Snapshots from the Shadow World, January 2026
Spotlighting under-reported items of interest for Undue Influence subscribers
Revolving door spins ever more quickly
Lockheed Martin Australia has just poached its new CEO straight from the Australian Government’s weapons buying group, Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG).
This latest appointment continues the global weapons giant’s long-standing practice of recruiting its local chief executives from the ranks of senior Australian military and defence officials.
Jeremy King, who was head of the Joint Aviation Systems Division in CASG until December, according to his LinkedIn, started his new job with the world’s largest weapons-maker earlier this month. At most, the gap between jobs was six weeks.
Lockheed Martin Australia has $4.7 billion in current contracts with the Australian Government. (Source: Finance Department Austender website, 27.1.26.)
After a transition period working with Lockheed Martin’s current Australian CEO, Warren McDonald – who served in the Royal Australian Air Force for more than 40 years before jumping to Lockheed – Mr King will assume outright responsibility as Lockheed’s new chief executive on 23 February. He will report to the president of Lockheed Martin International, Jay Pitman.
“Jeremy’s exceptional depth of experience in large-scale defence acquisitions, combined with his long-standing commitment to customer-centric leadership, make him the ideal candidate to drive Lockheed Martin’s growth in Australia and New Zealand,” said Mr Pitman.
Mr King said he was honoured to join Lockheed Martin. “I have served the Australian Defence Force for more than 30 years, leading major capability programs such as the MRH-90 and Chinook projects. I am eager to leverage my [extensive experience] in leading Lockheed Martin’s efforts in Australia and New Zealand.”
Movements through the revolving door are not illegal. Undue Influence is not alleging or implying illegal activity by any named person nor by Lockheed Martin. The issue under scrutiny – yet again – is the legal ability of powerful corporations to gain access to top-level decision makers via such senior revolving door appointments.
Revolving door database
Jeremy King will become a late entrant to the revolving door database, which we are now working full-time to complete. As with all our work, the database has required a huge amount of time in fact-checking as we strive to locate evidence for each data point. This is no easy task given the secrecy of the defence department and the arms industry.
We are confident Undue Influence readers will consider this project to have been worth the wait. It will be a unique and powerful public resource that maps how – and how extensively - the revolving door system has operated in the Australian military-industrial complex in recent decades.
To our many new subscribers in recent months, welcome. This long-running research project has meant we have been posting less often than usual. Please stick with us! We’ll be back to normal in a few months with many fascinating posts to come.
AUKUS: ‘High probability of failure’, former top UK official
Can the mismanagement of Australia’s largest ever defence procurement – set to cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars – reasonably be blamed on “a great deal of naivety”?
To remind readers, it is clear that Australia’s political and military leaders put no guardrails in place to protect the almost $10 billion of Australian taxpayers’ money that is being transferred to the US and UK to help their nuclear shipyards grow and maintain employment - whether Australia gets its nuclear-powered submarines or not. (See the below link for details if you missed this news.)
Defence Minister Richard Marles has also refused to say whether Australia will be refunded the money if either the US or UK, or both, fail to deliver.
On top of these disturbing revelations, a former top British defence official has now warned (paywalled) that because of the shambolic state of the UK’s submarine service, AUKUS is likely to collapse.
Retired rear admiral Philip Mathias said he feared that Australians were not adequately informed about the troubles plaguing the British navy.
“It is clear that Australia has shown a great deal of naïvety and did not conduct sufficient due diligence on the parlous state of the UK’s nuclear submarine program before signing up to AUKUS – and parting with billions of dollars…”
RADM Mathias was formerly a director of nuclear policy with the UK Ministry of Defence and a nuclear submarine commander. He told The Nightly earlier this month that AUKUS was agreed to by enthusiastic politicians and policy advisers who did not appreciate the capacity constraints in delivering the project.
“Whilst the US may sell some [nuclear-powered submarines] to Australia, there is a high probability that the UK element of AUKUS will fail, making the international row in 2021 over the cancellation of the plan for Australia to build French-designed submarines look like a non-event.”
Global arms trade: business is booming
The combined arms sales revenue of the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies (SIPRI Top 100) was $971 billion (US$679 billion) in 2024, the highest level ever recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Lockheed Martin continues to rank head-and-shoulders above second-placed rival RTX (Raytheon), raking in $92.5 billion (US$64.7 billion) in arms sales in 2024. RTX earned $62.4 billion (US$43.6 billion).
UK weapons giant BAE Systems, lead contractor of AUKUS as well as the contentious $65 billion Hunter class frigate program, which is currently under investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission, has moved up to 4th place from 6th, earning $48.4 billion (US$33.8 billion) globally.
Boeing, meanwhile, has dropped out of the top 5 - to 6th - after several years of slippage from its formerly entrenched No. 2 position; no doubt giving former Australian defence minister, leader of the opposition, war memorial director Brendan Nelson – who now lives in London running Boeing’s ex-US global operations – a few headaches. (Dr Nelson also appears in the revolving door database.)
Boeing remains the Australian Defence Department’s second largest contractor, however, with $1.2 billion in local turnover last year, trailing Australia’s largest defence contractor, BAE Systems, by $1 billion in its 2025 revenue. (See the recently released ADM 2025 Top 40 - paywalled.)
Israel’s arms industry is booming, in part due to its campaign of genocide in Gaza. The total arms revenue of the three Israeli arms companies in the SIPRI Top 100 rose 16 per cent to $23.2 billion (US$16.2 billion) in 2024, compared with a 5.9 per cent rise in revenue by the industry overall. SIPRI reports that the Israeli weapons boom can be attributed “both to Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza and high global demand for Israeli military equipment such as advanced UAV [drones] and counter UAV capabilities”.
From billions to trillions: Trump plans 50% Pentagon budget increase
Independent US watchdog Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has attacked Donald Trump’s plans to increase the Pentagon’s budget by 50 per cent to US$1.5 trillion. In a 10 January update, POGO said such an increase would “only be a dream for the defence contractors who profit from the irresponsible, inefficient, incredibly wasteful misuse of your hard-earned tax dollars — and a nightmare for the American people. The Pentagon has never passed a financial audit. What it desperately needs is oversight, transparency, and reform. Not a comically large cheque.”
The POGO update comes hard on the heels of the release of the book The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home by William Hartung and Ben Freeman.
“A damning indictment of the conflicts of interest running rampant in the defence establishment.” - Publishers Weekly
Two chapters in the book that look particularly interesting are: “The Militarization of American Science: Buying the Ivory Tower” and “Capturing the Media: How Propaganda Powers the War Machine.”
William Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Ben Freeman is director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute and a faculty member at the Institute for Defense and Business, where he teaches seminars on the defence budget process and the foreign influence industry.
Mr Hartung also co-authored the 2011 book Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
New doco, Cover-Up, on Seymour Hersh
The legendary American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is well into his ninth decade and is continuing to hold power to account.
A riveting documentary about Hersh’s long career in investigative journalism exposing the war crimes and other sins of the US government and its military and intelligence services is now out on Netflix.
Cover-Up was produced and directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. It opens with Hersh’s exposure of the US military’s massacre of civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War and the ensuing cover-up. The film also covers his scoops during the Watergate scandal, his period at The New York Times (and why he left), and his exposure of the US military’s torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. There are personal insights into his childhood, early career and marriage. It’s a rich and fascinating portrait of one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time.
Aged 88, Hersh continues to publish weekly reports on Substack.
In February 2023, he reported that it was the USA, not Russia, that blew up the Nord Stream pipelines – a report that was strenuously denied by the Biden administration.
Hersh explains in the closing minutes of the documentary why he continues his investigative work despite the heavy toll it has often taken on him:
HERSH: We’re a culture of enormous violence. It’s just something brutal; [but] there’s a level you just can’t get to…
POITRAS: So why do you keep doing the work?
HERSH: You can’t have a country that does that. That’s why I’ve been, sort of, on the war path ever since [My Lai]. You can’t have a country that does that and looks the other way.”
Shortly before the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, director Laura Poitras said: “[Hersh] was horrified by the [My Lai] massacre but didn’t want to pin it just on the soldiers. He looked at the chain of command and to expose the chain of command. And I think that’s why he’s continually obsessed by going back to these stories because of these cycles of impunity… It drives Sy and is a source of profound moral outrage.”
