The Big Aerospace & Defense ETF Is Mostly Aerospace

Holdings data as of August 8, 2026, straight from the fund's reported book. Weights are what the ETF actually holds, not estimates.

When people want defense exposure in one ticker, ITA, the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF, is usually the answer. It's the largest, most liquid way to own the group. But pull the holdings and the name is doing some quiet work. This is an aerospace and defense fund where aerospace, the commercial kind, does most of the heavy lifting.

Start with the number that reframes everything. GE Aerospace is 22.75% of the fund. Nearly one in every four dollars sits in a single jet-engine maker. Add RTX at 14.85% and Boeing at 9.30% and the top three holdings are almost 47% of the entire ETF. This is a concentrated fund wearing the costume of a diversified basket. By AlphaOS's own read the concentration risk here is High, with the top ten holdings making up about 76% of the book.

Now the part that surprises people: the pure defense primes are the small positions.

The companies most people picture when they hear "defense stock," the ones that build fighter jets and submarines, sit in the middle of the book, not the top. General Dynamics is 4.33%, Lockheed Martin is 4.01%, and Northrop Grumman is 3.98%. Stack all three together and you get 12.3% of the fund. GE alone, at 22.75%, is nearly double the three of them combined. If your thesis is rising defense budgets flowing to the prime contractors, ITA gives you that, but diluted by a much larger bet on commercial aviation recovering and jet engines shipping.

That commercial-aerospace tilt runs deep. Below the primes you find the parts and materials makers that feed civil aviation as much as defense: Howmet Aerospace at 4.74%, TransDigm at 4.68%, and further down the aftermarket specialist Heico. These are picks-and-shovels for building and maintaining aircraft, and a lot of that demand is airlines, not the Pentagon.

Where ITA does capture the modern face of defense is in its smaller positions, and they're worth knowing. L3Harris at 3.86% is the communications and electronic-warfare name. Rocket Lab at 3.13% is the space-launch bet. Axon at 2.65% is drones, tasers, and the software layer of policing and defense. And BWX Technologies at 1.36% builds the nuclear reactors that power navy submarines and carriers. None of them moves the fund much on its own, but together they're the part of ITA that looks like where defense is going rather than where it's been.

So what are you actually buying? Not a clean bet on the defense primes. ITA is roughly a barbell: a very large weight in commercial-aerospace giants like GE, RTX, and Boeing at one end, and a long tail of primes, parts makers, and modern-warfare names at the other. If you specifically want the fighter-jet-and-submarine trade, you'd own more of it holding GD, LMT, and NOC directly than you get inside ITA. If you want the whole aerospace-and-defense complex with a heavy lean toward civil aviation, ITA is the one-ticker version.

One more connection worth flagging. Defense keeps showing up in places you wouldn't expect. The cybersecurity ETF HACK holds General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman too, treating digital defense and physical defense as one budget line. If you own both a defense ETF and a cyber ETF, check the overlap. Here's what's actually inside the cybersecurity ETFs, and the full ETF library if you want to line ITA up against the rest.