Peace is not a competitive business – Death pays better.

The paradoxes of using the wrong KPI.

Peace is rarely profitable. Death, on the other hand, invoices extremely well.

Claudia Laricchia

In the first six days of the current war involving the United States and Iran, the United States alone spent at least $11.3 billion, according to Pentagon briefings to Congress. Roughly $5.6 billion of that was spent on munitions in just the first two days of strikes.

That is almost $2 billion per day burned in missiles, logistics, and military operations. Some of the weapons used in the early strikes, such as precision-guided bombs or Tomahawk missiles, cost between hundreds of thousands and several million dollars each.

War is expensive. But it is also an industry.

Globally, military spending reached about $2.7 trillion in 2024, the highest level ever recorded.

Behind this spending stands a vast ecosystem: weapons manufacturers, logistics companies, reconstruction firms, cybersecurity contractors, surveillance technologies, private military services, and the financial markets that fund them. The arms industry alone includes companies generating tens of billions of dollars annually in weapons revenue.

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In other words, death has a supply chain.

Peace, by contrast, has no comparable industrial complex. There is no trillion-dollar peace sector lobbying governments for more diplomacy, more mediation, more dialogue.

Thomas Hobbes famously wrote “homo homini lupus” meaning man is a wolf to man. In his view, conflict was a natural condition of human existence. Yet the philosopher did not claim war was profitable. That part is our modern addition.

We have industrialized violence.

The economic logic of war is brutally simple: destruction generates demand.

Weapons must be produced, used, replaced, and upgraded. Military infrastructures must be built and rebuilt. Entire regions must later be reconstructed.

And the death industry today is not only human. It is planetary. Modern warfare and military infrastructures are heavily dependent onfossil fuels. The global military sector is estimated to produce about 5.5 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, more than the combined emissions of civilian aviation and shipping.

The world’s armed forces burn immense quantities of jet fuel, diesel, and energy to power bases, fleets, aircraft, and weapons systems. If the world’s militaries were a country, they would be among the largest emitters on Earth. War therefore contributes not only to human death, but to the slow death of ecosystems and climate stability. And it is not by chance that oil is one of the most important reasons why wars exist.

Indeed, the deeper problem is structural. Our global economic system remains deeply tied to fossil energy. Energy production itself is the largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Heavy industry – steel, cement, chemicals – and fossil fuel extraction form a large share of global emissions, while transportation systems based on oil remain central to modern economies.

Agriculture also plays a major role in planetary pressure: globally it accounts for roughly 70% of freshwater use and is a significant source of methane emissions and land-use change.

Transportation systems, cars, aviation, shipping, depend overwhelmingly on fossil fuels. Cities are designed around energy consumption. Housing, heating, cooling, and construction rely heavily on carbon-intensive materials.

Even healthcare systems, ironically designed to save lives, carry a substantial carbon footprint through energy-intensive hospitals, pharmaceutical production, and global supply chains. The result is paradoxical: an economic system that generates prosperity by consuming the ecological conditions of life itself. War and climate instability reinforce each other and death becomes systemic.

Maybe Hannah Arendt was right, warning that technological capacity can easily outpace moral responsibility.

Are we measuring the wrong success? From a narrow economic perspective, activity increased.But what exactly did we produce? Missiles. Ruins. Emissions. Grief.

If our primary indicator of progress is economic output, then war can appear productive. If we measure progress across four dimensions, economic, social, environmental, and human, the picture changes dramatically. Indeed, an economy that grows may still collapse ecosystems and a system that generates profit may still undermine the conditions for life.

Perhaps the real question is not whether war is expensive, but whether our indicators of success are fundamentally wrong. If the economy rewards destruction more efficiently than peace, then the problem is not human nature. The problem is the lens through which we measure value.

Claudia Laricchia, Women Economic Forum Italy – Public Affairs Director; SMILY Academy, President; Global Forum of Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Justice Forum, Head of Strategic International Cooperation; European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability and Rome Business School, Professor; and Correspondent of Mahabahu.

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