# Defense Primes Sector The legacy [[Military-Industrial Complex]] — the five-and-a-half giants that have owned Pentagon procurement since the Clinton-era consolidation — is living through its strangest boom: a record ~$1.01T FY2026 defense budget (including ~$150B from the [[Big Beautiful Bill]]) and a European rearmament windfall (NATO's June 2025 pledge of 5% of GDP by 2035), even as software challengers eat their valuation and their programs. This MOC covers the old guard; [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] maps the challengers. ## The primes, program by program - **[[Lockheed Martin]]** — the biggest prime, wounded: lost NGAD to Boeing (March 2025), watched the FY2026 [[F-35]] buy shrink to 47 jets amid Trump's public sniping, took a $950M charge on a classified Skunk Works program, and now pitches a "fifth-gen-plus" F-35 ("a Ferrari at half the cost") as its counter. Backlog above $170B; lead hardware role in [[Golden Dome]]. - **[[Boeing]]** — the comeback story: the F-47 NGAD win (>$20B EMD, March 2025) revived St. Louis fighters while Kelly Ortberg's commercial recovery pushed 737 rates toward 52/month. Still bleeding on fixed-price legacy: KC-46 losses past $7B, Air Force One so late that a Qatar-gifted 747 flies as the "bridge" plane in summer 2026. - **[[Raytheon]]** (RTX) — the munitions-demand winner: record $271B backlog on Patriot, GEM-T, and LTAMDS as Ukraine and the Iran war drained stockpiles; ~$850M in tariff headwinds as the countervailing Trump-era cost. - **[[Northrop Grumman]]** — B-21 charges past $2B as it buys production rate, and the Sentinel ICBM's 81% cost breach (~$141B) stands as the era's worst overrun. - **[[General Dynamics]]** — the submarine crisis: Virginia-class building at ~1.2/year against a required 2, Columbia slipped to late 2028, patched with a $15.4B Electric Boat modification to rebuild the supplier base. - **[[L3Harris]]** — the most successfully repositioned prime: SDA Tracking Layer prime (Tranche 3, $843M, on [[Lanteris Space Systems]] buses) and, via Aerojet Rocketdyne, the Pentagon's ~$1B bet on a second solid-rocket-motor source. [[Leidos]], [[Huntington Ingalls Industries]] (the shipbuilding-labor crisis in corporate form), [[BAE Systems]], and [[General Atomics]] (whose YFQ-42A flies against [[Anduril]]'s YFQ-44 in the CCA drone race) round out the tier. ## The challenger squeeze The defining 2025–26 story is valuation and program displacement. [[Palantir]] (~$400B market cap, revenue growing ~85%) is worth more than the top primes combined; [[Anduril]] took IVAS from [[Microsoft]], won an up-to-$20B ten-year Army enterprise deal (March 2026) consolidating 120+ contracts around Lattice, and leads the Army's Next-Gen C2 data layer. [[Golden Dome]] shows the new settlement: a [[SpaceX]]–[[Palantir]]–[[Anduril]] consortium (with [[Scale AI]]) leads the architecture on a subscription model while the primes take "lead hardware" roles — the old guard as subcontractor to the new. [[Pete Hegseth]]'s acquisition reforms (commercial-first drone dominance memos, ~340,000 small drones in two years) institutionalize the tilt. Golden Dome itself — $25B seeded, ~$185B official estimate, $1.2T per CBO — is simultaneously the sector's biggest prize and its biggest fiction; see [[Golden Dome]]. ## Who lobbies for this sector The primes are the demand side's defense bloc: [[Lockheed Martin]] ($15.7M in 2025, #16 spender), [[General Dynamics]] ($13.9M, #17), and [[Raytheon]]/RTX ($13.8M, #18) all sit in the top-20 client table on the [[Lobbying Hub]], alongside hired-gun work at census firms ([[Crossroads Strategies]] for Boeing/Northrop/Huntington Ingalls, [[S-3 Group]] for Boeing/RTX, [[Invariant]] for Raytheon). The personnel flow runs through the [[Revolving Door Roster]] — Jeff Shockey's staff-director→S-3→Boeing→RTX arc is the sector's signature move. ## Why this sector matters to the vault [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]]'s warning now has two branches: the legacy complex (this page) and the venture-backed one ([[Defense Tech Ecosystem]]) competing to capture the same trillion-dollar budget — with the [[PayPal Mafia to Pentagon Pipeline]] crowd winning the argument inside the administration. The primes' fixed-price losses, cost breaches, and shipyard decay are the empirical case the challengers cite; the challengers' sole-source dependencies (see [[MILNET]]) are the risk the primes' defenders cite back. ## Coverage gaps Now built alongside this page: [[L3Harris]], [[Huntington Ingalls Industries]], [[BAE Systems]], and the [[F-35]] program page. Still missing: RTX as distinct from the [[Raytheon]] page framing, GE Aerospace, Textron, Aerojet Rocketdyne as its own page, Electric Boat/Newport News as shipyard pages, and program pages for the B-21, Sentinel, F-47, and CCA. Highest value: a Sentinel ICBM page (the cost-overrun exhibit) and an F-47 page. ## See Also - [[Lockheed Martin]] · [[Boeing]] · [[Raytheon]] · [[Northrop Grumman]] · [[General Dynamics]] · [[Leidos]] - [[L3Harris]] · [[Huntington Ingalls Industries]] · [[BAE Systems]] · [[General Atomics]] - [[F-35]] · [[Golden Dome]] · [[Pete Hegseth]] · [[Big Beautiful Bill]] · [[Military-Industrial Complex]] - [[Anduril]] · [[Palantir]] · [[SpaceX]] — the challengers · [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]] - [[Size of Companies by Number of Employees]] — headcount reference for the defense-tech roster - [[Chipmakers Sector]] · [[AI Sector]] · [[Commercial Space Sector]] · [[Biotech Sector]] · [[Quantum Computing Sector]] · [[Cryptocurrency Sector]] · [[Carceral and Border Security Sector]] · [[Private Equity Sector]] · [[Energy Sector]] — sibling sector MOCs