President Trump says the arms deal he struck with Saudi Arabia last year is among the largest in history and that the U.S. would be foolish to walk away over the kingdom’s alleged role in the possible murder of Washington-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“I do think this: That I worked very hard to get the order for the military. It’s $110 billion. I believe it’s the largest order ever made. It’s 450,000 jobs. It’s the best equipment in the world,” Trump said at the White House this month.
For now, the public may have to take his word for it.
Few details have been released on what U.S. weapons contracts the Saudis have signed or may sign. It could be years before a fuller picture emerges and the president’s claim on the value of those sales can be verified.
Determining the status and details of arms sales to the Saudis and other foreign nations is often “fiendishly complicated stuff,” said Richard Aboulafia, the vice president of analysis at the Teal Group, a Virginia-based aerospace and defense consulting firm.
Government policy and nondisclosure agreements keep many of the specifics of the long and complex process of selling U.S. weapons out of public view.
Meanwhile, Congress is complicating the outlook for Trump’s Saudi Arabia deal. Lawmakers are lining up in opposition to any new sales in the wake of Khashoggi’s disappearance and suspected murder this month after entering a Saudi consulate in Turkey.
“I can never do business with Saudi Arabia again until we get this thing behind us,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said during a recent appearance on Fox News Channel.
A batch of potential deals worth billions of dollars has already made it through Congress. For example, the U.S. is working to finalize contracts on about $14.5 billion of those deals for “helicopters, tanks, ships, weapons, and training,” all since the president announced his major arms deal during a trip to Riyadh in May 2017.
The figure comes from a rare Pentagon statement on what are called Letters of Offer and Acceptance, or LOAs, with the kingdom. The LOAs, which are typically not made public, are among the final steps before a contract is signed and weapons are delivered. The Pentagon declined to give any more details on the specific arms involved in the negotiations.
“The U.S. government does not provide a country-by-country breakdown in open [foreign military sales] cases due to requests from our partners to not disclose the information,” Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael wrote in an email.
The Trump administration’s potential sales are already brisk, but not yet near achieving historic levels. The Pentagon said the original $110 billion estimate on the president’s deal is anticipated to occur over the next decade.
For a comparison, the biggest single year for Saudi arms was 2012 with $35 billion in agreements, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. A total of about $64 billion in deals was made during the Obama administration.
Trump’s deal with Saudi Arabia was from the beginning mostly “aspirational,” as Aboulafia put it.
About $24 billion of its total value was linked to actual sales proposals floated previously by the Obama administration and already cleared through Congress.
The rest of Trump’s deal — about $86 billion — was based on a broad understanding with the Saudis that they wanted to make future purchases from U.S. companies to bolster air and missile defense, border security, counter-terrorism operations, and other national security concerns.
It remains unclear how many of those earlier Obama deals are part of the Trump administration’s contract negotiations due to government and contractor secrecy.
Among the six holdover deals was a potential $11 billion sale of Lockheed Martin Freedom-variant littoral combat ships to the kingdom.
Trump’s State Department has since cleared nearly $20 billion worth of additional Saudi arms proposals through Congress, which is in addition to the Obama deals. The lion’s share of those new deals could come from the $15 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, to the kingdom, which was noticed to lawmakers a year ago.
“The Russians are flirting with the Saudis on a sale of the S-400 missile system, which, as with Turkey, would greatly complicate the THAAD sale,” Joel Johnson, executive director-international for the Teal Group, wrote in an email.
Lockheed declined to comment on the status of the THAAD or the littoral combat ship deals. The Saudis told the contractor they planned to buy more than $28 billion worth of its air and missile defense systems, combat ships, and tactical aircraft and helicopters, Lockheed said in May 2017 when Trump announced his arms deal.
Contract signings usually come three to five years after Congress is notified of a potential deal and first delivery of arms is often another three to five years later, Johnson said.
Getting deals through Capitol Hill is a key step in the arms sale process, though it’s just the midpoint in the negotiating process. After Khashoggi’s suspected murder, lawmakers could serve as a chokepoint for the Trump administration’s big sales goal.
Graham is just one of many prominent senators on both sides of the aisle who have expressed outrage with Saudi Arabia over the incident. Turkish officials allege Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate and dismembered.
“It appears that this was a grotesque and obscene act by the elements within Saudi Arabia,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “So the first step, I think, is to determine exactly what happened. That, I believe, requires a thorough international investigation, not something that the Saudis will do.”
Most importantly, Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have made it clear the chamber is in no mood to allow any new arms sales.
The committee weighs arms sales proposed by the State Department and can block them. Menendez blocked the sale of precision-guided munitions to the Saudis in June, for instance, due to concerns over their handling of the Yemen war and reports of bombings that have killed civilians.
No deals are currently on deck, but the State Department holds informal discussions with lawmakers and tries to be certain an arms proposal will pass unopposed before filing a formal notification to Congress.
Lawmakers could call a vote on any proposal that gets noticed, as they did last year with an earlier Saudi deal. That proposal passed but any vote now could put the Trump administration at risk of a painful public defeat as outrage over Khashoggi runs high.
“They might decide that they can’t risk such a vote and won’t make a request,” Reed said. “The reality is the Saudis spend a great deal on our support and I don’t think they are going to find anything comparable.”
