Trump wants more defense money. The Pentagon needs to replace missiles we already shot at people. States heard "jobs" and started wrestling each other like it's Black Friday at a dying mall.
Hypersonic missiles travel five times the speed of sound. They cost roughly what a small city spends on infrastructure in a decade. But sure, let's have Alabama and Arizona bid against each other to build them. Economic development at its finest.
The weapons stocks are depleted. We fired them. They exploded. Now we need more. This counts as a business opportunity instead of what it actually is, which is a subscription model for ordnance. Raytheon figured out recurring revenue before SaaS companies made it insufferable.
Governors are drafting tax incentive packages like they're courting Tesla. Except instead of electric cars nobody asked for, they're begging for the privilege of assembling guidance systems. The company gets the contract. The state gets a ribbon-cutting ceremony and three hundred jobs that require security clearances most residents can't pass.
Your portfolio probably has defense stocks in it. You bought Lockheed Martin because some Reddit thread said military spending always goes up. Congrats. You're long on the outcome of states offering to waive property taxes so a contractor will lease a warehouse in a logistics park off I-40.
The defense budget is massive. The war machine is depleted. These two facts should not coexist, but they do, because we spent forty years building things designed to break exactly once. That's the business model. That's what your ETF tracks.
States will fight. Companies will collect. The missiles will get built, then fired, then rebuilt. And you'll check your brokerage app wondering why your returns are flat while Northrop Grumman executives are buying their fourth vacation home.
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
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