In the bureaucratic language of the U.S. State Department, the agency quietly informed Congress on Friday that it had authorized a $5 billion sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia, and buried in that bureaucratic verbiage is one of the clearest indications to date of just how deep the kingdom has been sucked into America's struggle with Iran. It includes over 10,000 JDAM-ER guidance kits and general-purpose bomb bodies: 5,004 in the KMU-572 version, and 5,000 in the KMU-556 version; it contains an equal number of 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs, plus fuzes and target detectors, and the logistics tail that keeps an air force flying.

Boeing is the prime contractor. The long-range wing kit is at the core of the deal and extends the glide range of a standard JDAM by about three times that of an F-15, thereby allowing Saudi F-15s to release weapons from more than 45 miles and avoid being intercepted by Iranian and allied militiamen's air defense systems.

That's the story, Saudi Arabia has not sought this kind of power projection outside the country, but sought it because its own country has been under attack by drones and missiles fired by Iranian forces and by the Yemen's Houthis since Washington and Israel began their war on Iran earlier this year. Polytechnic independent estimates from defense researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate that Saudi precision-munitions stocks are now being depleted more rapidly than they can be replenished by “standard” peacetime orders.

The JDAM sale came on the heels of a previous sale. The same notification included in a $750 million contract for Honeywell-manufactured AGT-1500 engines for the Saudi Arabia's M1 Abrams fleet, and a separate clearance was issued for $188 million in F-16 sustainment work to Oman, which has been a contentious mediator between Washington and Tehran this year as President Trump has occasionally threatened their way as well. By adding it all up, it means the State Department has approved about $6.1 billion in Middle East arms sales in one day.

This comes on top of the arms package valued at more than $100 billion which Trump mentioned in his visit to Saudi Arabia in May that he would be looking at for the Saudis, a civil nuclear cooperation agreement, the so-called 123 Agreement, that Washington says will lay the foundation for a "decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership," and a sale of AIM-120C-8 air-to-air missiles to the Saudis valued at $3.5 billion, announced just days ago by the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency to Congress.

None of this is occurring in isolation and it is important to reflect on what the reality of this is actually. “Regional stability” and “interoperability” are words that have been used by every administration since the 1980s to describe such sales as these, and it's hard to tell that the State Department has used a different set of terms from Obama officials, who invoked the language a decade ago in reference to Riyadh, or from Bush officials, who used the language prior to that.

The backdrop is different: war in a major non-NATO Ally, depleted stockpiles and Congress seems to have no interest in voicing any objections at this time, unlike 2016 when lawmakers froze sales of precision-guided munitions in the Yemen war as a result of the civilian death toll. There is no mention of Yemen's ceasefire that has been in place since 2022, which is a tacit admission that the pretense that Saudi Arabia should not be arming Riyadh is no longer politically viable.

There's also a pretty straightforwardly commercial angle, one that gets lost in the geopolitical context. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) has reported that Saudi Arabia has been the biggest or second biggest importer of arms in the world, making between 70 percent to 90 percent of the total arms imports from U.S. arms suppliers over the past decade.

These military budgets, swollen with oil revenues, have for years served as some of the more reliable pipelines bringing petrodollars back into the industrial base of the United States: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and now, Honeywell all take a sip from those pipelines, and a $5 billion order isn't a rounding error, even for an enterprise the size of Boeing whose aerospace business has been struggling with its own problems. So, viewed from this perspective, the JDAM agreement is at the same time a security assurance, a diplomatic message, and an export order that ensures the continued operation of American production lines and jobs in defense manufacturing.

The more difficult query that doesn't get discussed in the press releases is where does this stop? No matter who is in the crosshairs, sending precision munitions to an active theatre of conflict at this magnitude tends to further a war rather than help to solve it, and the US-Saudi arms relationship has been marked by the mantra of "restock now, ask about restraint later" since well before Iran's recent emergence as the flashpoint of the moment.

Congress will be given a statutory six-month period to object, but lawmakers will have no reason to do so, and the shipment will proceed on a timeframe that the State Department has yet to reveal. It's a simple equation for Riyadh: it requires the bombs it's losing more quickly than it can replace. The logic is the same for everyone else, including Washington, though it's not usually expressed in public: An ally at war is a paying customer and, in these times of American foreign policy, that's not one of the equations that's easy to solve.