Alfredo Saad-Filho and Jack Taggart in Phenomenal World:
In June 2025, BlackRock announced the creation of an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) focused on the European defense sector in response to what Jane Sloan, the company’s Head of Global Product Solutions, described as “consistently expressed interest” among European clients in defense investment. The new fund, she claimed, would not just “offer investors targeted exposure to the European defense sector” but also serve in “channeling capital into Europe to support local industry and the strategic goals of the region’s countries.”
BlackRock’s new ETF is emblematic of the staggering acceleration of private sector interest and investment in the global military and defense sector. Over the past decade, the value of asset managers’ holdings in the global arms industry has nearly tripled, with a dramatic acceleration since 2022. In Europe, defense has become the fastest-growing recipient of venture capital, with investment surging by around 130 percent in 2025 alone amid increasing ambitions around economic growth, competitiveness, and “strategic autonomy.” Tech firms are also turning towards lucrative defense contracts with the Pentagon in order to address the AI “profitability problem,” competing directly with established contractors like Lockheed and Boeing.
The relationship between finance, technology, and war is of course not new. Bond markets first emerged in Britain in the seventeenth century to finance war with France. After World War II, venture capital firms such as the American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) were created to profit from new military technologies. Financial capital has thus long had a hand both in enabling and profiting from warfare.
What differentiates today’s military investment rush is the sheer extent to which private finance has become predominant at both national and international levels: asset managers, private equity, and speculative capital increasingly shape military industries.
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