// METHODOLOGY

Company Scoring

A name is not automatically a score.

We judge companies by the same two questions. What did this company actually produce, and how well did it do it. We did not start here with a formula either. Measuring a defense company's size by its revenue, its headcount, or how many countries it sells to is easy and misleading. A company with a large revenue may simply keep selling a handful of old designs. A small company may be the best in the world at something nobody else has noticed.

Right now we hold two layers for companies. One is a manually assigned tier, S, A, or B, which roughly summarizes that company's real weight in the defense industry. A major prime contractor and a smaller subcontractor cannot sit at the same tier, even if both do their own job well. The second is a single overall score from zero to one hundred, exactly like weapons and countries. We give that score the same way too. Not the company's reputation, but the real quality, consistency, and actual influence of what it produces.

Let us be straightforward. The company side is the youngest part of this site. Weapons and countries carry a system we have corrected, learned from, and pushed forward dozens of times over. Companies have not reached that maturity yet. The tiers and scores you see right now came out of a first pass. Once we finish a full round of company scoring, we will rewrite this page as well. What we are telling you here is our most honest version of today. It may change tomorrow.

What we look at when judging a company is not the single weapon it produced today. Its consistency across years. Whether it can reproduce the same quality of design again and again. Whether it has an innovation that genuinely sets it apart from its rivals. Whether it survives on state support or actually competes. All of this rests on evidence, not reputation. A big company's name does not automatically translate into a high score.

We give you the same promise here as everywhere else. A company paying us, a sponsorship deal, or buying advertising never shifts its score by so much as a point. Our independence holds here too.

Weapon Scoring Country Scoring