A row of F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets during the Royal International Air Tattoo 2024 on July 21, 2024 in Fairford, England. Getty Images / Matthew Horwood
Air Force-facilitated arms export sales reach all-time high
“Business is booming,” particularly for fighter jets, officials say.
DAYTON, Ohio—Foreign countries are buying more weapons through the U.S. Air Force than ever before, due in large part to global instability, officials say.
“Business has been booming, I understand, for this team, as events happen around the world and our partner nations recognize that it's a dangerous world once again, things like Russia invading Ukraine,” said Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Geraghty, the director of the Air Force’s Security Assistance and Cooperation Directorate.
Sales of U.S.-made weapons facilitated by the directorate totaled $46.2 billion in fiscal 2024, up from $28.7 billion in fiscal 2023 and an all-time high, according to Shawn Lyman, deputy director of AFSAC.
The bulk of the total comes from recent sales of F-35 and F-16 fighter jets. Earlier this year, the U.S. approved the sale of 40 F-16s to Turkey and up to 40 F-35s to Greece. The deal with Turkey was not without controversy—the U.S. was holding up the F-16 sale until Ankara allowed Sweden into NATO. Originally, Turkey planned to buy stealthy F-35s, but was banned from the program after the country purchased Russian air defense systems, straining its relationship with the United States.
Purchasing nations are set up with an “enduring relationship” and logistics support when they buy American—which isn’t the case when they buy from China or Russia, Geraghty told reporters at the Air Force’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference.
“The countries discovered this by themselves. When they go and buy from a non-allied partner and that non-allied partner maybe gets them a better, cheaper deal or something, but then they find out five to 10 years down the road, that these things are just broken, and they’re asking, ‘Where’d all our money go? We got these piles of junk on our runway or on our ramp.’ So they start to increase their appreciation for that enduring relationship,” Geraghty said.
Even with the increase in demand, Lyman said their directorate has been able to speed up some parts of the foreign military sales process, a historically slow and cumbersome system. The Pentagon released a list of steps last year to make the process more efficient, and Lyman said his directorate is improving the processes they can control, like speeding up “requirements definition” and “case development and writing.”