The Accelerating Revolving Door: How the Global Arms Boom Tightens Its Grip on Australian Decision-Making

 

The machinery of modern defence policy rarely turns in isolation. It rotates within a dense ecosystem of government agencies, military commands, corporate boardrooms, alliance politics and financial markets. At the centre of that system sits a phenomenon long scrutinised by integrity watchdogs and investigative journalists alike: the revolving door between public office and private weapons manufacturers.

In Australia, the latest turn of that door has landed with striking speed.

Lockheed Martin Australia has appointed as its new chief executive a senior official drawn directly from the Commonwealth agency responsible for purchasing weapons for the Australian Defence Force, the Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG). According to his own professional disclosures, Jeremy King led CASG’s Joint Aviation Systems Division until December. He commenced work for the world’s largest arms manufacturer only weeks later.

The proximity between regulator and supplier is not illegal. No wrongdoing has been alleged by the companies or individuals involved. Yet the optics are unavoidable. When the most powerful weapons firm operating in Australia recruits the official who until recently oversaw major acquisition programs, it illustrates precisely how porous the boundary between state authority and corporate power has become.

Lockheed Martin Australia currently holds approximately AUD 4.7 billion in active Commonwealth contracts, according to the Finance Department’s Austender database as of late January 2026. King will formally assume leadership of the Australian subsidiary on 23 February, following a transition period with outgoing chief executive Warren McDonald, himself a former Royal Australian Air Force officer with more than four decades of service before moving into corporate defence leadership.

King has publicly pointed to his thirty-year military career and experience managing projects such as the MRH-90 helicopter and Chinook fleets as credentials for his new role. Lockheed Martin International’s president, Jay Pitman, has framed the appointment as a strategic asset for expanding the company’s footprint across Australia and New Zealand.

From a corporate perspective, the logic is obvious. Few qualifications are more valuable than intimate knowledge of defence procurement culture, internal decision pathways and ministerial expectations. From a democratic perspective, the same fact invites uncomfortable scrutiny.

Mapping Influence in the Military-Industrial Web

Investigative groups tracking personnel flows across Australia’s defence sector argue that King’s appointment fits a wider pattern. Senior officers and procurement executives repeatedly migrate into arms firms that subsequently bid for contracts from the departments they once ran. Researchers compiling revolving-door databases describe years of painstaking effort required to document these transitions, in part because defence contracting remains one of the most opaque corners of public administration.

The question is not whether such moves comply with current law. The deeper issue is whether the law itself has kept pace with the scale of influence now exercised by multinational defence firms whose revenues rival those of major states.

This concern is magnified when viewed against Australia’s largest defence undertaking in history: AUKUS.

AUKUS and the Price of Strategic Naivety

Australia has already transferred close to AUD 10 billion to the United States and United Kingdom to support nuclear submarine industrial capacity under the AUKUS pact. These funds were committed without binding guarantees that submarines will ultimately be delivered. Defence Minister Richard Marles has declined to state publicly whether Australia would be reimbursed should either partner fail to supply the vessels.

The stakes are immense. Former senior British naval officer Rear Admiral Philip Mathias, who once directed nuclear policy at the UK Ministry of Defence and commanded nuclear submarines, has warned that the British component of the AUKUS project faces severe structural problems.

Speaking to Australian media, Mathias argued that Canberra underestimated the fragility of Britain’s submarine enterprise and did not perform sufficient due diligence before committing billions in taxpayer funds. He described the agreement as the product of political enthusiasm rather than industrial realism, cautioning that capacity constraints inside the Royal Navy could derail the program altogether. In his assessment, the United States might deliver limited numbers of submarines, but the UK element risks collapse, potentially eclipsing the diplomatic fallout generated when Australia cancelled its earlier French submarine contract.

If correct, the implications are profound. Australia may have already injected billions into allied shipyards without legal assurance of return, while contractors embedded in the AUKUS supply chain position themselves for decades of work regardless of final outcomes.

One of the largest beneficiaries of that ecosystem is BAE Systems, the British defence giant that leads the AUKUS submarine effort and the AUD 65 billion Hunter-class frigate program. BAE has climbed to fourth place globally in arms revenue rankings, earning USD 33.8 billion in 2024. That frigate project is currently subject to examination by Australia’s National Anti-Corruption Commission.

A Trillion Dollar Industry Finds Its Moment

These Australian developments cannot be separated from a broader global transformation. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the combined arms sales of the world’s 100 largest weapons and military services companies reached USD 679 billion in 2024, equivalent to roughly AUD 971 billion. It is the highest total SIPRI has ever recorded.

Lockheed Martin remains far ahead of all rivals, generating USD 64.7 billion in arms sales that year. RTX, formerly Raytheon, followed with USD 43.6 billion. BAE’s rise reflects the surge in demand driven by wars in Ukraine and Gaza and by government rearmament programs across Europe and North America.

Boeing, once firmly entrenched near the top of the list, slipped to sixth position. The company nonetheless remains Australia’s second-largest defence contractor domestically, reporting approximately AUD 1.2 billion in local turnover last year. Australia’s largest defence supplier, BAE Systems, exceeded that by about AUD 1 billion in 2025.

Former Australian defence minister Brendan Nelson, who now oversees Boeing’s international defence operations from London, appears within revolving-door research databases documenting senior political figures who have transitioned into arms-industry leadership.

Israel’s arms sector has also experienced extraordinary growth. SIPRI reports that the three Israeli firms within its top-100 ranking increased their combined revenue by 16 per cent in 2024 to USD 16.2 billion, significantly above the industry-wide average of 5.9 per cent. The institute attributes the surge to Israel’s military operations in Gaza and heightened global demand for Israeli drone systems and counter-drone technologies.

From Billions to Trillions in Washington

The logic driving this expansion is not confined to Europe or the Middle East. In the United States, the independent watchdog Project on Government Oversight has sharply criticised former president Donald Trump’s proposal to raise Pentagon spending by 50 per cent to USD 1.5 trillion.

In January, POGO warned that such an increase would overwhelmingly benefit defence contractors while exacerbating systemic waste inside a department that has never passed a full financial audit. The group argued that what the Pentagon requires is transparency and reform rather than what it described as an indiscriminate fiscal windfall.

Those critiques echo arguments advanced in the recent book The Trillion Dollar War Machine by William Hartung and Ben Freeman, published in early 2025. Hartung, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of the earlier study Prophets of War, and Freeman, who directs Quincy’s program on democratising foreign policy, examine how defence spending becomes self-perpetuating through lobbying, media influence and the militarisation of academic research.

Chapters devoted to the capture of universities by defence funding and the shaping of public narratives through sympathetic media outlets resonate strongly with Australian debates over sponsorship, procurement advisory networks and defence industry promotion.

The Role of Journalism in Exposing Power

Against this backdrop of swelling budgets and tightening corporate-state relationships stands a dwindling but persistent tradition of adversarial journalism. A new documentary, Cover-Up, chronicles the career of American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, from his exposure of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War to revelations about torture at Abu Ghraib.

Directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, the film traces Hersh’s relentless focus on chains of command rather than individual soldiers, and his insistence on documenting systemic impunity within military institutions. Now in his late eighties, Hersh continues to publish investigative reports, including controversial claims in 2023 regarding the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines that were rejected by the US administration.

Poitras has described Hersh as driven by moral outrage at recurring cycles of violence and accountability failure, a description that applies equally to the contemporary arms economy now reshaping strategic policy across the Western alliance.

Australia at the Intersection

For Australia, the convergence of these forces is no longer theoretical. The country is simultaneously expanding its defence industrial base, embedding itself in NATO-linked procurement frameworks, investing sovereign wealth in arms manufacturers and watching senior officials cross seamlessly into corporate leadership.

The appointment of Jeremy King to run Lockheed Martin Australia is therefore not an isolated personnel change. It is a data point inside a far larger pattern, one in which public authority and private military enterprise increasingly share talent, assumptions and long-term interests.

Coupled with the vast public transfers underpinning AUKUS, the soaring profits recorded by global arms giants and the aggressive expansion of defence budgets abroad, the evidence suggests that democratic governments now operate inside an industrial architecture that strongly rewards militarisation.

The risk is structural rather than conspiratorial. When procurement systems depend on a handful of multinational suppliers, when strategic alliances demand continuous weapons production, and when senior officials circulate between regulator and contractor, policy autonomy narrows even without overt corruption.

Australia’s challenge is therefore stark. Either it develops stronger guardrails around procurement, cooling-off periods for senior officials, independent oversight of mega-projects and transparency about alliance-driven expenditure, or it accepts a future in which defence policy is increasingly co-authored by the very firms that stand to profit from its expansion.

In a world where arms revenues approach a trillion dollars annually, the gravitational pull of the weapons industry is immense. The speed at which the revolving door now spins suggests that Australia is already well inside that orbit.