Given how the spectacle of Trump going to the Middle East and collecting cash and prizes like his much-hyped $142 billion Saudi arms “deal”, part of a purported $600 billion investment package, and his much-criticized Qatari airplane “gift”, Bloomberg has provided a useful service in picking apart the inflated figures in the arms agreement claim.
Even though it’s important to understand how great the Trump claim inflation is, so that recipients will hopefully apply a large discount any time Trump makes a grand pronouncement, he persists in this behavior because it is an effective form of cognitive anchoring. The public and press will remember the $142 billion, and not any properly haircut figure.
Consider another recent example, Trump’s loud claim that the US acted as a mediator in the India-Pakistan ceasefire talks. Washington Monthly explained how that claim was not only false but actually detrimental:
India and Pakistan have reached a ceasefire in their recent conflict, which significantly decreases the risk of a nuclear war this week. However, the amateur-hour way Donald Trump’s administration handled this crisis increased (if only slightly) the chance of a nuclear exchange down the line. It illustrates why Trump’s everything-is-about-me style of governance isn’t just a harmless embarrassment, but a daily disaster….
First, Trump claimed credit for the ceasefire, boasting that the U.S. had “mediated” it. India issued an immediate denial, but the mistake ran deeper than poaching an honor. In diplomacy, words matter. And as everyone in the region knows, the word “mediate” is a diplomatic landmine. Ever since 1947, India has strenuously rejected outside “mediation” of the Kashmir conflict….
Did the U.S. play an intermediary role in helping India and Pakistan reach a ceasefire agreement? Sure—as did Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, and China (none of which rushed to the microphones to seize credit). As India stated in smacking down Trump’s claim, it was the two parties themselves who reached an accord, not any external actor seeking to impose “mediation.” …
Second, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a far more substantive negotiation than the one approved. Mindful of his boss’s unquenchable thirst to be seen as a master deal-maker, Rubio posted that the two nations had agreed to “talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.” A “broad set of issues” really means “long-term disposition of Kashmir”— or at least that’s how Pakistan wants (and India fears) these words will be interpreted. Did Modi agree to such negotiations, and in response to a terrorist action? Vanishingly unlikely. Did India agree to any talks on any topic? Unlikely, but not impossible, although India immediately denied this, too. So even if Rubio’s statement contained a kernel of truth, any talks were ones India intended to keep secret. Rubio’s decision to spotlight them (if they even existed) stroked Trump’s ego, but at the expense of progress or U.S. credibility….
Another dangerous result of Trump and Rubio’s statements is that they unwittingly promoted Pakistan’s agenda, thereby encouraging a replay of the same hazardous behavior.
There’s more where that came from, but you get the drift of the gist:
Trump’s claims were wildly inflated
His extreme ego needs are harmful to international security
John Helmer has said that the Russians have realized they are negotiating with a cult of personality and have been proceeding accordingly.
But there is another implication: look how many words it took to debunk the Trump claim and question the Rubio follow on (as in either its accuracy or its propriety). How many people pay that much attention, let alone have a tolerance for complex arguments? This is the general problem with bullshit. It takes a minimum of 3x the space, and often more than 10x, to disprove it.
Similarly, a new article in the Financial Times, What has Elon Musk’s Doge actually achieved?, takes a harsh look at the many promises made, from cost savings to transparency, and finds them sorely wanting. The pink paper, as many others have, documents among other things how DOGE grossly inflated cost cuts and took credit for reductions that were already baked in. It even contends the DOGE approach was destined to do more harm than good:
Doge “got off in the wrong direction because it attacked exactly the wrong thing,” says Matt Calkins, chief executive of software company Appian, which powers much of government procurement and has worked with the initiative on some cost-cutting measures.
“Of all the things you could do to affect the government, it would have been better to go after regulation. It would have been better to go after entitlements. Just blowing up jobs was a good way to make enemies, a good way to cause more disruption than progress.”
But this detailed analysis (the full article is very much worth a read) misses a major, if not the point, of DOGE nevertheless advancing the reactionary libertarian agenda of destroying government services. The Big Lie repetition of “fraud” has been effective. Fraud is a risk in all commercial activity, even one to one dealings. The question for any organization is the cost and effectiveness of fraud prevention and mitigation measures. In just about all instances, having anti-abuse measures that are so stringent as to reduce it to zero is too costly, both in terms of hard outlays like staffing, as well as more complex considerations (for businesses, alienating potential customers; for government, greatly restricting delivering services to target populations).
For instance, a long-standing ally of the site casually mentioned of the Trump demolition exercise, that Something (by implication, Something Big) needed to be done. I disputed that contention. With complex systems, like human bodies, even if there is a problem, limited interventions are always preferred to radical ones, so a stent is a better solution (if viable) than a heart replacement. The big reasons include less risk to the patient, lower costs, plus the conservative treatment typically does not preclude more aggressive ones later.
But in keeping with the idea that DOGE was at least in part a messaging operation, we’ve had far too many otherwise intelligent readers pump for a teardown…with no real logic as to why, let alone any clue of what comes next.
Now to Bloomberg on the Saudi arms deal puffery, politely headlined as US-Saudi $142 Billion Defense Deal Sparks Questions, Few Answers. Key extracts:
The Trump administration called its $142 billion defense deal with Saudi Arabia “the largest defense sales agreement in history.” Critics aren’t so sure….
But like the broader $600 billion economic deal that it was a part of, the defense agreement lacked any specifics. And skeptics of the administration immediately pointed to questions around the numbers. One is that Saudi Arabia’s entire defense budget this year is $78 billion, estimated Bruce Riedel, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Yves here. Both the Administration and Congress have a habit of using CBO scoring numbers, which tally total outlays over the next ten years for a particular program or piece of legislation, as the cost, which many news-readers mistakenly treat as expected next-year outlays. But if that was the treatment, there should have been some disclosure, say in a yet-to-be-produced briefing paper.
Back to Bloomberg:
Democratic and Republican administrations alike have a long history of re-purposing previous deals into sweeping, headline-grabbing agreements for presidents to sign during trips. Trump did it before, during his first-term trip to Saudi Arabia in 2017, when he announced the Saudis would spend $110 billion on US weapons to modernize the kingdom’s military.
That package included deals negotiated under the Obama administration and others that were in the initial stages of a lengthy process requiring congressional approval and negotiations between the buyer and defense contractors. To date, the 2017 deal has yielded more than $30 billion in implemented foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia, according to a State Department fact sheet in January….
If deals do eventually emerge from the White House and Saudi Arabia, experts will start sorting through what was new and what was old. Already, there are more than $129 billion in active military sales to Saudi Arabia from the US, according to the State Department fact sheet.
Yves again. So perhaps only $13 billion in incremental commitments? To Bloomberg again, which stresses that the hype has commercial value to the US:
“A lot of this is about the optics, but the optics matter,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “It’s an attempt to send a message of reassurance after several years of uncertainty in the US-Saudi bilateral relationship on defense cooperation.”
The agreement is likely to yield real gains, particularly in the realm of missile defense, where the US has much to offer and Saudi Arabia has significant needs, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on defense strategy and budgeting.
At a time when some of the US’s traditional allies in Europe may be reluctant to purchase weapons from Washington, Saudi Arabia’s willingness to do so is especially welcome, he said.
Regular readers are likely wondering why the Saudis and the Europeans are so keen about US weapons, given not just the way Russian systems have regularly proven to be superior in Ukraine, but even the way the stereotyped sandal-wearing Houthis chased the US out of Middle East waterways. The practical difficulty (aside from the elephant in the room of geopolitics) of integrating disparate systems is large, including training of operators. The Russians make a big point of backwards integration in the operation of major systems like military planes: if a soldier knows an old system, it will be close to trivial for him to learn to manage a new one.
By contrast, Ukraine military pilots had grown up flying Soviet planes. Many experts warned that trying to retrain them to operate Western aircraft was an impossible ask. If they had to undertake an action under high pressure, they would default to what amounted to muscle memory in flying the Soviet jets, which would be all wrong for the Western ones. The high level of not-well-explained losses of Ukraine-operated F-16s validates this concern.
However, an upside of this Saudi arms buy is that it has the Israels worried. Bloomberg mentions that in passing:
Even without specifics, some analysts said the scale and complexity of weapons purchases contemplated by Saudi Arabia could risk compromising Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region, which US presidents for decades have committed to maintain….
But Dana Stroul, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that the categories outlined by the White House have long been part of Saudi Arabia’s military modernization plans. Absent more detail about particular weapon systems, they don’t raise alarms about qualitative military edge, said Stroul, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
A very long article in the Times of Israel, Trump signs deals with Saudis, including biggest-ever $142 billion arms agreement, has a banner above the header laying out a key worry: Expert: Gulf states stronger friends for Trump than Israel?
The article weighs heavy on, and is clearly unhappy about, all of the pomp and circumstance during Trump’s visit. There is an absence of substance about the deals, but a lot not-well-coded whining:
Biden had decided to pay a visit to Saudi Arabia as he looked to alleviate soaring prices at the pump for motorists at home and around the globe. At the time, Prince Mohammed’s reputation had been badly damaged by a US intelligence determination that found he had ordered the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
But that dark moment appeared to be a distant memory for the prince as he rubbed elbows with high-profile business executives — including Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — in front of the cameras and with Trump by his side…
Saudi Arabia and fellow OPEC+ nations have already helped their cause with Trump early in his second term by stepping up oil production….
William Wechsler, senior director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, said Trump’s decision to skip Israel on his first Middle East visit was remarkable.
“The main message coming out of this, at least as the itinerary stands today, is that the governments of the Gulf … are in fact stronger friends to President Trump than the current government of Israel at this moment,” Wechsler said.
Admittedly, the Times does land a blow in its brief mention of corruption:
The three countries on Trump’s itinerary — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — are places where the Trump Organization, run by the president’s two oldest sons, is developing major real estate projects. They include a high-rise tower in Jeddah, a luxury hotel in Dubai, and a golf course and villa complex in Qatar.
Finally, the apparently big, even if again considerably exaggerated “$600 billion” investment pledge counters the idea that the US is no longer a good place for foreign capital, as demonstrated by exits from US stocks post “Liberation Day” on a scale to seriously weaken the dollar.
A final question is what if anything the show of fealty by Middle Eastern states to US means for BRICS. As we have pointed out repeatedly, a big problem for BRICS is the comparative dearth of high GDP per capita states as members. China’s GDP per capita is less than 1/6 that of the US. Even if you use PPP per capita. China’s level is less than 1/3 of that of the US.
Lower incomes means less economic surplus.
Saudi Arabia’s GDP per capita is roughly 2.5 times that of China’s, so it has the potential to be a powerful addition to BRICS. But if it continues to maintain relations with both the US and what is perceived to be a China-led sphere, as India has said it intends to do, does that limit how much it support BRICS?
And let me remind reader, BRICS so far is much less substantive than most readers imagine. It does not even have a budget, unlike the (perceived to be) much less ambitious ASEAN or Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
So this is a long-winded way of demonstrating, frustratingly, how effective hype can be. How to counter it well remains an open question.
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For someone who has such open contempt for the law, Trump is an ardent and abiding follower of Brandolini’s law. Also known as the bullshit assymetry principle.
Re: India v. Pakistan. John Helmer has a different take on events, talking to Ray McGovern with Nima. He said that while we know India lost several aircraft, we don’t know about Pakistan’s losses in the air, but we do know about Pakistan’s losses on the ground — loss of command and control (!) — which triggered movement of Pakistan’s nuclear forces, which triggered movement of India’s nuclear forces. Helmer thinks that is when Pakistan called Washington begging for mediation.
https://youtu.be/rY_pZu_anJU?t=4440
https://archive.ph/jiC8h
NYT would agree.
There was no mediation. Please do not use that word. The US freelancing and calling both sides does not amount to mediation.
Seems the lie served a purpose: selling out Trump branded luxury apartments.
https://theprint.in/india/trump-residences-in-gurugram-sold-out-days-after-us-president-claimed-he-brokered-ceasefire/2627053/
Thanks for this breakdown!
As always, laughing out loud at the sheer mendacity of it all! LOL
#TheKicker
Bwaaahahahaha!
Yes, strike one blow … for corruption.
Your comment at the end about BRICS/India/Saudi is something I have thought about a bit. I liken it to API Technology – you know, when you have two disparate systems – like an old mainframe in a datacenter somewhere, and now it has to talk to some dang new-fangled AI thing in “the cloud”? Well, you’re not going to move the mainframe, and it may be too critical/complex to replace/modernize, so you write some code elsewhere to serve as an API that permits your ancient IBM cabinet thingy talk out to modern distributed systems.
Well, the US/UK/EU is like that mainframe … the emerging Global South is the future … Countries like Saudi/India/perhaps-even-Turkey are going to be your API-translator layer … ferrying all manner of things between two increasingly different and distant worlds.
The “America: For Sale” tour continues.
It is very sad that we have to look to Bruce Springsteen to show leadership and call out Orange Julius.
https://www.politico.eu/article/corrupt-incompetent-and-treasonous-bruce-springsteen-lashes-donald-trump/
(I give Bruce credit, he’s 75 and still going. But where is AOC?)
Yea, to show leadership and join “a long list of American celebrities who voiced support for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris”. It looks more like a setup for next Wrestlemania. Springsteen vs Trump, only on pay-per-view! If ratings are good enough, then plebs could get Madonna vs Melania extravaganza.
If Bruce had supported Jill Stein, would he have had more credibility in your view?
I get it that we’re a peak cynicism.
He would have had more credibility in my view if he did what he is paid for, sing instead of talk. Same apply for most celebrites that are more than happy to be cogs in the machine (instead of raging against it).
P.S. Now that I think again, those celebrites are probably paid to talk also, though not by the common people but by the machine.
“Same apply for most celebrites that are more than happy to be cogs in the machine (instead of raging against it).
It’s kinda funny, that phrase. Because Bruce and Tom Morello are close friends. Morello toured with them for a while.. Ghost of Tom Joad
Bruce doesn’t seem to understand all those Blue collars he wrote about voted FOR Trump. And They’re not the ones who are paying $2000 per ticket to see him.
“Bruce?” Springsteen is just another musician-celebrity fraud. I love the publicity shots of him and his dear friend Obama (or should I refer to him as”Barack?”) leaning against a nice old car, with the shades on. So cool, those two. The fact is, whether it’s Bono, or Springsteen, of Jimmy Fallon, the two-Party iron rule remains in place. Remember what “Barack” said: they’re playing between the 40-yard lines. And it is indeed play.
I’m familiar with the “shut up and sing” argument. It has merit, however, nature abhors a vacuum.
Bruce has been political for a long time, I remember him crying about George W. Bush winning in 2004 … it could be a release valve that serves the Donkeys by giving them an appearance of caring, i.e Donkey-adjacent celebs give actual politicians cover to do nothing.
All publicly quoted figures of this type are kidology to some extent.
Any defence package of any size is complex, staged over many years and usually includes both immediate purchases and options on future tranches. So I would not be surprised if this figure included everything from options taken up for new tranches from past contracts, new contracts for delivery over 5-10 years, options on further packages, spares, support and training packages extending over 25 years (standard for this sort of thing) and upgrades and weapon packages. Bear in mind that these days, what’s sometimes called Total Cost of Ownership or Through-Life Cost can easily be twice the initial procurement cost.
The Saudis will not be greatly concerned about equipment performance as such, and anyway their attempts to use sophisticated weapons have been generally unimpressive. This package is designed to tie the US more closely to them, as has been their policy for decades, by making the US their effective defenders. The package will include lots of US personnel in-country to help with everything from training to operational planning, all of whom will be effectively hostages in the event of a crisis with, say, Iran. Think of the US, if you like, as a giant PMC, providing equipment, training, support and mercenaries to the Saudis.
For this reason they are not going for Russian equipment. As you say, there would be great difficulties of integration and operation, and even such basic things as language. The Russians would never agree to the kind of massive presence in the country that really serious arms deliveries would entail, nor could they compete, frankly, with several generations of contact at all levels between US and Saudi officers, together with contacts from other western states, which have produced a military that thinks and fights like the West. I’m sure the Russians would be only too happy to undermine the US position, but this isn’t the way to do it.
More widely, this is certainly a political, if not military, snub for Israel, not least because the Israelis have a history of trying to manipulate US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. I don’t think it has much to do with BRICS, which remains, as you’ve often pointed out, a vestigial entity, and one where a defence dimension may well never emerge. In the meantime, the Saudis are playing both sides against the middle, as usual.
Government contracting (and accounting) is a very complicated milieu of rules/regs (FAR combined with ASBs) hidden in unnecessary complexity behind ‘security clearances’. During my own career, my ‘rise’ because of the mere questions I asked. The assumption was that I wouldn’t play ball.
As I watch the front line on the various telegram/youtube channels, I am not surprised to see the live demonstrations (marketing value) of the clips. Most that I watch do not contain the bloodshed, so they are sanitized for the audience. As a former ‘customer’ (working for the contractor), I was privy to watching the demonstrations of our products in exercises mimicking war games. It was a marketing tool.
Watching the next generation products used in real warfare has helped me understand, with great sadness, the smoke and mirrors we in the West project as superior technology. We are completely fake, like Hollywood.
The real question for me? How long will the charade continue? Trump was the perfect selection for the neocons (and the tech titans that prepare to tighten the noose) as consummate salesmen. This is my mere opinion and I admit to that.
Apologies for typos.
So, the US has sold a lot of arms to Saudi Arabia.
What, precisely, are the Saudis going to do with those arms? They obviously can’t attack Israel. By the time they have been trained in using the arms, the Iranians will know all about them and using them on Iran would be suicidal, and using them on Iraq would be the equivalent of using them on Iran, i.e. suicidal. Their use of arms against Yemen was notably unsuccessful.
It seems to me that the US might just as well have saved diplomatic trouble by dumping all those arms in the Atlantic, for all the value they add to the US agenda.
How dare you suggest that!
Are you not forgetting the shareholders of the defense contractors?
The CEOs and their pay packages, options and bonuses?
The revolving door for the current and former Generals and assorted personnel and their ability to go into consulting work when they retire.
The lobbying dollars and campaign contributions that are all piggybacked on defense spending?
How selfish. LOL
(Though it’s not really very funny at all)
And I do agree with your comment.
Saudi Arabia used those weapons in its long intervention against Yemen (from 2015 onwards). The strong involvement of specialists from the USA, the UK, and France highlighted the fact that the Saudis were not very proficient in the usage of their armament.
Knew right off the bat that Trump was lying about how much these deals were worth as, like this post mentions, he did the same exact same thing a coupla years ago when he went to Saudi Arabia and announcing it, had a board or two showing images of the weapons systems that he was selling the Saudis. Only it took time to realize that a lot of this money was already backed into the cake and was part of regular deals.
That mention of that Dana Stroul cause me to do a double-take. She’s a real nasty piece of work and Brian Berlectic has mentioned her several times. Here is a video of him showing who she is-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYbGLynvr4A (4:50 mins)
In reference to countering bullshit: Eisenhower’s speech nailed it that, “…an alert and knowledgeable citizenry…” is a prerequisite. Our attention span is conditioned by media to validate Occam’s Razor. News-as-entertainment replaced journalism; journalists replaced with Communications Degrees in Mastering Being On TV.
The underlying Financial Times article, “What Has Musk’s DOGE Actually Accomplished?,” comes off as the approved analysis of the Uniparty Daily Truth. Much of the color commentary is from rightwingers, who are miffed because DOGE blew their cover. DOGE stepped in it quickly, when they themselves would have been a tad more daintily patient in destroying the social state, or what is left of it , in the U S of A.
Quotes from our betters:
‘Calkins, the government contractor (sheesh): “Of all the things you could do to affect the government, it would have been better to go after regulation. It would have been better to go after entitlements. Just blowing up jobs was a good way to make enemies, a good way to cause more disruption than progress.” [Translation: Better office politics, please!]
‘“I think that some people, particularly on the right, felt that maybe Doge would be just kind of a catch-all solution,” says Cato’s Dominik Lett. [Meaning that he wanted DOGE to wreck the agencies so that his peeps won’t have to lift a finger.]
‘But [Lett] adds that “if you want to reassure bond markets, if you want to put the budget on a sustainable path, you need to make spending reductions to Medicare, Medicaid and social security. And for the administration, Doge was never really intended to make significant benefit reductions to those programmes.”’
Then there’s this mindless drivel from on high: ‘Safra Catz, the chief executive of software group Oracle — whose founder Larry Ellison has been a Trump ally — Doge was simply the long overdue introduction of a business mindset to government. “Don’t use things from years ago just because you have always been using them,” she says of the initiative’s approach.’
Catz undoubtedly isn’t aware of the old business axiom: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I guess that she’s having some problems with her business mindset.
Social Security is much on the minds of our betters, as we see, yet Social Security is lean and efficient. The superiors are in a snit because one more manufactured crisis hasn’t done in Social Security.
Meanwhile, I note today’s posting here at Naked Capitalism about United Health Care. Financial Times starts off with vox pop: People think that the government is wasteful. Ergo, natch, DOGE. Vox populi, vox dei, vox Silicon Valley.
Yet: People know that U.S. health-insurance is a scam and a swamp. Do I see squads of unnamed jamokes showing up to diddle the software of health insurers suspected of gaming the system? Heck, I’m such a naïf.
And the upright citizens wonder about the emergence of Saint Luigi Mangione.
KSA has been a large user of US high tech gear: E-3 AWACS squadron, F-15 several squadrons, An extensive ground to air surveillance sensor network, Bradleys….. These systems are 40 years old or more.
One thing the KSA does not do is logistics support of these systems and in some it needs US techs to operate them….
A lot of so called arms deals include a large part, maybe 70% of the buy price, as logistics support.
That said some of the buys systems are not ordered. IIRC the earlier Trump 45 deal included a number of THAAD “batteries”, that to my knowledge were not ordered, even if the US could open the lines to make more.
Likely the Saudis are implying they put the money as a wedge in a 10 year plan, starting sometime soon.
They remember another cult of personality, namely Stalin.
And one wonders if his purges are inspired by Stalin.
Someone said that wIth Stalin there was a cult of personality, and also a personality behind it.
Don’t forget Jared who also has a company trying to make deals with Arab nations and who apparently seeded the Riviera idea in Trump’s noggin. Meanwhile the Adelson payoff in favor of Israel is fading since Trump can’t run again however much bs he spouts on that topic. Perhaps we’ll have world peace if every country has a Trump resort complex.
The Man Who Would Be King needs robes and a camel. He has appetittes and visions of sugarplums and sweetmeats, but….Correct me if I am wrong; 1) isn’t the US on somewhat short supply of military equipment that actually works ( refer to war in Ukraine), 2) Doesn’t all that military equipment require refined rare earth minerals which may be hard to obtain from the Chinese peasants; 3) Mastery of aviation products doesn’t seem to be a DOD forte: three carrier planes lost to the Houthis, a F-35 almost downed, a dozen drones -by-bye the acquisition of a jumbo jet without a plan or budget to retrofit ( and has Boeing changed their management team?) , and now Trump has an aeronautical engineering degree to design combat aircraft. I am soooo..tired of all this winning.
I wonder about the claims of such a major group of arms sales. Knowing its hard to ever see if it happens there is one way to watch over time. All major arms sales both Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) have to be notified to congress under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations 22 CFR Part 120-130. The notifications do eventually appear in a couple of places. The Federal Register being the major source, but DDTC publishes DCS sales in News and Events here: https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/ddtc_public/ddtc_public?id=ddtc_public_portal_news_and_events&cat=Report
Foreign Military Sales are available here, it is not a goverment website but has some interesting information. https://www.forumarmstrade.org/major-arms-sales-notifications-tracker.html
One thing to think about is year over year sales of weapon systems, I usually do a rough percentage of the export of “weapons” from the U.S. including both FMS and DCS sales and generally it is only about 3% of all exports. The Military Industrial Complex hits way above its weight, and arms sales garner a lot of attention but are really not big drivers of export volume. There are big sales from time to time but not every year. e.g. JSF.
The kinds of weapon sales it takes to get to the $ 142 B level is years countries don’t buy major weapon systems on impulse and they normally take many years to deliver.
Oz