Ten arms sales notices reached public inspection in a single batch this morning, and the two largest of them are 800 air-to-air missiles for Qatar and 20,000 guidance sections for Saudi Arabia
Ten arms sales notifications went on to public inspection at the Federal Register at 08:45 on Thursday morning, in one batch, all of them dated 25 August and all signed by the same liaison officer.
Five are new. Under section 36(b)(1) of the Arms Export Control Act, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress of proposed letters of offer to Singapore, Kuwait, Greece, Norway and Saudi Arabia. Their stated totals are $22.3m, $484m, $80.1m, $270m and $1.96bn. Added together that is $2.82bn, which is this desk's sum of the five value blocks rather than a figure any of the documents prints.
The Saudi case is the largest new one
Saudi Arabia is down for up to 10,000 air-to-air guidance sections and up to 10,000 air-to-ground guidance sections for the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, a kit that turns an unguided rocket into a guided one. Major defence equipment accounts for $1.35bn of the $1.96bn total and the rest is launchers, warheads, rocket motors, fuzes, training and support. The principal contractor named is BAE Systems of Nashua, New Hampshire.
The notification says the sale would improve the security of a major non-NATO ally and augment Saudi operational aircraft. That is the document's own justification language and it is where this item leaves it.
The largest number in the batch is not a new sale at all
Four of the ten are not proposed sales. They are reports under section 36(b)(5) that something has been added to a case Congress was told about years ago, and one of them dwarfs every new case in the batch.
Qatar was notified in November 2018 of 40 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles at an estimated $215m. In October 2019 that grew to $692m. This week's transmittal adds up to 800 more AMRAAMs, in the C-7 or C-8 variant, plus 50 guidance sections. The new items alone are put at $2.09bn, which takes the case to a revised $2.782bn. A case first sized at $215m is now roughly thirteen times that, on this desk's division of the two published figures.
The other three additions are small by comparison. Georgia swaps 46 Javelin command launch units for 30 lighter ones and its case rises $7m to $37m. Sweden adds ten instrumented AMRAAM test vehicles inside an unchanged $605m. Poland adds up to five inert JASSMs with test kits for its F-16 flight test programme, inside an unchanged $1.77bn.
Two documents, one transmittal
Two of the ten are the same notification. Document 2026-17559 and document 2026-17560 both carry Transmittal 0C-23, both name the Government of Georgia, and both report the same Javelin swap and the same $37m. Compared after normalising whitespace, the two texts differ in two places: one says the notification "is provided" and the other says it "is being provided", and one hyphenates self-defence across a line break. Neither document explains why there are two of them, and neither does this item.
What the rest of the batch buys
Kuwait's $484m contains no major defence equipment at all. It is sustainment for a fleet: modification equipment, aircraft parts, ground handling gear, jet fuel and engineering support for its C-17 transports, with Boeing as the principal contractor.
Norway and Singapore both arrive here for the same procedural reason. Each had a case sitting below the threshold at which Congress must be notified, $99.99m for Norway's 155mm high explosive projectiles and $12.4m for Singapore's 43 Hellfire missiles, and each asked to add enough to cross it. Crossing the line requires notification of the whole programme, not the increment, which is why a $270m and a $22.3m figure appear for cases that were already running.
Greece is the only purchaser in the batch drawing on Foreign Military Financing rather than paying entirely from its own budget. It is down for 350 Switchblade 300 Block 20 loitering munitions and 35 fire control systems, with AeroVironment named as the contractor.
A section 36(b) notice is a notification of a proposed sale. None of these is a contract, and the documents say so.
