark. Australia is a signatory to the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions, which impose legal duties to prevent genocide and avoid complicity. Yet the state sponsors events that provide commercial platforms to corporations implicated in supplying weapons used in unlawful attacks on civilians. Officials justify participation as advancing economic and strategic interests. To communities that have witnessed the erasure of entire Palestinian neighbourhoods, such arguments ring hollow.
The Price Paid by the Powerless
The pattern is clear. Whether in Washington or Sydney, governments and billionaires aligned with the arms trade present warfare as economic opportunity. They speak in neutral terms of defence capability, jobs and innovation while marginalising the reality that every contract signed produces the tools that have levelled hospitals, schools and family homes and extinguished countless civilian lives.
This alignment of state and private capital in support of the war economy has a corrosive effect on democracy itself. When governments become partners to merchants of death, they normalise the idea that economic strength is measured in missile sales and battlefield lethality rather than human security or the preservation of life.
Public resistance is the only visible counterforce. Activists vow to stand at the gates of every expo to deny social licence to an industry built on blood. They argue that silence is complicity and that every act of obstruction is a barrier against the next war deal. Their defiance asserts that the community will not allow the suffering of civilians to be converted into stock value for the wealthy.
The stakes are not theoretical. While dignitaries toast defence contracts under bright convention centre lights, parents in Gaza spend their nights digging children from collapsed buildings with bare hands. The wealth generated from these events flows upward to investors who will never witness the carnage their profits helped to create. The cost is paid by families with no power, no protection and no voice in the boardrooms where their fate is traded.
The global war economy thrives on distance. It depends on the notion that those who profit will never be forced to look into the eyes of the grieving. The protests at Darling Harbour aimed to collapse that distance. Their message was that every missile launched and every drone strike enabled through these deals creates victims whose lives have value. The war industry would prefer that truth to remain unseen.
If the world continues to reward the financiers and politicians who treat war as business, the cycle of enrichment for the few and devastation for the many will persist. The struggle to resist is therefore not symbolic. It is a direct challenge to a system that measures success in shareholder gains rather than human survival.
The blockade at Sydney was a line drawn. Whether governments heed it will reveal whether there is any moral boundary left that money cannot cross.
Government Power, Corporate Influence and the Silencing of Dissent
The events that unfolded in Sydney in early November exposed a troubling fusion of political authority, corporate lobbying and the interests of the global arms trade. Within twenty-four hours, the Premier of New South Wales moved from overseeing a police crackdown on peaceful anti war demonstrators to headlining a private lunch for a business lobby with direct links to companies implicated in atrocities in Gaza. The contrast was stark, and for many within the community it crystallised the extent to which political leadership has become intertwined with the machinery of militarised profit.
During the blockade of the Indo Pacific weapons expo, NSW Police deployed riot officers, mounted units and dog squads against crowds protesting the state’s sponsorship of an event that platformed Israeli weapons manufacturers. Pepper spray was used repeatedly and indiscriminately, with numerous protesters reporting temporary loss of vision and chemical burns. While state officials insisted the response was necessary to maintain order, witnesses described scenes of deliberate targeting of individuals as well as random spraying into the assembled crowd. More than a dozen people were arrested, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful nature of the demonstration.
The force of the policing contrasted sharply with the indulgence extended to the arms industry inside the convention centre. Defence Minister Richard Marles had described the expo as “beautiful, menacing and extremely cool,” a choice of words that revealed an aestheticisation of weaponry more suited to a marketing campaign than a government sworn to uphold humanitarian law.
From Pepper Spray to Private Power Lunch
Rather than distance himself from the companies showcased at the expo, Premier Chris Minns doubled down the following day by appearing as the keynote attraction for a business luncheon hosted by the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce in New South Wales. The chamber has longstanding relationships with corporations involved in supplying arms to Israeli forces operating in Gaza and the West Bank. Its corporate sponsors include major Australian firms such as ANZ and Optus. The organisation was previously chaired by Jillian Segal, who served as the federal government’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism.
Minns’ participation signalled endorsement of an entity that facilitates commercial ties with businesses profiting from a conflict that the United Nations has found involves acts of genocide. His appearance also placed him at odds with international jurists, human rights advocates, the NSW Greens, the City of Sydney and a growing section of the public who oppose normalising trade with companies complicit in mass civilian harm.
The disconnect between official rhetoric and public sentiment has been intensified by high-profile cases that symbolise the human cost of such partnerships. Eighteen months before the expo, Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom was killed in Gaza by a missile manufactured by Rafael. A former chief executive of Rafael was later appointed to contribute to the inquiry into her death. For many, this raised serious concerns about conflict of interest and accountability. As one commentator noted on social media, Rafael would be promoting the same class of weapon just a short distance from where Frankcom had once worked in Sydney.
Secrecy, Exclusivity and the Closing of Democratic Space
The luncheon at which the Premier addressed chamber supporters took place behind closed doors. The NSW branch of the organisation refused to disclose the venue, citing security concerns. Attendees each paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for tickets, ensuring that access was restricted to corporate members and invited insiders. Media were explicitly excluded at the instruction of the Premier’s office, which arranged to supply its own official photographer.
The event’s sponsors included Gilbert and Tobin, a major corporate law firm, and Scentre Group, the owner of Westfield shopping centres. The sponsorship list underscored the way in which the arms trade has woven itself into the fabric of mainstream corporate Australia. Minns, meanwhile, has continued to characterise protest movements as disruptive to social cohesion, despite the fact that criminalising dissent while courting war-linked donors risks eroding public trust in democratic governance.
The timing added to public disquiet. On the same day that Minns prepared to speak at an event associated with an embassy that supports Israeli military policy, the Sydney Peace Prize was being presented at Town Hall. The keynote address was delivered by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Judge Navi Pillay. She reminded the nation that under the Genocide Convention, every state has a legal duty to prevent genocide, to hold perpetrators accountable and to protect those at risk. She cautioned that governments maintaining ties with entities implicated in atrocities risked breaching international law.
Minns was unlikely to face such scrutiny during his private engagement. By restricting independent media access, the Premier’s team controlled the narrative and shielded him from questions about genocide, complicity or moral responsibility. The contrast with the treatment of protesters outside the weapons expo could not have been more stark. Those calling for peace encountered force. Those enabling war received hospitality.
A Defining Test of Public Values
The pattern that emerges is consistent with broader shifts in the global political economy of war. State leaders are aligning themselves with powerful defence lobbies, adopting economic frameworks that treat weapons production as a neutral industry and marginalising those who challenge the legitimacy of profiting from civilian suffering. The Premier’s actions illustrated how proximity to corporate power can override ethical obligations rooted in international law.
This moment represents a test for public values in Australia. The moral principle articulated by Pillay is clear. States must act to prevent genocide. Anything less invites legal and historical judgment. Yet the government of the country’s largest state sponsored a weapons expo attended by firms that a UN commission has identified as enabling grave crimes in Gaza, then moved to suppress protesters who opposed that sponsorship.
When political leaders cultivate relationships with entities associated with war crimes while curbing the right to resist, the fabric of democratic accountability begins to fray. The silence of major media outlets in the face of these events has further compounded public concerns that political and corporate interests are being protected at the expense of truth and justice.
The community response has been unambiguous. People from diverse movements continue to organise, protest and challenge the normalisation of the war economy. They insist that those who hold public office must be held to standards consistent with international humanitarian law. They argue that peace is not strengthened through partnerships with the architects of destruction, but through solidarity with those whose lives are shattered by the weapons that bring profits to the privileged.
Australia now stands at a crossroads. Whether its leaders choose alignment with the global war industry or with the principles of human dignity and lawful accountability will shape not only national policy, but the country’s moral standing in the eyes of the world.
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