America's military planners are quietly preparing to transit one of their biggest arms sales to Israel ever through Washington, and the figures are hard to interpret other than as a gauge of how long America thinks the region's conflict will persist. This week, multiple U.S. officials confirmed that a $2.8 billion arms sale would provide Israel with a total of 40,000 two-thousand-pound MK-84 general purpose bombs and BLU-117 hardened bombs, as well as 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads designed to pierce through reinforced concrete and buried structures. The Washington Post broke the story Tuesday, and soon was followed by Reuters, which quoted another official confirming the numbers independently.

What's interesting about this package is not that it's so big, although for a relationship noted for its large arm movement, it's still kind of big. The timing and the financing system. The bulk of the transaction should be handled through Foreign Military Financing, in which American taxpayers effectively finance Israel's acquisition of American-made arms, to the benefit of the U.S. defense manufacturers, while the U.S. is reducing its own stockpiles, which are used for other contingencies.

That's important more than the usual amount, as the Pentagon already admits of a munitions shortage directly related to the seven-month conflict with Iran. Last month the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the conflict has cost the U.S. about $38 billion through now, rising by $3 billion per month, primarily as a result of munitions being fired and then having to be replaced. The CBO also predicted the war would drive inflation up by half a percentage point in the first quarter of next year, a relatively small number on the surface but one that comes at a politically sensitive time of a war that the White House has to defend the affordability of.

The bombs have a history of their own and this sale will be an indicator of how far Washington is prepared to go. Joe Biden's administration halted shipments of the MK-84 and its penetrating siblings in 2024, fearing the weapons could inflict "excessive civilian suffering" in dense urban areas in Gaza. That interlude was short-lived, however, when Donald Trump returned to the presidency in early 2025 and shipments have continued to roll off the assembly lines since that time: more than 35,000 identical bombs were sold in a single year, worth $2.04 billion, without going through the standard congressional review procedure, and an additional $6.67 billion in approvals were issued in January. With this new $2.8 billion tranche, the administration will have approved nearly $12 billion for the most significant munitions sales to Israel in about 18 months, a faster rate than ever during the Biden years, even during the peak of the Gaza campaign.

The Post spoke with rights researchers and former ordnance experts who were blunt about the real-world impacts of these weapons. A two-thousand pound bomb doesn't care if a fighting position is under it or the building surrounding it, it is meant to destroy the building. In dense urban areas, Israel's rules of engagement can never be expected to be able to deal with munitions of this scale in a responsible way, and more contentiously, whether the targets Israel is selecting are legitimate military targets in the first place,” wrote Brian Finucane from the International Crisis Group.

In the past three years, documentary evidence and independent forensic investigations of strike sites has shed light on the distance between the stated goals of Israel's operations and what they actually achieve, which has intensified the debate over whether the campaign is aimed at civilians.Although Israel has always denied that its operations are aimed at civilians, this has been the subject of debate, and the gap between the stated goals and what is actually being achieved has grown larger as documentary evidence and independent forensic analysis of strike sites has accumulated in the past three years.

In terms of politics, the sale falls in the middle of a realignment in the Democratic coalition on Capitol Hill. Only five months ago, a record 63 percent of the Senate Democratic caucus, including those who have not been known as Israel skeptics, voted for a series of resolutions to try to block the earlier $8.8 billion bomb package that would never have been possible two years ago. The trend line is clear, and even with the Senate's math it is likely that this latest $2.8 billion request will not pass with ease, though it is clear that it will not pass without a fight.

It's also a regional dimension. The sale follows as Gulf capitals brace for Houthis' missile threats, Saudi Arabia discusses retaliating against attacks on its east-west oil pipeline and shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has been reduced. All of those pressures make it imperative, in Washington's view, to continue to maintain Israel's weapons stockpiles as a deterrent to the Iranian axis of evil working on several fronts at once. But it also means American taxpayers are paying for this expansion of an escalating multi-theater conflict at a time when the CBO's inflation warning makes it clear the war is starting to have impact on the domestic economy that voters will feel at the grocery store, gas pump before they feel at a line item in a defense appropriations bill.