For more than three years, Raytheon, a major US defense contractor, has been aiding and abetting war crimes in Yemen, manufacturing the world’s worst humanitarian crises and profiting upon the bodies of Yemeni children torn apart by their bombs.
Largely hidden from the public, billions of dollars have been made by American arms manufactures in the US backed war in Yemen. As a result, the Saudis are able to deliberately produce massive civilian causalities, using Raytheon’s weapons with the purpose of starving the people of Yemen and depriving them of life saving medicine.
With one Yemeni child dying every ten minutes, without the help of Raytheon, the Saudis would not be as successful as they are now; at the same time Raytheon also benefits from that success, seeing a sharp rise in their share prices, because when civilian death toll rises, so do Raytheon’s stocks.
This can be quite difficult for many Americans to stomach, but the sad truth is that the Saudi airstrikes on Yemen have correlated with the dramatic rise in Raytheon’s share price; in the three years the war has been active, Raytheon’s stocks rose by 94 percent, from $108.44 per share in 2015 to $210.70 in 2018.
Remnants of missiles from Saudis have been retrieved which trace back to Raytheon, hundreds of civilian deaths have been confirmed from these discoveries alone. Considering the fact that Raytheon’s weapons have been used to target weddings, civilian homes, water drilling rigs, and funeral ceremonies, the high rate of civilian deaths is not as surprising.
In April, the Saudis launched a missile at a wedding in northern Yemen, 23 people were killed with the majority of causalities being women and children. The missiles were later shown to come from Raytheon’s factory in southern Arizona, and four days after the attack, Raytheon’s quarterly earnings rose to $633 million for $2.20 per share.
Bombing civilians in order to make the Houthis surrender appears to be the Saudi’s intent. In 2016, a missile manufactured by Raytheon hit a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, killing 11, including a staff member. Shortly after, Doctors Without Borders was forced to flee the country, making the humanitarian crises much worse.
Despite all these atrocities, the US government continues to supply the Saudis with arms for their assault on Yemen. In 2017 Saudi Arabia agreed to $7 billion worth of munitions from Raytheon and Boeing. On top of that, the US military is also providing the Saudis with mid air fueling and giving them the exact coordinates of where to bomb. All the while weapons manufactures idly sit back making a killing profit off of the killing of children.
Marcelo Guadiana writes for the Borgen Project and RouserNews, focusing on war and poverty. He is a senior at UMass Boston a B.A. in economics.
