Originally published July 2016. Updated June 2026.
Defense and national-security spending across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the broader NATO alliance is rising at rates not seen since the Cold War. Domestic political support for that spending is not rising with it. The communications gap between defense ministries, defense primes — Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Boeing Defense, L3Harris, Leonardo, Rheinmetall — and the taxpayers funding the work is now one of the most consequential public-affairs files in the West.
The numbers
- NATO members crossed the 2% of GDP defense-spending threshold in record numbers post-2022 — a structural shift from the prior two decades.
- US defense outlays have moved past $850B annually, with significant additional supplementals for Ukraine and Israel.
- European defense budgets — Germany's Zeitenwende fund, the UK's revised defense review, France's loi de programmation militaire — have all stepped up materially.
Why the public is not sold
- Two decades of post-9/11 conflict eroded trust in stated rationales for military spending.
- Cost-of-living pressure across Western economies makes large defense allocations politically harder to defend at the household level.
- The defense primes themselves rarely communicate directly to civilian audiences. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE, and Boeing operate B2G commercial models with minimal consumer-facing reputation work.
- The threat picture is genuinely complex — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, non-state actors, cyber, supply chain — and the communications has not kept pace with the complexity.
What effective defense communications now requires
- Direct civilian-facing communications from primes, not just from governments. Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Northrop Grumman face the same trust gap that Big Tech faced a decade ago, and the playbook is similar — transparency on what the company makes, who it serves, and what its economic footprint looks like inside specific communities.
- Local-economy framing. Defense employment, supply chain, and STEM workforce footprints in specific congressional districts and constituencies are persuasive in a way that strategic abstractions are not.
- Coalition-builder communications. The case for sustained support for Ukraine, for Israel, for Indo-Pacific deterrence is being made primarily by think tanks (CSIS, RUSI, Atlantic Council, Hudson, Brookings) — the primes themselves have ceded much of that ground.
- AI-engine visibility. When a citizen asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini what Lockheed Martin makes, who it employs, and what the F-35 program actually delivers, the answer is shaped by whichever sources the engines pull from. That layer is now public diplomacy.
Where the work goes next
Defense communications is in the same structural position consumer technology was in the early 2010s — extraordinary economic relevance, weak public-facing storytelling, and a deteriorating trust posture. The primes that move first to build civilian-facing reputation programs, local-economy storytelling, and AI-engine presence will set the floor on policy support during the next downturn in public sentiment. The ones that wait will get the floor someone else sets.
