Congratulations on Your Promotion! (From Raytheon to the Pentagon, Then Back to Raytheon)

Somewhere between the boardroom and the Situation Room, a very special kind of American dream is being lived. It involves stock options, classified briefings, and the blissful absence of anything resembling a conflict of interest — at least officially. Welcome to the revolving door, where the defense industry and the U.S. government are basically the same job with different business cards.

While the rest of us are busy arguing about which politician deserves our righteous Twitter fury, the people actually deciding where bombs fall, which weapons systems get funded, and which foreign governments receive America's special brand of "security assistance" are spinning quietly through a carousel that connects the Pentagon, the State Department, and the C-suites of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon with the frictionless elegance of a well-oiled turret.

The Carousel in Action

Let's walk through the mechanics, because they really are something to behold.

A defense industry executive spends a decade building weapons systems and lobbying Congress for contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. Then, in a move celebrated as "bringing private-sector expertise to government," they accept a senior role at the Department of Defense or the National Security Council. In this capacity, they help shape procurement policy, advise on military strategy, and occasionally nudge the United States toward engagements in regions where — purely by coincidence — their former employer's products happen to be particularly useful.

After a few years of distinguished public service, they return to the private sector, typically to a seat on the board of the same defense contractor, or a competitor, or a consulting firm that advises both. They bring with them an invaluable asset: a Rolodex full of people who are currently doing the job they just vacated.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a LinkedIn profile.

The Numbers Don't Lie (They Just Don't Volunteer Information)

A 2021 report from the Project On Government Oversight identified over 1,700 instances in a single year of former senior government officials — including generals, admirals, and senior civilian officials — moving into roles with defense contractors. Seventeen hundred. In one year. That's not a revolving door; that's a revolving stadium.

The same report found that the top 20 defense contractors employed an average of more than 380 former senior government officials, military officers, and members of Congress each. These aren't entry-level hires. These are people whose primary professional value is the ability to pick up a phone and have someone important answer it.

Meanwhile, the defense budget has grown with the reliable consistency of a subscription service nobody remembers signing up for. The United States currently spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. If you've ever wondered who keeps advocating for that number to go up rather than down, the answer is: people who financially benefit from that number going up.

A Few Illustrative Stops on the Tour

Consider the archetype of the post-military career trajectory. A four-star general retires after decades of service, collects a pension, and within months joins the board of a major defense contractor — often one whose equipment they championed during their time in uniform. From that perch, they advise on government relations, appear on cable news as a credible-sounding military analyst (with their corporate affiliations mentioned briefly, if at all), and attend the right conferences where current officials are also present.

Or consider the civilian variant: a senior Pentagon acquisition official who spent years overseeing contracts for a particular class of weapons system retires and is immediately retained as a consultant by the companies that bid on those contracts. Their expertise, we are told, is invaluable to the private sector. Their familiarity with the government officials who now hold their old job is, presumably, irrelevant.

The State Department runs its own version of this circuit. Defense industry lobbyists and executives cycle through advisory roles on arms export policy — the very policy that determines which foreign governments can purchase American weapons and under what conditions. If you've ever wondered why the United States continues to sell advanced munitions to governments with, shall we say, complicated human rights records, part of the answer lives in those advisory committees.

"But There Are Rules!"

At this point, a reasonable person might note that the United States has ethics regulations governing exactly this kind of thing. And indeed it does. Federal employees are generally prohibited from lobbying their former agencies for one to two years after leaving government. This is called a "cooling-off period," which is a charming name for what is, in practice, a brief vacation before resuming the same work under a different job title.

The restrictions are riddled with exceptions, apply unevenly across agencies, and do essentially nothing to address the more structural problem: that the same small universe of people with defense industry backgrounds keeps cycling through the positions that shape defense policy. You don't have to lobby your former colleagues if your former colleagues already share your worldview, your assumptions about American power, and your general sense that the solution to most geopolitical problems involves a procurement contract.

What Gets Decided in the Carousel

Here is where it becomes less amusing. The people moving through this system are not making trivial decisions. They are shaping America's military posture in the Pacific. They are advising on arms sales to Gulf states. They are influencing which weapons systems get developed, which get cancelled, and which get enthusiastically marketed to allied governments through the Foreign Military Sales program — a program that, not incidentally, generates enormous revenue for American defense contractors.

They are present in the rooms where decisions are made about whether to pursue diplomacy or escalation, whether to fund reconstruction or more weapons, whether a particular foreign government is a strategic partner or a security threat. And they carry with them, embedded in their professional DNA, a set of incentives that consistently point in one direction: more defense spending, more weapons sales, more interventions that require more defense spending.

The public, meanwhile, is invited to participate in democracy by choosing between two politicians who will both, in different registers, staff their national security teams with people from this same carousel.

Another Day in the Empire

There is something almost poetic about the revolving door if you can manage the emotional distance required to appreciate it. The empire doesn't need a shadowy cabal. It doesn't require secret meetings or coded messages. It just needs a professional class with aligned financial interests, a government that has decided expertise means industry experience, and a political culture that treats the defense budget as essentially beyond democratic scrutiny.

The door keeps spinning. The contracts keep growing. And somewhere in a glass-walled conference room, a recently retired undersecretary is explaining to a defense contractor's government relations team exactly which current officials to call, and exactly what to say.

Another day in the empire. The carousel is open for business.