The employment of private security contractors in Afghanistan soared during former President Donald Trump’s tenure to nearly 6,000.

Almost 17,000 contractors operated in Afghanistan, according to documents prepared for Congress by the Defense Department earlier this year ahead of the withdrawal. This number dropped to 7,800 as of July.

In the months leading to the end of the 20-year war, major defense companies were awarded contracts in Afghanistan worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In terms of lives lost, contractors paid a higher price than U.S. service members since the beginning of the U.S.’s longest war. About 3,814 contractors had been killed in Afghanistan as of late 2019, compared with approximately 2,300 troops, according to the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.

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Afghan government relied on foreign military contractors and trainers to function, said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in March.

The three largest defense companies in the world are all U.S. companies. Their combined revenue accounts for 1 percent of the $10 trillion U.S. GDP, according to the CIA World Factbook.

The price of shares in several of the world’s largest defense contractors sank in August as the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan led investors to reassess their commitments to beneficiaries of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Here are the five military contractors that ate up as much as $2 trillion of the money the U.S. Treasury spent in Afghanistan over the last two decades.

Lockheed Martin

Based in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defense contractor that deals in global security and aerospace products. It employs about 114,000 people worldwide.

Lockheed made $65.4 billion in sales in 2020. If you bought and held $10,000 of this company’s stock in 2001, it’s now valued at $133,559.21.

Lockheed is best known for its Black Hawk helicopters which were widely used in the Afghan war. The big bucks for Lockheed come from contracts for the F-35 stealth fighter ($12 billion in the current budget alone), the combat systems for Aegis cruiser ships, and lots of electronics for command-control, cyberwar, and space communications.

Boeing

Boeing is best known for its commercial airliners but its big-ticket defense contracts relate to the B-1 bomber, B-52s, C-17 cargo jet, V-22 Osprey vertical take-off aircraft, and F-15 and F-18 fighters. All were in Afghanistan.

“Seeing first-hand how these troops count on Boeing ought to make us redouble our efforts to ensure we give them the best equipment we can,” said Brian Nelson, a spokesman for Integrated Defense Systems at Boeing, after a visit to Afghanistan in 2009.

Raytheon

Raytheon Technologies Corporation, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is an aerospace and defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military, and government customers worldwide. It has 195,000 employees worldwide who work in avionics, cybersecurity, directed energy, electric propulsion, hypersonic, and quantum physics.

Until 2020, it was known as Raytheon Company before it merged with the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses to become the third-largest defense contractor in the world.

Apart from selling weapons to governments across the world it also offered military training in Afghanistan. Its big contracts were for a new nuclear cruise missile, strategic missile defense systems, and a lot of projects dealing with sensors, satellites, electronics, and cyberwar.

General Dynamics

General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics is a defense and Information technology contractor headquartered in Reston, Virginia. It was awarded a task to provide information technology management services in Afghanistan to support the U.S. Army corps of Engineers (USACE) Middle East District reconstruction and infrastructure development programs.

The task order was awarded under the IT enterprise solutions contract and had a potential value of $32 million over five years. It also had multibillion-dollar contracts for nuclear submarines, Burke-class destroyer ships, and on the commercial side, Gulfstream jets.

Northrop Grumman Corp

Founded in 1939, Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products, and solutions in aerospace, electronics, information systems, and technical services to government and commercial customers worldwide. Northrop Grumman’s Europe air traffic management systems subsidiary, Northrop Grumman Park Air Systems, was awarded a contract by NATO to provide a second air traffic control receiver site for Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan.

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Karpinksi always contended that she was sacrificed (and revelations since bear her out) and that the torture in part had been put into motion in part by interrogators supplied by the private defense contractor CACI. There is still hope, a thin thread, however, that CACI will be punished for its complicity in the torture, which not only included the aforementioned, Geneva Convention-violating atrocities, but according to the 13-year-old Center for Constitutional Rights suit on behalf of three former detainees: sensory deprivation, beatings, tasering, withholding of food and water, electric shocks, and sexual abuse.

We know that the so-called “torture memos” drafted by John Yoo, then-Assistant Attorney General in the Bush Administration, were used to set the gears in motion for what was called “harsh interrogation techniques” and U.S. detention centers across the Global War on Terror. We know Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller oversaw the Guantanamo Bay prison, at which there were widespread accusations of similar abuse. Evidence suggests that his deployment to Abu Ghraib to “Gitmoize” the Iraqi hellhole was instigated by none other than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Apparently, mission accomplished.

CACI has denied all allegations and has contended that as a government contractor it is immune from lawsuits anyway, but in June the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear its appeal, and the case is finally headed to trial. CACI had managed to get this case tossed out at least twice but it was reinstated upon appeal. They are trying for a third time, but at a hearing on Friday, the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case seemed skeptical. So are we. We know how much the contractor has benefitted from our wars after 9/11 and how much money it put into lobbying for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan.