A recent analysis from the Financial Times (FT) found that the world's top defense companies have been receiving high orders of military supplies – from tanks to fighter jets to missiles – because of developing and ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.
According to 15 defense groups, including the largest U.S. contractors as well as United Kingdom's BAE Systems and South Korea's Hanwha Aerospace, the combined order backlogs were $777.6 billion, up from $701.2 billion two years earlier, or about a 10 percent increase. This is by the end of 2022, which is the latest for which full-year data is available. It continued into 2023 and in the first half of the year, when the backlogs stood at $764 billion driven by surging war risk in Ukraine and the South China Sea, governments felt forced to continue placing orders. "The explosion of a possible regional conflict in the Middle East will likely result in surging orders in 2024," FT included in the article.