Section 01 · Find Your Metro
Each Metro Has Its Own National Security Economy
Search your metro to see what its national security economy holds, who holds it, how it compares, and where its work travels.
About this dashboard
For a region, national security spending is demand for capabilities it already holds or can credibly build — production, innovation, logistics, sustainment, frontier technologies — and that demand generates spillovers across the wider regional economy. It is not a sector; it cuts across several at once. Whether it turns into growth depends on whether a region's production, its innovation and the ecosystem supporting them are aligned closely enough to reinforce each other — and on how many firms hold that capability, not only how many dollars arrive.
Every region ends up with a national security economy of a different size, profile and role — and that shapes what it can build next.
Department of Defense Spending by Metro
Where Recipients Are Based
Virginia Beach–Chesapeake–Norfolk, VA–NC
The National Security Economy · New Localism Associates & Punto Labs · data as of September 2026 · draft
Virginia Beach–Chesapeake–Norfolk, VA–NC · Full Profile
Composition · leading categories
Top Contractors
Work Sent Out
Top Stakeholders
Work Brought In
Prime awards (contracts and grants) from USASpending.gov, processed at transaction level, annual average FY2024–FY2025. The base is enhanced with assets mapped by hand from official federal sources — national and federal laboratories, military bases and installations, research centers and universities, and offices such as the Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Logistics Agency. Shares are of the region's tracked allocations and cannot be added across dimensions: one award can belong to more than one category.
Section 02 · National Picture
The National Security Economy at a Glance
Explore how the national security economy breaks down, and which capabilities the country is buying at scale.
About this view
The national security economy covers every firm, university, laboratory, federal facility and institution performing federally funded security work, domestic and foreign. This view sorts every tracked dollar five ways — the function it performs, the kind of organization behind it, the domain it serves, the technology it supports and the component that awarded it — and names the top national recipients driving each.
Read it as a map of which capabilities the country is buying, and how concentrated each one is. Categories overlap by construction: a single award can be logistics and software at once.
- Allocations tracked
- — annual avg.
- Areas ranked
- — metro & micro areas
- Assets mapped
- 57,698 facility-level
- Period
- FY2024–25 data as of September 2026
Section 03 · Metro Rankings
The Geography of America's Security Economies
Start by choosing a ranking, then explore how metros are positioned within the national security economy.
About these rankings
The position a metro holds in the national security economy depends on how it is measured. These rankings make it possible to see the top performers along different dimensions, each with a distinct role to play. The two headline rankings measure different things: Metro Giants ranks metros by the size of the security economy they hold, while High-Intensity Metro Leaders ranks by what that economy weighs against the population around it. Within each, different cuts of this economy bring different leaders to the surface.
The map shows where the leading metros sit; the table gives the figures behind them. Cuts by activity, sector, technology, organization type and DoD component apply to the total-allocations ranking.
The Picture Behind This Ranking
How this cut is measured
Department of Defense Spending by Metro
About the data
What We Measure
Read the decisions behind every figure — what each one includes, and what it leaves out.
What is in it
The national security economy is shaped by more than one department. This dashboard is built to carry defense, energy and space spending side by side — same metros, same two lenses, same cuts. Only defense-related spending is loaded today. Within it, the database covers every firm, university, laboratory, federal facility and institution performing federally funded security work, domestic and foreign, regardless of where that work is performed.
The three sources
Loaded
Defense — awards from the Department of War, coded as Department of Defense in the source data.
Announced
Energy — Department of Energy awards: the national laboratories, nuclear security and the facilities behind them.
Announced
NASA — NASA awards.
The total in detail
Counted once
Each award is counted once, where its recipient is based. When a firm based in one metro performs work in another, the dollars appear in both metros' profiles but only once in the national total.
Excluded
$15.2B performed abroad by foreign-based firms — under 3% of DoD-funded spending, with no direct implication for firms or activity in the United States.
Not comparable to
The ~$1 trillion DoD obligates annually across all mechanisms — personnel compensation, classified spending, working capital funds and awards outside the U.S. all sit outside this database.
What counts as one thing
The unit of analysis is the asset: an institution or operational unit operating at a single physical location in the United States. An organization with several locations counts as several assets — which is what makes bottom-up regional aggregation possible.
The four families of asset
Firms
Defense contractors, and where data permits, their subcontractors.
Research
Universities and colleges receiving DoD funding; DoD laboratories, FFRDCs and University Affiliated Research Centers.
Federal presence
Military bases and other federal installations; acquisition commands, DLA offices and Defense Innovation Unit offices.
Innovation intermediaries
Accelerators, incubators and defense-focused venture capital firms.
Which region a dollar belongs to
A firm headquartered here may perform its work three states away; a firm headquartered elsewhere may run the shipyard downtown. Both are real and they answer different questions, so the dashboard carries two lenses and never adds them together. This is the single decision that changes a region’s position most.
The two lenses
Lens 1 · default
Where recipients are basedRecipient location
Attributes each award to the metro where the receiving entity is based, regardless of where the work is carried out. It measures the region's business footprint — the firms and institutions legally and managerially anchored there, including those winning work elsewhere.
What it lets a region decide
- Which employers to retain, and which are exposed to a single programme
- Where supplier-development money would actually reach local firms
- Which workforce pipelines match the companies already headquartered here
Lens 2
Where the work is performedPlace of performance
Attributes each award to the metro where the funded work physically happens, including work carried out by firms headquartered elsewhere. It measures activity on the ground — jobs, facilities, installations and throughput.
What it lets a region decide
- Which outside primes are already operating here and could be anchored
- Where land, utilities and infrastructure investment would follow demand
- How much local activity would leave if a single facility relocated
The two lenses overlap and are not additive: the same award can appear in one metro under recipient location and in another under place of performance. Reading only one produces a systematically wrong picture — a region can look strong because it hosts work it does not own, or weak because its firms deliver elsewhere. National totals combine both, counting every recipient based in the United States plus firms based abroad performing work here.
How every dollar is sorted
Every dollar is sorted five ways: the functional role an asset plays, the kind of organization behind it, the defense domain it serves, the critical technology it supports, and the agency component that awarded it. Classification draws on Product and Service Codes, NAICS codes, award descriptions, keyword methods and curated desk review.
The five dimensions
Dimension
Activity
The functional role assets play: Production, Logistics & Sustainment, Services, Innovation, Construction and Workforce Training — six categories, not four.
Dimension
Organization type
The kind of organization behind each asset: prime contractors, small businesses, universities, federal labs, military installations, innovation intermediaries, and more.
Dimension
Sector
The defense domain an asset serves, such as Aircraft & Aviation, Maritime & Shipbuilding, or Munitions & Missile Systems.
Dimension
Technology
The critical or emerging technology area an asset supports, such as Applied Artificial Intelligence or Secure Microelectronics. Tags are assigned by a keyword-based method and read as directional indicators of demand, not as measures of technology development or specialization.
Dimension
Funding agency
The organization that awarded the contract or grant — for defense spending, the military services (Navy, Army, Air Force) and the defense agencies (DARPA, DLA and others). Shown as DoD component in the ranking cuts. Not carried in this draft.
Category definitions
The definitions below are the ones used to assign every award. They are the source database’s own, reproduced unchanged.
When a number is not shown, and what it cannot tell you
Cutting — areas by five dimensions produces cells with very few assets behind them. A figure built on three awards is not wrong, but it is not a rate either, and ranking on it invents precision the data does not carry. The dashboard suppresses those cells and says so. Four further limits apply to every figure on every screen.
The suppression rule
The threshold
A cell is suppressed when it rests on fewer than 10 mapped assets or under $50M in annual allocations. Suppressed cells are shown as —, and a suppressed metro is excluded from the ranking rather than placed last.
Never zero
A suppressed cell is not a zero. Reading it as an absence of activity is the error the rule exists to prevent, which is why the symbol differs from the one used for a true zero.
Where it bites
Narrow cuts of small categories — Workforce training spreads $2.3B across — areas — will suppress heavily. That is the honest output: the category is too thin to rank at metro level.
The four limits
No dollar value
Military installations and many institutional assets appear in asset counts without comparable funding data, which is why the USD and asset views differ.
Overlap
A single asset may be associated with more than one activity, sector or technology. Categories overlap and cannot be summed.
Levels
Award → asset → metropolitan area → national. Assets that cannot be attributed to a metro are excluded from rankings but remain in national totals.
Core sources
USAspending.gov contracts and grants, SBIR/STTR award records, the DoD Base Structure Report, DoD laboratory directories and other official federal sources.
Built by a team including Victoria Orozco, Ari Colombo, Pamela Giachero, Bruce Katz and Michael Saadine.