GM CEO Mary Barra’s ability to reinvent herself rivals that of a career politician switching platforms on the campaign trail.
First there was “No More Crappy Cars Mary,” a promise she made on CNBC when she oversaw the automaker’s new product development.
Then there was “Mechanic Mary,” a moniker she earned gracing the cover of TIME in 2014 and vowing to fix General Motors. In 2021, she morphed into “Zero Emissions Mary” and again made the cover of TIME featuring her plans to transform GM into the darling of environmentalists and sell more electric vehicles than Tesla in North America within four years.
Barra’s latest incarnation: “Munitions Mary.”
GM and defense contractor Lockheed Martin, a defense juggernaut whose lethal missiles and bunker-busting bombs are engineered to obliterate fortified enemy strongholds and vaporize target grids, announced last week that they had signed an agreement to explore how GM’s “commercial manufacturing approaches” could be leveraged to support Lockheed’s defense production requirements.
The hypocrisy is almost too rich to parody. For years, GM serenaded Wall Street and the media with its corporate mantra of “Zero Crashes, Zero Congestion, Zero Emissions,” presenting itself as a technology company leading the transition to a cleaner future. The message was intended to position GM as a socially responsible company that checked all the sustainability, ethical impact, and long-term risk management metrics to be considered a socially responsible or ESG stock.
It’s hard to imagine a more anti-ESG stock these days than General Motors. Although Barra insists EVs are GM’s “north star,” the company will long derive its profits from gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs ranked by the EPA among the industry’s least fuel-efficient.
As for social responsibility, GM faces class-action and state attorneys general lawsuits for violating customer privacy, alongside mounting litigation for knowingly selling pricey trucks with faulty engines. In late 2024, its Cruise subsidiary was forced into a federal deferred prosecution agreement for deceiving safety regulators investigating a high-profile robotaxi crash.
Long-term risk management? GM ranks among the market’s most aggressive share repurchasers, burning billions on buybacks while Barra publicly whines that domestic players can’t compete with China’s EV makers because they are unfairly subsidized.
Meanwhile, most vehicles GM sells in Mexico are built on architectures designed and developed by SAIC, its state-owned joint-venture partner in China. GM plans to shift assembly of two of these SAIC-sourced models to its Ramos Arizpe complex—a move that a GM Mexico spokesman recently said, “reinforces a long-term manufacturing commitment to the country.”
So much for “Tariffs Mary,” who said she supported President Trump’s efforts to reshore American manufacturing and then invested $1 billion in GM’s Mexican operations and $600 million in its South Korea operations.
Notably, GM builds three of its most popular U.S.-market EVs in Mexico, vehicles generously subsidized by American taxpayers during the Biden-Harris administration.
Under traditional ESG guidelines, the defense sector was treated as an ethical “red line” right alongside tobacco, gambling, and fossil fuels. Trillion-dollar institutional asset managers and European sustainable funds explicitly barred defense equities from their portfolios.
By entering the munitions manufacturing business, GM has exposed the elasticity of ESG values when geopolitical priorities and business opportunities align.
Barra’s legions of defenders will note that GM has a distinguished history making armaments for the U.S. military, admirably responding to President Roosevelt’s “Arsenal of Democracy” invocation for U.S. manufacturers to shift from consumer goods to mass-producing airplanes, tanks, and weapons to supply the Allied powers during World War II.
Barra’s defenders might also argue that GM has little choice but to acquiesce to Trump’s invocation of the Defense Production Act calling on U.S. manufacturers to help restore America’s depleted munitions in the wake of the Middle East conflict.
That spin would be deceptive.
In 2003, General Dynamics Land Systems purchased GM’s defense business for $1.1 billion, effectively marking the end of the automaker’s foray into defense contracting. In 2017, three years after Barra was named CEO, GM re-entered the military sector and relaunched its GM Defense division.
In the past nine years, GM Defense and General Dynamics Land Systems have actively teamed up to collaborate on major defense projects, including the U.S. Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) competition.
Underscoring Barra’s desire to pursue military business, GM’s board—which Barra chairs and has consistently rubber-stamped her sweeping strategic pivots—in 2023 deepened its military ties by appointing Vice Admiral Jan E. Tighe, a former Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare and the Director of Naval Intelligence, to the company’s board.
What remains to be seen is how the Silicon Valley hotshots overseeing the software-enabled vehicles Barra has spent years touting feel about being drafted into the service of Uncle Sam’s military.
Silicon Valley is hardly a hotbed of American patriotism. Employees at leading technology companies have previously derailed lucrative U.S. military contracts that their management had secured. Indeed, venture capitalist Peter Thiel once railed that Google should have been investigated by the FBI and CIA for its “seemingly treasonous” behavior.
Thiel was referring to Google’s management caving to internal worker protests and refusing to renew its Project Maven artificial intelligence contract with the U.S. military over ethical concerns. At the same time, Google was supporting an AI research lab in Beijing and working on Project Dragonfly—a secretive, heavily censored search engine designed specifically to comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance laws.
While Google’s historic Project Maven mutiny was driven by rank-and-file engineers, the modern AI elite have institutionalized this resistance at the executive level. Look no further than frontier lab Anthropic.
In February 2026, Anthropic locked horns with the Pentagon over a multi-million-dollar contract, establishing two unyielding, contractual “red lines” for its Claude models: a total ban on mass domestic surveillance and a refusal to integrate its AI into fully autonomous, lethal weapons systems.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded Anthropic capitulate to standard “any lawful use” terms, the startup chose its principles over federal gold. The White House promptly retaliated, officially branding the firm a national security “supply-chain risk.”
This globalized demographic mismatch within the tech sector creates staggering vulnerabilities. ProPublica last year exposed that Microsoft was relying on engineers based in China to provide backend maintenance for the Defense Department’s cloud systems—with minimal oversight—leaving sensitive networks vulnerable to espionage from a leading cyber adversary. Remarkably, tech workers raised no public outrage.
While Google and Microsoft employees revolted over the weaponization of abstract cloud software, GM is agreeing to help manufacture the most raw, kinetic form of warfare imaginable: the mass production of heavy armaments.
Getting into the armaments business could prove a double-edged sword for GM. It essentially renders the company “too critical to fail”—providing an implicit national security safety net should its core business again stumble from over-reliance on high-margin trucks and SUVs. It also creates a high-stakes barrier for organized labor, making it far more difficult for the UAW to call a strike at facilities manufacturing critical military ordnance.
However, relying on the Pentagon leaves GM vulnerable to political shifts. A future, pro-labor administration could easily leverage these military contracts to impose sweeping wage increases as a mandatory qualification for doing business—just as the Biden administration previously used the federal procurement system to enforce strict contractor minimums and DEI compliance.
President Trump signed a sweeping Executive Order broadly accusing major defense contractors of sacrificing production capacity, innovation, and on-time delivery to fuel short-term stock buybacks. Given that Lockheed’s stock dropped five percent immediately following the order, it’s a safe bet that Wall Street believed Trump had the company squarely in mind.
In the five-year span from 2021 through 2025, Lockheed returned a staggering $25 billion to shareholders via share repurchases. Rather than reinvesting profits generated from federal contracts into expanding its domestic tooling, upgrading specialized factories, or securing its defense supply chains, Lockheed chose to goose its stock price.
Mary Barra has effectively bested Lockheed on the stock buybacks front, having authorized nearly $30 billion over the past five years for share repurchases. It hasn’t yet dawned on Wall Street that with Trump in office, GM’s buyback machine—which was largely responsible for its price surge—could be put in jeopardy.