Why Saudi Arabia's Trillion-Dollar Wealth Has Not Built a Military Powerhouse

Across the armies of the world, wealth is power—and in any contest of wealth, the nation of Saudi Arabia is practically a force of nature. The proud owners of a sovereign wealth fund worth over a trillion US dollars, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the House of Saud are among the richest and most influential political forces of the entire world. They hold command of the Middle East’s most lucrative oil-rich petrostate, and direct their firehose of pure financial capital toward everything from megaprojects, to science and technology, to global business and entertainment. But unlike most nations with the power of Saudi Arabia, the nation’s military isn’t nearly as powerful as one might expect. In fact, it is little more than an afterthought, a chaotic collection of strangely structured forces, imported foreign hardware, and hardly any defense-industrial complex to speak of. At a moment when the power balance of the Middle East is shifting rapidly, and when Saudi Arabia is looking to play an outsized role in global affairs, it is worth asking why Saudi Arabia is not the military powerhouse that it should be. What is Saudi Arabia doing to change the equation, and build itself into a regional power that can meet the moment? And if Riyadh were to really commit itself, building both a more formidable military and a defense-industrial complex, then just how powerful could Saudi Arabia truly become?

Key Takeaways

Saudi Arabia ranks seventh globally in military expenditure but relies almost entirely on foreign-designed and imported hardware.
Over half of Saudi Arabia's 260,000 active-duty troops belong to the National Guard, tasked primarily with protecting the House of Saud from internal threats.
Riyadh spends nearly $80 billion annually on defense, yet fields a significantly less capable military than regional peers like Turkey or Iran who spend far less.
The Vision 2030 initiative aimed to localize 50% of defense spending, but efforts have largely focused on domestic assembly rather than indigenous design.
Relying on imported military hardware from nations like the US, China, and Europe serves as a strategic shield, incentivizing foreign powers to protect Saudi oil flows.
Saudi Arabia's recent efforts to build domestic defense capabilities involve collaborative projects with Spain, Turkey, China, and South Korea.

The Disconnect Between National Ambition and Military Atrophy

Of all the nations known for the extreme heights of their ambition, none are even remotely comparable to Saudi Arabia. A list of Saudi megaprojects includes an over hundred-kilometer-long mega-city in the open desert, a four-hundred-meter-tall cube that would become the world’s single largest structure, a two-kilometer-tall skyscraper, a bridge that’s also a hotel stretching across a massive lagoon, and an artificial moon, all initially promised to be ready by 2030. Saudi Arabia is a nation that is trying to overhaul its entire society by force, funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into highly speculative development projects, taking over entire global sports one after another, and building hyper-futuristic cities from the ground up, with no known evidence that anybody actually wants to live there. But compare the grand scale of Saudi Arabia’s broader ambitions to the state of its standing military, and the results are a little confusing. Saudi Arabia’s armed forces aren’t tiny, by any means; the nation boasts a total active-duty troop count of 260,000, and in 2025, it is expected to spend nearly eighty billion dollars on its military, over seven percent of its GDP and the seventh-greatest net total of any nation on Earth. Its army boasts five hundred American-made Abrams main battle tanks, several hundred self-propelled howitzers and multiple rocket launchers, and an anticipated total of nearly a hundred lethal attack helicopters. Its navy will soon sail a total of eleven well-armed frigates, plus a healthy surface fleet of smaller combat vessels and several thousand Marines. The nation's air force flies over three hundred copies of America's F-15E Strike Eagle, including nearly a hundred that have been custom-upgraded to a special Saudi standard, plus over 150 European-made fighters and all the air-to-air refuelers, tactical airlifters, and airborne early warning aircraft that would be expected of a truly modern military. It has ten thousand troops focused solely on air defense, plus an entire branch of its military dedicated to strategic nuclear missiles, and it is known for a technological sophistication that allows it to keep pace with peer forces in Europe, Asia, and North America. But look a little bit closer at the Saudi military, and its standing relative to its international peers leaves something to be desired.

Reliance on Imported Hardware and the Absence of Domestic Industry

In aggregate dollar amounts, Saudi Arabia spends roughly as much on its military as Germany, India, the UK, or France, but in one particular regard, each of those nations leaves the Saudi Armed Forces in the dust. Each of those nations, as well as other top military spenders like Japan, South Korea, or Israel, all have a robust military-industrial complex to call their own. The less impressive among them are still quite impressive, while the best among their number are world leaders in military innovation. Each of them develop and build a fair proportion of their own military hardware, like the French Rafale fighter jet and CAESAR howitzer, or several classes of major combat vessels and several types of main battle tank for Japan. Many of those nations export their military hardware, each of them has next-generation indigenous designs currently under development, and all of them benefit from the immense technical knowledge that comes with building their own kit. By contrast, the Saudi Armed Forces are almost entirely an imported military. All of its artillery, all of its tanks and heavy fighting vehicles, all of its manned aircraft, and its entire naval fleet, were designed and built outside of the country. Saudi Arabia ranks seventh in the world in military expenditure, but it is the biggest military spender, by far, to be using practically zero indigenously designed or built hardware in its arsenal. In fact, it is not until the Netherlands, number nineteen on the list and spending barely a quarter of what Saudi Arabia does, that one finds a military that is anywhere near as reliant on foreign imports as the Saudis are. The foreign kit it acquires often comes at unusually high prices—not because they buy expensive kit that other countries cannot afford, but because it seems quite happy to pay for overpriced copies of the same kit that other countries purchase for less. And by all outward indicators, Riyadh isn’t just content to pay extra prices for its advanced weapons; it is more than happy to live in a world where it has no better alternatives. Saudi Arabia barely has the beginnings of a defense-industrial base, with just two percent of its overall military spending directed toward domestic suppliers, as recently as the late 2010s. In terms of what Saudi Arabia does with that hardware, the results can be downright confusing. First and foremost, its military is split in half, for no clear reason. While in total, it comprises about 260,000 troops, over half of those are a part of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which exists under a completely different chain of command via the nation’s Ministry of National Guard, instead of being run by the Ministry of Defense like the rest of the armed forces.

Regional Comparisons and Disproportionate Military Returns

The National Guard’s primary function is to protect the House of Saud from a coup d’etat, something that it seems entirely able to do, given that it is bigger than the rest of the military combined. Nor do its choices of military hardware make very much sense. It often uses several redundant pieces of hardware from several nations to fill the same function, when just one would do, and the proportions of certain types of equipment can be downright strange. It has more tanks and fewer artillery than would be expected of an army of its size, its combat air fleet contains dozens of aircraft that are functionally redundant, and many of its special operators are cordoned off into even more ministries. According to most international military personnel who have trained with Saudi troops, many among their number are either undermotivated, unfocused, or simply incompetent. Nor does Saudi Arabia’s vast military expenditures provide anywhere near the return on investment that other Middle Eastern nations can achieve, despite the fact that those other nations are doing much more while spending much less. Saudi Arabia fields a standing military, counting the national guard, of 260,000 active-duty troops. But compare Riyadh to a nation like Turkey, with nearly half a million active-duty personnel at its disposal, plus nearly four hundred thousand reservists. Turkey’s military spending is less than a third of Saudi Arabia’s. Or take Iran, the largest standing military in the Middle East at over six hundred thousand active-duty troops, and 350,000 in reserve. Iran spends a tenth of what the Saudis do on defense, and they commit a much smaller proportion of their GDP. Egypt comes in with similar numbers, about 440,000 active-duty troops and 480,000 in reserve, despite spending the equivalent of under five billion dollars on their armed forces, compared to almost eighty billion for the Saudis. In return, Saudi Arabia’s active-duty forces are more comparable, by the numbers, to nations with a far smaller population, like Israel, or far lesser wealth, like Iraq. All told, Saudi Arabia's armed forces aren't just lacking in power or in industrial independence, relative to the nations that spend comparable sums on defense. It is lacking even when compared to its regional peers, despite having the sheer capital to eclipse many of them at once. Quite frankly, it is in a state of atrophy that would horrify the leaders of most major militaries, and it comes with such complete dependence on foreign suppliers, that those other nations could practically shut down the Saudi military if they felt Riyadh was stepping out of line. By any fair metric, Saudi Arabia's military is dismal, relative to what it could, and should be. The reasons behind this disparity demand closer examination. In the great, big world of international defense spending, nothing happens by accident, and the current state of Saudi Arabia's military is no different.

Strategic Priorities and the Historical Threat of Regime Change

The nation's undersized armed forces, its strange and entirely imported composition, and its atrophied military-industrial complex are the product of choice, not coincidence, and understanding the thinking behind Riyadh's choices is critical to grasping the state of their military today. But in the special case of Saudi Arabia, the situation isn't necessarily the byproduct of poor decision-making. In many ways, the status of the Saudi military is entirely by design. To explain this dynamic, the domestic side of things for Riyadh provides a starting point, before going international. At home, Saudi Arabia is like an animal with no natural predators; very few nearby nations have the combined military and economic strength to challenge it. Those that could challenge it would rather not, and any nation that might be powerful and unhinged enough to try—namely, Iran—is fighting on multiple fronts in the region, while knowing full well that an attack that got in the way of Saudi oil production would provoke an incredible global response. For that matter, Saudi Arabia knows that the international community will help protect its oil against any threat, meaning that the worst it has to worry about militarily, are non-state actors like the Islamic State or the Houthi rebels. Cut the size of the current Saudi military in half, and then cut it in half again, and it would still be more than enough to respond to terror threats on its own soil, even if it wouldn’t be able to consider intervening proactively in places like Yemen. But the threat that Saudi Arabia does face, is the threat of regime change from within. Even the nation’s name, Saudi Arabia, translates to, “the land of the House of Saud”, directly referencing the sprawling royal family that has controlled the nation since it was unified in 1932. The House of Saud is, of course, very powerful within Saudi Arabia…but its leaders are well aware that they aren’t invincible. It’s for that reason that Riyadh has chosen to split its military in two, and send the larger half into its own ministry as a National Guard, before specifically charging that National Guard with defending the regime from the smaller, but considerably better-equipped proper military. Not only that, but the regime benefits directly from a military that struggles to organize itself effectively, where high-ranking officers with massive egos are busier competing for clout than plotting an overthrow of the Crown Prince. It benefits from a military rife with corruption and nepotism, where everyone’s loyalty is available for purchase, where the people with the most power are often the ones with the least common sense, and where enlisted troops are openly encouraged not to think for themselves, lest they start getting their own ideas about how things should be. And beyond the regime’s desire to neuter its own military and protect its stability, there are other reasons that Saudi Arabia doesn’t much care to build strong armed forces.

Recruitment Challenges, Financial Leverage, and Foreign Reliance

For one thing, this is not a country where young Saudi men are typically very willing to put their lives on hold, and sign up to serve their countries. Instead, it has been accused of relying on mercenaries from Yemen, Africa, and Latin America to be part of its prior intervention in Yemen, while its reticence to allow foreigners into its proper military inherently constrains its armed forces to be as small as the recruiting pool dictates. And although Saudi Arabia could recruit more troops, it prefers to leave many capable young fighters to serve in the militias of their own clans and tribes, with whom the Saudi state has cultivated a mutually beneficial arrangement to serve with the national guard and enjoy all the financial incentives that come with it. That way, the regime can unify tribes that are loyal to the House of Saud, keep them loyal with a consistent flow of funds, and ensure that any tribes looking to go rogue are embroiled in clan rivalries long before they grow strong enough to challenge the royal family. Then, there are the international factors to consider, specifically the reasons behind Riyadh's purchase of so much foreign kit, and its willingness to accept hardware that's overpriced, redundant, or both. Where price is concerned, the answer is straightforward: Saudi Arabia has ridiculous amounts of money to spend, other nations reliably enjoy getting paid, and by paying a bit more than is necessary for its hardware, Riyadh can build genuine goodwill with foreign capitals while dismissing its extra expenditures as little more than a rounding error. As for the nation's willingness to pay for redundant kit, the reasoning is similar, in that Riyadh can build goodwill by buying more from foreign suppliers, but there's also another angle. As with so many other elements of Saudi Arabia's grand ambition, the nation's military leaders tend to go by the rule of cool. If the Saudi military has most of its critical boxes checked off, and it can afford to spend a little more in order to look visually impressive, then they are going to ensure it looks impressive. There’s also another, more pragmatic reason for Saudi Arabia to rely on so much foreign kit, and to source it from so many different world powers at once. Here, the value comes in the reality of foreign military exports: specifically, that if a complex piece of advanced hardware is purchased from another nation, then decades of spare parts shipments, software updates, and more are also being purchased. So, for however long that foreign military kit is fielded, it ensures the supplying nations are not alienated. For most countries that rely on foreign hardware, export limitations are a headache that make them vulnerable to the meddling and coercion of major powers, and have to simply be tolerated as the price of doing business. Just ask Riyadh’s rivals in Tehran, who have struggled to keep all sorts of hardware in service under a crush of Western sanctions.

Vision 2030 and the Geopolitical Shield of Exported Security

For Saudi Arabia, however, there’s another way of looking at the situation. The rest of the world is very interested in ensuring that the nation’s oil keeps flowing, direct from the desert sands into the global market. And for Riyadh to remain reliant on foreign hardware to protect that oil, should give other nations peace of mind in two ways at once. First, it guarantees that Saudi resources are protected by kit that powerful nations know well, and believe that they can trust, instead of taking the risk that untested indigenous Saudi equipment would fail at the moment of truth. And second, it allows Riyadh to quite painlessly hand away leverage over its armed forces, giving the US, China, Europe, Russia, and other suppliers the knowledge that they could threaten with export controls if they needed to. That's good reassurance for Riyadh's foreign partners, but doesn't sacrifice much for Saudi Arabia, given that its leaders weren't inclined to build a more independent military anyway. Now, although Saudi Arabia may have its reasons to avoid building a bigger military than it has, and although it may have its reasons for allowing itself to rely on foreign imports, that still doesn't fully explain the disconnect between the nation's military potential, and its military reality. There is still the question of just why Riyadh has chosen not to build a military-industrial complex, if not for its own use then for export abroad, at a moment when the nation seems to be working its way into every moneymaking venture that it possibly can. Over the last decade and more, Saudi Arabia has embarked on a nationwide effort to transform itself, in preparation for a new world that it is actively helping to create. Riyadh is well aware that the vast majority of its fortunes have, across modern history, come by way of the oil trade. But while oil wealth is clearly a very nice thing to have, it comes with two key problems. First, the oil is going to run out someday, and second, demand for oil might not even last as long as the oil does. As the world moves toward renewable energy sources, Riyadh accepts that it won’t be able to fight that change forever. It is faced with the prospect of bringing an oil economy into a largely post-oil world, which is widely considered a losing proposition. And for Riyadh, the answer to that problem is diversification: taking as much of its saved-up oil wealth as possible, and using it to kick-start as many other self-sustaining industries as possible before either the oil, or the money, eventually runs out. Since 2016, the Saudis have organized the bulk of those efforts under Vision 2030, a massive government program that is intended to surge as much funding as possible, and accelerate development to a remarkable degree. It is this effort to diversify its economy that has led Saudi Arabia to invest in so many wildly aspirational projects at once.

Missed Opportunities in the Defense-Industrial Complex

The nation is trying to make itself into a major global tourist destination, and a waypoint for both world travelers and freight logistics. It is trying to become a dominant force in sports and entertainment, a major player in the global real estate market, and a center for self-starting entrepreneurship. It is targeting well-educated foreigners to be part of vast projects leveraging AI and other advanced technologies, while trying to turn itself into a viable competitor in the renewable-energy sector that will ultimately kill the demand for Saudi oil. And it has become the world leader in producing absolutely wild concept art—sometimes because those concepts are meant to end with real-life versions of what is being proposed, but always because they are an effective way of pulling attention, debate, and public interest toward the larger societal overhaul that Saudi Arabia is working to accomplish. Vision 2030 does touch on questions of defense, setting an initial goal to localize over half of Saudi Arabia’s military spending within the nation by 2030 at the latest. But in practice, that goal hasn’t translated into building a healthy defense-industrial complex. Instead, the initiative has mostly resulted in a lot of relocation efforts: moving production lines of foreign equipment onto Saudi soil, so that manufacture can be done at home, while design, development, testing, and advanced research have gone ignored. In 2017, the nation announced it would build a state-owned military corporation, Saudi Arabian Military Industries, but its responsibilities remain starkly limited. The company, colloquially known as SAMI, was charged mostly with just building and maintaining hardware, and for the most part, that is precisely what has happened. Its other state-owned military groups mostly build basic equipment and ammunition, with limited development efforts focusing on digital and electronic security. Other than that, programs to develop complex military equipment simply don’t exist. And to be clear, it doesn’t appear that Saudi leaders were hoping to achieve anything better. At least in the early years of Vision 2030, high-level Saudi officials and spokespeople routinely confirmed that at the very most, the hope was for their national defense industry to form deeper collaborative relationships with foreign nations, import technologies that could be manufactured locally, and then start exporting, after about a decade or two. When asked directly about potential opportunities for Saudi industry to export to countries that struggle with Western export controls, the leader of Saudi Arabia’s General Authority for Military Industries made clear in a 2019 interview that the country hadn’t yet made plans to capitalize. When other leaders were asked about reducing Saudi Arabia’s dependence on foreign arms providers, they routinely came back with the same basic reply: that their focus was on diversifying their acquisitions, from lots of different international providers, rather than becoming a producer of indigenously designed technologies. As for why Saudi leaders were so hesitant to beef up a defense export industry, it’s difficult to say for sure. The nation’s leaders haven’t addressed the question directly, and until the last few years, they haven’t seemed to agree that it was even a problem. Perhaps a focus on defense-industrial initiatives would have been too sharp of a contrast with the glitzy, futuristic appeal of other Vision 2030 projects, or would have risked shining a light on the geopolitics of it all, in a moment when Saudi Arabia’s pitch to the world was one of benevolent, visionary ambition.

Global Market Shifts and the Limitations of Saudi Production

Or perhaps it was a strategic oversight, a misreading of the value of the global arms market. Perhaps Saudi leaders avoided the topic out of fears that it would drive Western nations to expand the scope of export controls over their own military technology, a fair portion of which was being denied to Riyadh at the time. But no matter what motivated Saudi Arabia's thinking at the time, it's safe to say that simply ignoring the economic potential of defense was a major missed opportunity. Over the last decade, several nations have grown into major players in the highly lucrative arms export industry: South Korea, Turkey, and China, along with a very good last few years for Germany and France. In each case, the indigenously developed equipment of those nations has become their major selling point: fighter jets from France, tanks from Germany, combat drones from Turkey, and so on. In each case, the growing defense-industrial role of those nations has come along with rising power and influence on the global stage, and while each of them had a much more robust defense industry than Saudi Arabia had a decade ago, none of them have surged anywhere near as much money toward defense as Saudi Arabia has surged across its Vision 2030 projects. At the same time, the Saudis have shown a willingness to do many of the same things that might have helped make up the gap. They have invested heavily into recruiting foreign experts, building new production lines and physical infrastructure, and expanding research institutions, just not in a way that directly applies to military-industrial matters. Instead, Saudi Arabia has found out the hard way that, despite its broader efforts to become more relevant on the global stage, there is just no easy way to become relevant in the defense world without being able to design and build some hardware internally. Other relevant nations can design advanced military hardware across several domains at once, test and refine their equipment efficiently, and then roll into production as needed, using their own facilities and their own experts to do so. Not every initiative turns out to be a success, but the process is refined to a point of consistent excellence. By comparison, Saudi Arabia today isn’t just a step behind; it’s hardly even a contributor in high-level defense conversations. A 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies observed that far too many major Saudi security decisions and investments over a period of decades have not been part of any coherent force improvement plan, and Saudi security investments have been made with limited regard to cost-effectiveness. In one particularly embarrassing example for the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia had asked to join the Global Combat Air Programme, a joint effort between the UK, Italy, and Japan to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet. But the response that Saudi Arabia received from the GCAP nations bordered on condescension. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an aerospace industry, and would be far from a valuable partner. The head of Italian aerospace corporation Leonardo suggested in February 2024 that the Saudis could start by putting together a few Eurofighter jets on an assembly line, and then they could talk about next steps. Over the last several years, Saudi leaders have watched alongside the rest of the world, as the international order has started to change dramatically. When Riyadh first laid out Vision 2030, there was no way to know that within a decade, Russia and Ukraine would have fought a years-long war, Israel and Iran would have changed the balance of the Middle East in a head-to-head conflict, and China would have risen to stand opposite America as a true global superpower.

Recent Adaptations and the Evolving Security Environment

Like every other nation, Saudi Arabia has watched as its expectations for the future have, at times, failed to match reality. And like every other nation, Saudi Arabia has had to figure out how to respond. In the past couple of years, that has meant Riyadh rethinking its military expenditures, and its decision to sideline its defense industry. During that time, Saudi Arabia has made good progress in increasing its capacity for military production on its own soil, now having localized about twenty percent of its production needs, as of 2024, and expanding the number of military industrial facilities in the country from just five, in 2019, to over three hundred, at the start of this year. While the kingdom isn’t quite on track to reach its Vision 2030 goals on time, which would require localizing a full fifty percent of its defense production, it does seem like it will get relatively close, and should be able to hit that benchmark before the 2030s are out. Senior Saudi leaders have suggested that the nation is even about to turn a corner in its defense-industrial growth, hitting a level of progress that will allow its capacity to start growing exponentially, rather than just by a couple of percentage points each year. And as time has gone on, Saudi Arabia has played a more active role in jointly developing military equipment alongside other nations. It has worked with China to build the infrastructure to produce ballistic missiles, it has built a combat management system that it designed jointly with Spain, it has opened up to receive indigenous defense technology from Turkey, and it has recently started a bilateral development relationship with South Korea, to facilitate collaborative research and design. Its acquisitions patterns have shifted too, with China now supplying four times the amount of equipment it once did, South Korea sending air defense systems, and Germany reopening its relationship with Saudi Arabia by sending air-to-air missiles, after several years in which Berlin banned the sale of military exports to Riyadh. That means that Saudi Arabia has gotten more access to sophisticated equipment that it can study, and more access to the knowledge and technical capabilities of various partner nations. And it has done all that without sacrificing its defense relationship with America, where Washington agreed to sell Saudi Arabia nearly 150 billion US dollars’ worth of weapons, in advance of a potential sale of F-35 stealth fighter jets. With these new developments, Saudi Arabia has proved able to gather more advanced and formidable equipment, beefing up its standing military at an important time for the region. Right now, the nation faces an evolving security situation, as the wider Middle East has been sent spinning on its axis. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, to Saudi Arabia’s south, pose a growing threat, and so do operatives of the Islamic State, who appear to be making ready for a comeback in Syria and Iraq. The Saudis avoided direct entanglement in the brief war between Iran and Israel, with Iran choosing not to attempt a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but Riyadh knows as well as anybody else that war could return to Iran, and that if Iran did try to cut off the strait, the Saudi military might have to get involved. With better equipment, Saudi Arabia should be able to rest assured that it can deter most potential attackers, and deal with the ones that it cannot simply scare off. But even with all those changes, Riyadh still hasn’t built the complete, top-to-bottom defense-industrial complex that it is capable of creating. The nation's push toward domestic weapons manufacturing hasn't translated into new initiatives to design or build their own kit, even though the nation is in the position to start looking for new windfalls. Many of Saudi Arabia's most ambitious megaprojects have been downgraded or quietly swept out of sight, while bad press has only accumulated, from human rights concerns, to hesitation from foreign investors, to red flags in the country's economic numbers, to new reports that over twenty-one thousand workers may have died while working on Vision 2030 projects from 2017 until 2024.

Educated Speculation: What Saudi Arabia Could Ultimately Achieve

Some Vision 2030 projects are doing decently well - specifically, the projects that pour Saudi wealth into initiatives that are more self-sustaining, and work to meet demand that exists, as opposed to what Riyadh claimed was the demand for a glittering linear city in the middle of the desert. Initiatives that can capture well-trained subject-matter experts, both from Saudi Arabia and from around the world, and then pour their expertise into well-funded and concrete projects, do tend to deliver. And at a moment when Saudi Arabia is seeing the shifts in the global oil market that it was concerned about, this is when the push to diversify the Saudi economy needs to start delivering. For the nation to overcome its long-time reticence, and throw its resources into building a real arms industry, would be a solution that leverages the nation's clearly demonstrated set of strengths, while avoiding many of the same pitfalls it's been unable to navigate away from in the past. A Riyadh that isn’t content to just slap a “Made in Saudi Arabia” sticker on somebody else’s military hardware, is a Riyadh that could join an ongoing spending boom in the defense world. It has more money, to solicit the help of more experts, and to invest in better design and development infrastructure, than almost any global competitor. It can follow the model that other nations in a similar position have laid out, while achieving comparable levels of success far faster than the competition, both because it can benefit from the lessons they learned through trial and error, and because it can funnel more resources to defense firms than any of them. For Saudi Arabia to go all-in on defense, should be a winning proposition. It is perplexing that the nation still hasn’t taken the leap to assert itself as a regional military authority, given its nearly absolute lack of will to make that happen. But if Saudi Arabia did decide to change course, either to strengthen its own military or to build out an exporting defense industry, what could it achieve? Saudi Arabia’s own military will likely retain a few key, guiding features. The House of Saud will continue to prioritize its own survival, it will continue to cultivate a situation in which nobody can gather the strength required for regime change, and it will keep relying on foreign military hardware, even if a growing portion is going to be built in-house. With those constraints, it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia would ever grow its standing army, of less than eighty thousand, to the size of Turkey or Iran, and it is even less likely to convince a wave of affluent, comfortable young Saudi men to enlist. But the nation could build out its capabilities in different directions, starting with the question of foreign manpower. Saudi Arabia has a shadowy history of relying on mercenaries, and since it doesn’t allow foreigners to join the military proper, mercenary forces could offer a valuable way for the nation to develop greater offensive potency, specialize in certain overlooked areas, and assert itself abroad. In the mid-2020s, the demand for global mercenary forces is on the rise. Russia's Wagner Group built the model, using seemingly nationless soldiers to establish control over reserves of critical minerals. Nations from Turkey, to China, to the Emirates have started to build similar organizations, dispatching them across the globe to establish a presence in highly profitable zones. Saudi Arabia is a prime candidate to get in on the mercenary game, where its financial resources can be devoted to purchases of loyalty from armed actors, and its reliance on foreigners extends the veil of plausible deniability. When it comes to military procurement for export, Saudi Arabia could conceivably scale up its current approach, building the military hardware of other nations instead of designing its own models. Across the globe, there are plenty of hardware-producing nations that have the cutting-edge designs, but lack production capacity to meet demand. By building out its manufacturing sector, Saudi Arabia could enhance the abilities of arms-producing nations to build the hardware they design. Not only that, but production facilities on Saudi soil would help the nation to preserve one of the most important geopolitical gifts that comes along with its oil wealth. Nobody wants to see Saudi Arabia attacked, simply because that would place the nation’s oil reserves at risk. While lowered global demand for oil could change that dynamic, it could very quickly be restored if powerful world nations rely on Saudi Arabia to build their military kit. Finally, there is all the things that Saudi Arabia could achieve if it did decide to try designing its own indigenous military hardware. There are some areas where Riyadh is unlikely to become competitive soon—such as building tanks, or fighter jets, or naval destroyers on par with legacy nations. But Riyadh’s existing investments, largely through Vision 2030, offer the potential to take a different path forward. The nation is trying to turn itself into a hub for high-tech manufacturing, and when it comes to military technology, there are some real opportunities for Saudi Arabia to get in on the ground floor. Those would include the development of advanced artificial intelligence tools, robotics technology, cybersecurity, encryption and secure communication, and 3D-printed manufacturing. Bridging its civilian investments into the defense world, Riyadh could see massive returns. Riyadh is not the defense leader that one might expect, but that isn’t an accident; it is a choice, and one that the House of Saud believes will serve its needs better than any fighter jet or main battle tank ever could.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the US military protect Saudi Arabia?

The US has a history of providing military support to Saudi Arabia, with the US temporarily relocating a Patriot missile defense battery from South Korea to the Middle East in response to escalating threats from Iran, and Saudi Arabia importing nearly 80 percent of its arms from the United States, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Why is Saudi Arabia giving the US $600 billion?

There is no information provided in the context about Saudi Arabia giving the US $600 billion, but it is known that Saudi Arabia has a sovereign wealth fund worth over a trillion US dollars and has invested heavily in various projects, including megaprojects such as a 100-kilometer-long mega-city and a 400-meter-tall cube.

What does the House of Saud do?

The House of Saud is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia, known for its alliance with the Wahhabi movement and developing the country's oil resources, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman playing a key role in the nation's governance and development projects.

Who rules the House of Saud?

The House of Saud is ruled by its members, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman being a prominent figure in the current ruling family, and the Saud dynasty being the ruling house of Saudi Arabia since its founding.

Can a woman walk alone in Saudi Arabia?

There is no information provided in the context about the specific rights or restrictions on women walking alone in Saudi Arabia, but it is known that the country has undergone significant changes in recent years, including the relaxation of some social restrictions, under the vision of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Why is Saudi Arabia's military spending so high?

Saudi Arabia's military spending is high, with an expected expenditure of nearly 80 billion dollars in 2025, which is over 7 percent of its GDP, due to its strategic location in the Middle East and the need to counter threats from neighboring countries, such as Iran, and to protect its oil resources and interests.

Who protects Saudi Arabia?

Saudi Arabia's military is responsible for protecting the country, with a total active-duty troop count of 260,000, and the US also provides military support, including the temporary relocation of a Patriot missile defense battery to the Middle East, to help counter regional threats.

Does Saudi Arabia have mandatory military service?

There is no information provided in the context about whether Saudi Arabia has mandatory military service, but it is known that the country has a significant military presence, with a total active-duty troop count of 260,000, and a wide range of military equipment, including American-made Abrams main battle tanks and F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets.