From Juliet Macur’s remarkable profile of wounded soliders on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times: “Explosions have killed 1,123 American service members in Iraq and have wounded at least 10 times more, often with a devastating combination of injuries — ruptured organs and severed spines, obliterated limbs and burst eyeballs. Among the more than 16,653 Americans wounded in Iraq are 387 amputees.”
From a short item inside the Times’ business section Sunday: “No matter how one feels about this particular conflict, war always has winners and losers — on both sides.” Some “indisputable winners” so far? Defense contractors. Courtesy of the Times, here are six top defense contractors and the percentages by which their profits have increased since 2004: Boeing (37.4 percent), Lockheed Martin (44.2 percent), General Dynamics (19.1 percent), Northrop Grumman (29.2 percent), Raytheon (108.9 percent) and Halliburton (292.9 percent).
