Trump’s green light of Saudi F-35s for MBS is only the beginning

President Donald Trump quipped that it would just take just one day for the US to approve the billions in advanced fighter jets, tanks and other weapons that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has pledged to buy.
The process is a bit more complicated.

“It’s already approved, but don’t worry, we have to go through a process. The process will take — Elon knows — the process will take, would you say, 24 hours?” Trump said at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington on Wednesday, directly addressing Elon Musk in the audience and with a nod to the government efficiency drive the president unleashed earlier this year that saw the Tesla CEO taking the reins.


As Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman continued a pageantry-heavy bilateral visit to Washington this week, Trump has boasted that the kingdom will purchase around $142 billion of US military equipment and services. Trump’s approval to sell Saudi Arabia the advanced F-35 fighter jets the kingdom has long coveted was the most high-profile deal the two leaders agreed to in an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday.

A White House fact sheet published Tuesday didn’t detail the purchases beyond references to “nearly 300 American tanks” and “future F-35 deliveries” of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-produced jet, highlighting the boost to the US defense industrial base and workforce. General Dynamics Land Systems referred questions on a potential sale of its Abrams tanks to the US government.

Trump’s green-lighting of the deal also is just one step in a long process.

In remarks Wednesday, the president acknowledged the proposed purchases would be subject to the foreign military sales process, but portrayed that merely as a formality. The foreign military sales process is nonetheless a lengthy one, involving a number of steps and entities that can take many years to result in weapons deliveries.

Following preliminary discussions, a foreign government sends a formal letter of request to purchase US weapons. The outlines of the request are circulated informally to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee and within the State Department and Pentagon. Only after this behind-the-scenes work and a certification by the State Department does the Defense Security Cooperation Agency formally notify Congress of the proposed sale.

While Congress does not approve arms sales, they are subject to a review period during which lawmakers could block a sale. After Trump’s meeting with MBS, as the Saudi royal is known, Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said selling F-35s to Saudi Arabia “raises major concerns about protecting US military technology and the military edge America shares with our allies.”

Following a congressional review, the US government would present a letter of offer and acceptance to the purchasing country, then negotiate the terms with the relevant defense companies.

Another complication on any F-35 sale in the Middle East is the legal requirement for the US to help Israel preserve its “qualitative military edge” over other countries in the region.

Historically, this has been accomplished by providing Israel first access to new defense technologies, as well as more advanced versions of a given platform. On Tuesday, Trump brushed off questions about Israel’s possible objections to Saudi Arabia’s purchase of F-35s, saying the countries are both valued allies and that Saudi Arabia’s jets would be “pretty similar” to Israel’s.

While Trump also agreed to sell F-35s to the United Arab Emirates more than five years ago during his first term, that Gulf state still does not have any of the jets. The Emiratis paused their attempt to buy the platform amid disagreements with the Biden administration, which sought restrictions on its use.

The Congressional Research Service in October 2020 found the UAE request posed a number of challenges, including the potential to degrade Israel’s qualitative military edge, the risk of “technology leakage” to China or Russia and the potential for the UAE to use the aircraft in regional conflicts that may not be in the US national security interest.

The Trump administration is “not as concerned about qualitative military edge for Israel as previous administrations might have been, not because they’re particularly anti-Israel, but because they’re very big on selling stuff and they see that as a major element of what American foreign policy should be,” said Gregory Gause III, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute.