110 Children and $25 Billion in One Day, Ask Yourself Who This War Is For

The school in Minab had been separated from the adjacent IRGC compound by perimeter walls since at least 2016. The satellite imagery existed. On February 28, someone decided it didn't matter.

110 children were killed that day, 66 boys and 54 girls, along with 26 teachers and four parents. The U.S. military's preliminary investigation later confirmed the strike relied on outdated intelligence processed through AI targeting tools. Amnesty International has called for a public investigation, criminal accountability, and reparations. The administration has not committed to any of those.

On that same day, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX rose between 4% and 6%. Their combined shareholder gain in a single trading session: $25 to $30 billion.

That is not a side effect of the war. That is the business model.

The First 100 Hours

When the United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran on February 28, the U.S. spent an estimated $5.2 billion in the first 100 hours, roughly $1.2 billion per day, mostly in munitions that will need to be replaced, at taxpayer expense, through contracts with the same firms whose stocks surged the moment the bombs started falling.

The CEOs of RTX, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, and others have since agreed to quadruple production of what the Pentagon calls "high-end weaponry." Between 2020 and 2025, those same firms spent $110 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, more than double what they invested in actual production capacity. They spent a decade paying shareholders rather than building the arsenal. Now taxpayers are being asked to fund the replenishment at emergency scale.

This is where the school and the stock ticker connect. The system that produced the Minab strike, rushed intelligence, AI-assisted targeting, contractors incentivized by volume, is the same system that just made its shareholders $25 billion richer in a single session. The children in Minab are not a tragic exception to how this works. They are how it works.

What the Coverage Missed

The school bombing has been reported, but treated as a discrete tragedy rather than a window into how this war is being run. Almost no outlet has connected the Minab strike to the AI targeting confirmation, the outdated intelligence finding, and the shareholder windfall in the same sentence. Those are not three stories, they are one story about who bears the cost of American military decisions and who collects the return.

THE GAP

What the mainstream coverage missed:

The financial and human costs of this war are being reported in separate rooms. Business coverage tracks the defense sector rally. Foreign policy coverage tracks the strikes. Neither is asking who designed a targeting system that couldn't distinguish a school from a military compound, or why the firms building that system collected $25 billion on the day it failed. That is not an oversight, it's a choice about what counts as news.

WHO PROFITS

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, and Boeing collected a combined $25 to $30 billion in shareholder value on the first day of strikes. Their executives have since committed to quadrupling production on federal contracts. The children in Minab have no earnings call.

Working people pay in taxes. Working people die in wars. The people who profit from both are not in the schools in Minab, and they are not in the airport lounge at Newark. They are on the earnings call.

FURTHER READING

Want to go deeper? These are the sources worth your time.

• For the accountability demand: US Must Be Held Accountable for Minab School Strike — Amnesty International
• For the financial picture: Weapons Makers Cash In on Trump's Iran War — Responsible Statecraft
• For the full contractor breakdown: Which US and Israeli Military Companies Are Profiting from the Iran War — Al Jazeera
• For the systemic argument: Defense Contractors Stand to Profit Off the Iran War — Jacobin