Destruction by War and Rising Brand Values

War and brand. What at first glance appears to be a contradiction should be read as a symbiosis. War destroys value; brands create it. And yet the two are more closely intertwined than is morally comfortable. Three headlines from 2025, which read like incidental news items, upon closer inspection turn out to be expressions of a changed normality. On 5 September 2025, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump had authorized, by executive order, the renaming of the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”—a semantic act that changes little but reveals much. A few months earlier, the same newspaper reported that the investor Peter Thiel had taken a stake in a European defense contractor, explicitly justified by the rapid rise in military spending and the revaluation of security as a growth market. And finally, in December 2025, the New York Times reported that the U.S. government had circulated concrete offers and planning documents to investors for the reconstruction of the largely destroyed Gaza Strip—as a large-scale infrastructure, real estate, and development project after the war. These three reports tell no story of exceptions, but of normalization.

War has been institutionalized. It organizes political economy by shifting budgetary priorities, structuring industries, and legitimizing state intervention. Global military expenditure surpassed USD 2.4 trillion for the first time in 2024 and has been growing faster than the world economy for years; it has thus reached a magnitude comparable to global public spending on education. In Europe, military spending has risen in real terms by double digits since 2021; in the United States it remains stable at around 3.5 percent of GDP; and in most NATO countries the two-percent benchmark is no longer a target but a floor. This development is bipartisan, cross-generational, and largely decoupled from traditional austerity logics. Debt brakes apply—until security is at stake; then they are suspended, redefined, or politically neutralized. War has become compatible with capital markets, which reward defense companies with above-average returns; with innovation narratives, in which military research is framed as a technological driver; and with location policy, which defines security as a prerequisite for competitiveness. Defense is no longer a defensive term but an expansive one. The business is booming because it is politically desired, socially accepted, and communicatively well framed. War sells itself as a promise of stability in an unstable world.

Destruction generates destructive products—and rewards strong brands. Where destruction is systematically pursued, markets emerge for ever more efficient means of destruction. This market is primarily a business-to-business market, with the state as the nearly exclusive customer. Tanks, drones, missile defense systems, or cyber weapons are not bought impulsively; they are acquired through lengthy procurement processes, politically legitimized, parliamentary backed, and strategically justified. This is where the role of branding begins. Systems from Lockheed Martin, Rheinmetall, or BAE Systems stand not only for technical performance, but for reliability, interoperability, and alliance compatibility. Brands function as anchors of trust in a highly sensitive and politically charged market. At the same time, history shows that some weapons systems escape the pure B2B context and diffuse culturally. The Kalashnikov arms conglomerate demonstrated early on, with the AK-47, what it means when a destructive product becomes a globally recognizable brand—robust, cheap, iconic. Contemporary systems, such as military drones or surveillance technologies, likewise migrate into civilian applications: policing, border control, private security markets. Destruction generates adjacent markets. These products are expensive, complex, and morally sensitive. Precisely for that reason, they depend on reputation. Trust becomes the central resource. Those who supply weapons deliver not only technology, but political reliability, legal insulation, and moral relief. Branding becomes a prerequisite for market participation. It translates violence into professionalism, death into technology, escalation into innovation logic. The more destructive the product, the greater the communicative effort required to present it as necessary, inevitable, and rational.

Destruction creates space for reconstruction—and brand expansion. Destruction is not the end of value creation, but its transition. Where cities, infrastructure, and living spaces are destroyed, room opens for reordering, redesign, and reinvestment. Reconstruction is the second harvest of war. It requires planning, capital, logistics—and images of a better future. This is where brands enter the scene. Global construction and infrastructure companies such as Vinci, Hochtief, or Bechtel stand as archetypes for the physical reconstruction of roads, ports, energy and water systems. Mobility and transport are organized by system providers such as Siemens Mobility or Alstom, which represent standardized, scalable infrastructure solutions worldwide. At the same time, new markets emerge for housing, tourism, and consumption. International hotel chains such as Marriott International, Hilton, or Accor often function in reconstruction contexts as anchors for investment, employment, and symbolic normalization. Where new urban centers are planned, shopping malls, retail formats, and experience architectures follow, carried by global real estate and consumer brands. Reconstruction is thus not only built but curated. Into this logic also fit brands associated with leisure, exclusivity, and high-end lifestyles. Golf courses, resorts, and gated communities are regular components of large-scale development projects. That models such as those established internationally by the Trump Organization—golf courses as anchor projects for real estate development, hospitality, and tourism—are conceivable here is less an exception than economic routine. Golf functions as an infrastructure symbol: land-intensive, security-dependent, capital-heavy. It marks the transition from battlefield to investment landscape. The phoenix rising from the ashes is no longer a myth. It is a business case—with a master plan, return expectations, and corporate design.

Interim conclusion. These three movements—armament, destruction, reconstruction—form a self-reinforcing cycle. Within it emerges an environment in which strong brands benefit disproportionately. They assume functions far beyond classical differentiation. Brands stabilize expectations in situations of radical uncertainty; they reduce political and administrative friction costs and make complex, morally charged decisions communicable. Where violence escalates, they provide continuity; where order disintegrates, they promise structure. By translating war, destruction, and reconstruction into familiar narratives—security, innovation, sustainability, future viability—they turn existential violence into economic normality. They depoliticize killing by professionalizing it, technologizing it, and embedding it in business models. The business of death does not expand in a vacuum; it is accompanied by brands that structure it, legitimize it, and render it compatible. Today this increasingly occurs under the pleasing label of purpose. What once appeared as power politics or armament now presents itself as a contribution to resilience, responsibility, or future security. Purpose functions less as a moral compass than as linguistic softening. It overlays hardness with meaning, endows destruction with intention, and transforms structural violence into a question of the right attitude. Branding thus becomes an ordering factor in the state of exception—not because it provides orientation, but because it makes disorder manageable. Stability, in this logic, does not arise despite permanent instability, but from it.

None of this, of course, is new. It recalls a classic of Marxist social analysis from the final phase of the post-war boom: Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). In their analysis of monopoly capitalism, they argue that mature capitalist economies structurally tend toward surpluses that can no longer be productively absorbed. To avoid stagnation, the system requires outlets: armament, war, massive state expenditure. From this perspective, the military-industrial complex appears not as a malfunction, but as a functional solution. The (hard-to-digest) theoretical delicacy for connoisseurs of Marxist economic theory lies in the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. As productivity rises, capital intensifies, and markets saturate, profitability comes under structural pressure. War functions in this logic as a radical reset: it destroys capital, forces new demand, and opens temporary windows of return. This is where brands intervene. They ensure that the economic impulse triggered by destruction does not remain episodic but is stabilized over time. Brands stabilize expectations beyond the moment of destruction, extend investment horizons, and integrate state spending programs into long-term business models. By framing war, armament, and reconstruction as security, innovation, resilience, or sustainable development, brands help stabilize the profit phase of a system under return pressure. They translate the state of exception into duration, the event into structure. In this sense, brands are not a side effect of the military-industrial complex, but part of its functional logic: they make destruction compatible, reconstruction calculable, and permanent instability economically productive.

In the end: a modest proposal. Harvard Business Review Press republishes Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy. Donald Trump writes the foreword—about power fantasies, deals, and the art of presenting personal interests as national necessity. Elon Musk contributes the afterword—on tech messianism, megalomania, and the logic of the chainsaw: complexity is not understood but cut apart; contradictions are not negotiated but severed. The book becomes required reading for brand strategists.