Editorial office April 22, 2022 https://mpr21.info

The war in Ukraine has triggered a wave of increases in military budgets, both in the United States and in Europe, for which the essentially American arms industry is celebrating.
But before hostilities broke out, the bosses of the main arms companies were already preparing to increase their sales. In a January this year conference call with his company’s investors, Greg Hayes, CEO of Raytheon Technologies, boasted that the prospect of war in Eastern Europe and other global hot spots would be good for business:
“ We see, I would say, international sales opportunities… The tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things put pressure on some of the defense spending there. So I hope we get some benefit from it.
At the end of March, in an interview given to the Harvard Business Review after the start of the war in Ukraine, Hayes defended that his company would benefit from the war:
“So I don’t apologize for it. I think once again we recognize that we are there to defend democracy and the fact is that we will end up benefiting from it over time. Everything that’s being shipped to Ukraine today, of course, is coming from stockpiles, whether it’s from the DoD [Pentagon] or from our NATO allies, and that’s great news. Over time we will have to replace them and we will make a profit for the business for years to come.”
Ukraine only provides the dead
The war in Ukraine will indeed be a boost for companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
First, there will be resupply contracts for weapons like Raytheon’s Stinger anti-aircraft missile and the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin-produced Javelin anti-tank missile that Washington has already supplied to Ukraine by the thousands.

However, the largest stream of benefits will come from assured increases in post-war “national security” spending, here and in Europe, justified, at least in part, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Direct arms transfers to Ukraine already reflect only part of the extra money for US military companies.
In this fiscal year alone, they are guaranteed significant benefits from the Pentagon’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program, which finance the acquisition of US weapons and other equipment, as well as military training.
They are the two main channels of military aid to Ukraine since the time the Russians took Crimea in 2014. Since then, the United States has committed some $5 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
Everything was planned before the war

On March 31 last year, before the start of the war, the US European Command declared an “imminent potential crisis”, given the nearly 100,000 Russian troops already present along the border with Ukraine.
Late last year, the Biden administration pledged $650 million in weapons to Ukraine, including anti-aircraft and anti-armor equipment like the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin Javelin anti-tank missile.
Continue reading “Ukraine is a gold mine for the US war industry.. A disaster for the Planet – English/Spanish”












