There is an American company that takes in more revenue than the GDP of over a hundred countries, employs a hundred and twenty-two thousand people, carries a contract backlog of a hundred and ninety-four billion dollars, and that most people know almost nothing about. Lockheed Martin does not sell consumer products. It has no visible brand in daily life. It does not appear on lists of companies admired by millennials. And yet it is arguably the most important company in the world in terms of its influence on the global order, because Lockheed Martin is the one that builds the machines with which the United States maintains its planetary military hegemony.
In 2025, Lockheed Martin posted revenues of seventy-five billion dollars. Approximately seventy-three per cent came from the United States government, primarily the Department of Defense. The remainder came from international sales to allied governments. Its flagship product, the F-35 Lightning II, is the most expensive weapons programme in human history, with an estimated life-cycle cost exceeding two trillion dollars. That is not a typo: two trillion, with a t. Lockheed Martin is not just a company. It is an institution of the American state, as integral to the defence of the United States as the Pentagon itself.
How to Become the Largest Defence Contractor in the World
The history of Lockheed Martin begins, strictly speaking, with two separate companies. The Lockheed Corporation, founded in 1926 in California, made its name during the Second World War building the P-38 Lightning, one of the war’s most versatile fighters, and the Hudson bomber for the RAF. But its real distinction came in 1943, when an engineer named Clarence “Kelly” Johnson created a secret division within the company to develop America’s first jet fighter, the XP-80. That division, known informally as Skunk Works, would become the most legendary aeronautical engineering operation of the twentieth century. We will come back to this.
Martin Marietta, for its part, had roots in aviation since the twenties but diversified into ballistic missiles, space systems, and defence electronics during the Cold War. It was a less glamorous company than Lockheed but solid, with major contracts in missiles and satellites.
The merger took place in 1995, in the context of the massive consolidation of the American defence industry following the end of the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. defence budget shrank significantly and the industrial base simply could not sustain itself at 1980s spending levels. The Pentagon, under William Perry as Secretary of Defense, actively encouraged mergers among contractors to reduce excess capacity. It became known as the “Last Supper,” a 1993 meeting where Perry told industry executives there was not enough business for everyone and they had to consolidate. Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged. Northrop bought Grumman. Boeing absorbed McDonnell Douglas. From dozens of prime contractors, essentially five or six remained.
The result was an oligopoly. Lockheed Martin emerged as the dominant player, with a portfolio covering virtually the entire spectrum of military capability: combat aircraft, missiles, air defence systems, satellites, naval systems, cybersecurity. There is no area of American defence where Lockheed Martin does not have significant presence. And once you reach that position, it is very difficult for anyone to displace you.
The Relationship with the Pentagon: Revolving Doors and Lobbying
The relationship between Lockheed Martin and the United States government is of an intimacy that defies conventional categories of public and private. It is not exactly corruption, at least not in the crude sense of the word. It is something more sophisticated and harder to combat: an institutional symbiosis.
The revolving door between the Pentagon and the defence industry is perhaps the most visible mechanism. Generals and civilian officials at the Department of Defense who spend decades managing procurement programmes end up, after retirement, working for the companies they once oversaw. The flow runs in both directions: industry executives move into government to manage the very programmes they worked on from the other side. None of this is illegal. Regulations impose waiting periods and restrictions on direct lobbying. But the reality is that after thirty years working in defence systems, an official’s knowledge, relationships, and worldview are deeply shaped by the industry. Nobody needs to buy anyone. Priorities align organically.
Lobbying is the other dimension. Lockheed Martin spends tens of millions of dollars a year lobbying Congress and the Executive, and contributes generously to the campaigns of legislators from both parties, especially those on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees. The F-35, for instance, is manufactured with components produced in virtually every state in the Union. This is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategy to ensure that every member of Congress has an electoral interest in the programme’s survival. If a legislator votes against the F-35, they are voting against jobs in their district. The geographic distribution of the F-35’s supply chain is, in itself, a masterpiece of political engineering.
Is this a problem? It depends on whom you ask. Critics, including Eisenhower in his famous farewell address of 1961, warn about the dangers of the military-industrial complex: a confluence of interests between the defence industry, the armed forces, and the political establishment that can distort national priorities, inflate budgets, and perpetuate conflicts to sustain demand for weapons. Defenders argue the defence industrial base is a strategic national asset that cannot be improvised. Building a fifth-generation fighter takes decades. If the industrial capacity is lost, it is not recovered through a tender. The relationship between state and industry is symbiotic because it cannot be otherwise.
The truth, as is usually the case, lies somewhere in between. It is true that Lockheed Martin wields disproportionate influence over American defence policy. It is also true that without Lockheed Martin, the United States would not have the F-22, nor the F-35, nor the missile defence systems that protect its allies, nor the satellite constellation that gives it an information advantage over every adversary. The military-industrial complex is real, has its distortions, and is at the same time the reason the United States is the dominant military power on the planet.
Exports: Geopolitical Control Through Technological Dependency
One of the least discussed and most fascinating aspects of Lockheed Martin’s business is how international arms sales function as an instrument of American foreign policy. When a country buys the F-35, it is not buying an aircraft. It is buying a strategic relationship with the United States that lasts decades.
The F-35 illustrates this almost perfectly. The programme has more than a dozen buyer or partner countries: the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Norway, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Finland, Belgium, Poland, among others. Each of these countries, by adopting the F-35, integrates into an ecosystem of maintenance, software updates, spare parts supply, and training that depends on Lockheed Martin and, ultimately, on the United States government. The aircraft’s software is updated centrally. Critical spare parts are obtained through a global logistics chain controlled from the United States. The weapons the aircraft can carry require American authorisation.
This means the United States holds, de facto, a veto over the operational capability of its allies’ air forces. If Washington decides to restrict access to spare parts or updates, the aircraft degrades. It is not a threat exercised openly, but it is implicit in the programme’s architecture. Turkey discovered this when it was expelled from the F-35 programme after purchasing the Russian S-400 air defence system. The message was unambiguous: you cannot be a customer of Lockheed Martin and of Almaz-Antey at the same time.
From a geopolitical perspective, this technological dependency is an extraordinarily effective tool. It creates a community of interests that extends far beyond the commercial transaction. Countries that operate the F-35 share data, doctrine, logistical infrastructure, and ultimately a worldview in which interoperability with the United States is the strategic priority. It is NATO materialised in an aircraft.
The HIMARS, the rocket artillery system Ukraine made famous, operates on a similar logic. Countries that buy it depend on the United States for the rockets and missiles it fires. They cannot produce them locally. The platform without the munitions is an expensive truck. Lockheed Martin delivered HIMARS number 750 in November 2025 and demand continues to grow, driven by the war in Ukraine and the widespread perception that it is one of the most effective weapons systems in modern warfare.
Business Model: Complexity Equals Eternal Contracts
Lockheed Martin’s business model rests on a principle any businessperson will recognise: the more complex the product, the longer and more lucrative the service contract. A fifth-generation fighter is not like a car you buy, use, and replace. It is a system of systems requiring continuous maintenance, software updates, component modernisation, pilot and technician training, and logistics management for its entire operational life, which can stretch thirty or forty years.
The F-35 is the definitive example of this logic. The acquisition cost of an F-35A, the conventional variant, runs to around eighty-two million dollars per unit in the most recent production lots. Not cheap, but not a scandalous figure compared to other modern fighters. What drives the programme’s total cost to the astronomical numbers that appear in the headlines are the sustainment costs: maintenance, spare parts, software, upgrades, infrastructure. The Pentagon estimates that the cost of operating and sustaining the F-35 fleet through the 2080s will be one and a half trillion dollars. That is the real business: not the sale of the aircraft but the lifetime contract that comes with it.
This creates a structural incentive towards complexity. A more complex system requires more maintenance, more updates, more technical support. And each additional layer of complexity deepens the client’s dependency on the manufacturer. It is not a conspiracy. It is the natural logic of a market where the product is so sophisticated that only its designer can maintain it.
Critics point out, rightly, that this distorts incentives. Lockheed Martin has no direct economic incentive for its products to be easy to maintain. Every hour of maintenance is revenue. Every technical problem requiring manufacturer support is a contract. The Pentagon has pushed for years to reduce F-35 sustainment costs, with modest results. The programme launched an initiative in 2023 called “War on Cost” that managed to trim roughly eighty-three billion from projected sustainment costs, but the total figure remains stratospheric.
A Necessary Aside: The Masterpieces of Skunk Works
One must be fair to Lockheed Martin, or more precisely to its Skunk Works division, because beyond the lobbying, the cost overruns, and the complexities of the military-industrial complex, this company has produced some of the most extraordinary machines ever built.
Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works’ founder, established a principle that defined the operation for decades: small teams, minimal bureaucracy, total autonomy. The result was a series of aircraft that redefined what was possible.
The U-2, developed in the fifties, was the first reconnaissance aircraft capable of operating above sixty-five thousand feet, beyond the reach of Soviet fighters and missiles of the era. It overflew the Soviet Union for years, providing intelligence that was fundamental to the management of the Cold War, until Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. The U-2 remains in service today, more than seventy years after its first flight, which says something about the soundness of the original design.
The SR-71 Blackbird is probably the most impressive aircraft ever built. Designed in the early sixties under Johnson’s direction, the Blackbird flew at over Mach 3, at altitudes above eighty thousand feet. It was so fast that its primary defence against missiles was simply to accelerate. The materials for its airframe, predominantly titanium, had to be covertly acquired from the Soviet Union through front companies, because the Soviets were the world’s leading producer. There is something deliciously ironic in that. No SR-71 was ever shot down in operations. Not because nobody tried, but because nothing could catch it. When it was retired from service in 1998, there did not exist, and still does not exist, an aircraft that surpasses it in speed and operational altitude. It is a machine from another era that looks like another era, but one that has not arrived yet.
The F-117 Nighthawk, developed under Ben Rich, Johnson’s successor at Skunk Works, was the world’s first operational stealth combat aircraft. Its angular shape, designed to deflect radar waves, was so radical that Lockheed engineers joked they had made a diamond fly. The F-117 was used in combat for the first time in Panama in 1989 and decisively in the Gulf War of 1991, where it penetrated Iraqi air defences with an effectiveness that changed the conception of aerial warfare for ever.
And then there is the F-35, which is a different matter. The F-35 is not Skunk Works’ masterpiece. It is the masterpiece of Lockheed Martin’s business engineering. An aircraft designed to be everything to everyone, three variants for three branches of the armed forces and a dozen countries, good enough at everything and excellent at sensor and data integration, which has generated more controversy than any weapons programme in history but which, at this point, with more than a thousand units delivered and no viable alternative in sight, is a fait accompli. The F-35 is not the best fighter ever built. It is the most inevitable.
Lockheed Martin’s ability to produce machines like these is the reason why, despite all the legitimate problems the military-industrial complex poses, the company occupies the position it does. It is not just lobbying and revolving doors. It is that when the world needs an aircraft that flies at three times the speed of sound, or a fighter invisible to radar, or a missile defence system that works, the list of companies that can deliver is extraordinarily short. And on that list, Lockheed Martin comes first.
In the final analysis, Lockheed Martin is a paradox: a publicly traded private company that answers to its shareholders, but whose only relevant client is the most powerful state in history, and whose product is that state’s capacity to project force to any corner of the planet. It is capitalism in the service of empire, or empire in the service of capitalism. Depends on how you look at it. What is beyond dispute is that without Lockheed Martin, or without something very much like Lockheed Martin, the world order we know, with its flaws and its virtues, would not exist.