#bae systems

May 27, 2024 - Student protesters at the University of Manchester in the UK unfurl a 10 meter long banner stating clear demands to their University to cut ties with Israel's barbaric genocide:

“RAF Cosford Air Show 2026” _ Cosford, Shifnal, TF11 8UP, Midlands, UK _ Sunday 14.06.2026 _ Photos by: Spyros Kaprinis [14.06.2026].

To build public consent for increased spending on the military industrial base, politicians often lean on economic arguments. The Defence Secretary John Healey has suggested that jobs in the military industry produce greater economic benefits than in other sectors while outlining his intention to make the Ministry of Defence (MOD) an “economic department”. On the contrary, the military industry is not of inherent economic value, as asserted by Healey, but the beneficiary of an active industrial strategy that has been less available to civilian manufacturing sectors since the early 1980s. The UK’s leading military contractor BAE Systems, for instance, only paid 14 per cent of its £2 billion research and development (R&D) budget in 2022 with the rest of the bill covered on its behalf by government customers. As explored in detail below, the state subsidy and support provided to military companies operates to the benefit of the private investors that own them. Rather than a set of national or publicly-owned companies, the Ministry of Defence procures equipment from an “asset manager arsenal” — a landscape of multinational contractors, many of which are owned by the same few global investment firms. The level of public investment and resource afforded to military firms is politically pertinent in the context of climate crisis, in which the coordinated deployment of existing capital stocks, productive equipment and skilled labour towards the energy transition is of planetary importance. Given the state’s role in steering industrial capacity towards the military industry, there is an opportunity to repurpose production in the context of a wider economic transition, one that has long term benefits for the sector’s workers, communities and the national economy. 

...supplies of food to starving people in South Sudan, Somalia and DRC. Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, has quietly scrapped support for a fleet of aircraft providing “life-saving” humanitarian aid to some of the world’s poorest countries. The decision further reduces the distribution of vital aid to countries facing serious humanitarian crises, including South Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). BAE Systems announced record profits this year of more than £3bn, buoyed by increased defence spending linked to the Israel-Gaza conflict and Russia’s war in Ukraine. The decision to scrap support for the aid aircraft is thought to have been made in order for the defence firm to pursue projects related to Nato members’ 5% increase in spending on arms. Several major humanitarian contracts have been cancelled since the decision, including one with the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to fly aid to 12 destinations across Somalia where almost 5 million people face “crisis” levels of hunger.