WASHINGTON — The State Department notified Congress on September 17 of a proposed $24.3 billion sale of forty-eight F-35A stealth fighters to Saudi Arabia, and within a week the deal had collided with a Defence Intelligence Agency assessment warning that Chinese telecommunications equipment inside Saudi military-adjacent facilities makes the kingdom a counterintelligence risk for the most classified aircraft in the American arsenal. Three days later, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told reporters in New York that Ankara would have “no issues” meeting Riyadh’s military needs under the trilateral Mecca pact — a public offer of alternative fighter jets timed so precisely it read less like diplomacy than a contingency both capitals had already rehearsed.
The question is not whether Congress blocks the sale; no resolution of disapproval has been tabled and the thirty-day review has roughly a week remaining. The question is whether Riyadh designed the fallback before Washington created the need, and whether the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed August 7 with Turkey and Pakistan was always intended as an arms-procurement corridor wearing the uniform of collective defence.
Table of Contents
- The Sale That Arrived with Its Own Objection
- What Did the DIA Find Inside Saudi Bases?
- The Mecca Pact’s Defence-Industrial Corridor
- Can Turkey Actually Replace the F-35?
- Five Days, One Cockpit Canopy, and Hong Kong
- Who Controls the Architecture Riyadh Signed?
- Does Riyadh Need the F-35 or the Leverage?
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Sale That Arrived with Its Own Objection
The package — forty-eight F-35As, forty-nine F135 engines, secure communications, electronic-warfare suites, and the kind of cryptographic hardware the United States has historically reserved for its closest treaty allies — was formally submitted to Congress on September 17, 2026, triggering the mandatory thirty-day review during which either chamber can pass a joint resolution of disapproval. By the following day, members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party had filed formal objections, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the committee’s ranking Democrat, had issued a statement whose bluntness left no room for diplomatic hedging.
The Trump Administration should not move forward with its proposed sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia when our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), Ranking Member, House Select Committee on the CCP
The line between political opposition and institutional objection matters here. The congressional sceptics are not arguing, as they did during the Obama-era Saudi arms debates, that the weapons will be used to kill civilians in Yemen; they are arguing that the weapons will be compromised before they leave the crate — that the intelligence environment inside Saudi Arabia is structurally incompatible with the security protocols the F-35 requires. This is not a human-rights objection but a counterintelligence one, and it carries a different weight on Capitol Hill because it originates not from advocacy groups or foreign-policy caucuses but from the Defence Intelligence Agency itself.
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The distinction matters for a second reason. Turkey was expelled from the F-35 programme in July 2019 for purchasing Russia’s S-400 air-defence system — a conscious procurement decision Ankara made knowing the consequences, codified in Section 1245 of the 2020 National Defence Authorisation Act with no waiver mechanism written in. The Saudi case is architecturally different: the DIA is not objecting to what Riyadh bought from a rival power but to what a rival power’s companies have already installed inside the kingdom. Buying a Russian weapons system is a choice; hosting Chinese telecommunications infrastructure across your defence-adjacent facilities is a condition, and Congress has never been asked to adjudicate the latter for an F-35 customer.
If the sale survives, Saudi Arabia becomes the first Arab state to operate the F-35 — a milestone the Trump administration framed, when it signed the US-Saudi Strategic Defence Agreement granting Riyadh Major Non-NATO Ally status in November 2025, as the centrepiece of a recalibrated alliance. If it does not, Riyadh faces an arms-market reality in which the country promised the aircraft as part of a strategic bargain discovers that the bargain’s most visible deliverable was never fully in Washington’s gift.
What Did the DIA Find Inside Saudi Bases?
The DIA identified three concerns: Chinese military personnel access to Saudi bases, Huawei and ZTE equipment embedded in telecommunications infrastructure near defence installations, and the inability to guarantee a maintenance-site restriction limiting F-35 servicing to Saudi and American personnel only — a standard no prior F-35 customer has faced against a Chinese threat vector.
Portions of those findings were cited in a November 19, 2025, letter from Representatives Krishnamoorthi, Joe Courtney, and Donald Norcross to Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — ten months before the State Department formally notified the sale. The base-access concern was framed not as an allegation of active espionage but as a question about protocols in a kingdom whose military cooperation with Beijing has expanded faster than its security-clearance architecture can absorb. The Huawei and ZTE concern centred on firmware-update cycles that create persistent network-access points no amount of physical perimeter security can offset.
The third concern, and the one with the most direct operational consequences for the proposed sale, was whether Washington and Riyadh could enforce a maintenance-site restriction limiting F-35 servicing access exclusively to Saudi and American personnel — a standard no other F-35 operator has been asked to certify against a Chinese, rather than Russian, threat vector. The F-35’s Autonomic Logistics Information System transmits performance and maintenance data to Lockheed Martin’s central servers in real time, and requires the kind of network isolation that the DIA apparently concluded cannot be guaranteed in a telecommunications environment running Huawei-manufactured equipment at adjacent facilities.
The Taiwan comparison circulating in congressional testimony is instructive but imprecise. Taipei has never been offered the full F-35 package, partly because the island’s geographic proximity to Chinese intelligence operations makes the aircraft’s Low Observable coatings, sensor-fusion data, and mission-planning software unacceptably vulnerable to technical collection. But Taiwan’s exclusion was never formally litigated in Congress because the offer was never made, the price never published, and the political cost of rejection never incurred. Saudi Arabia’s case is different in every relevant respect: the sale has been notified, the $24.3 billion price is public, and the DIA’s objection centres not on geographic proximity to China but on Chinese infrastructure already physically present inside the prospective operator’s own military-adjacent installations — the first time this configuration has arisen in the programme’s twenty-five-year history.
What the November 2025 letter asked was whether the administration had required Riyadh to curtail its military-technology cooperation with Beijing as a precondition for the sale. No public response was issued, and the sale was notified ten months later with the DIA’s unresolved concerns arriving in Congress alongside the package rather than having been addressed before it.
The Mecca Pact’s Defence-Industrial Corridor
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed on August 7, 2026, by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif formalises collective security in language that Fidan described as “technically the same” as NATO’s Article 5: any armed attack against one signatory is to be regarded as an attack against all three. The pact builds on the bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed on September 17, 2025 — exactly one year to the day before the State Department notified Congress of the F-35 sale — and Turkey was added eight months after the bilateral deal, with a joint secretariat established in Riyadh following an August 31 meeting in Istanbul.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Feb 21, 2024 | Turkish KAAN fifth-generation fighter maiden flight |
| Sep 17, 2025 | Saudi-Pakistan bilateral Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed |
| Nov 19, 2025 | Krishnamoorthi/Courtney/Norcross letter cites DIA concerns to Hegseth and Rubio |
| May 2026 | Turkish Air Force contracts first KAAN serial-production batch |
| Aug 7, 2026 | Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan) |
| Aug 31, 2026 | Trilateral joint secretariat established after Istanbul meeting |
| Sep 17, 2026 | State Department notifies Congress of $24.3B Saudi F-35A sale |
| Sep 19, 2026 | Fidan publicly offers alternative military hardware to Riyadh |
| Sep 22, 2026 | F-35 parts-to-Hong-Kong supply-chain breach reported |
| ~Oct 17, 2026 | Congressional 30-day review window expires |
| 2028–2029 | KAAN first serial deliveries to Turkish Air Force projected |
The combined military inventory the pact commands is difficult to dismiss: approximately 1.4 million active personnel, 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and 340-plus naval assets, backed by combined annual defence budgets of roughly $124.4 billion. The International Institute for Strategic Studies assessed the agreement as moving Saudi-Turkish relations “from diplomatic rapprochement to formal security alignment” and described it as “clearly oriented towards Iran and meant to address Iran’s new strategic approach which is geared towards dominance of the broader Gulf region.” The Council on Foreign Relations went further, titling its analysis “The U.S.-Led Middle East Order Is Over” — a conclusion that may overstate the rupture but identifies the direction of travel accurately enough to make Washington uncomfortable.
What matters more than the Article 5 language, however, is the defence-cooperation clause beneath it. The Arab Center Washington DC, in the most analytically precise assessment published to date, described the collective-defence commitment as less transformative than the procurement and technology-sharing provisions: the pact “establishes no joint command, standing forces, or specified trigger mechanism,” which renders the mutual-defence guarantee aspirational while the defence-industrial framework remains operational. Fidan’s September 19 statement that Turkey would have “no issues” meeting Saudi military needs, “especially on some technical issues,” was not a statement about war-fighting or mutual defence; it was a statement about manufacturing, delivery timelines, and the kind of technology transfer that the F-35 programme’s security architecture is specifically designed to prevent third parties from providing. When Saudi Arabia’s defence expenditure is already strained by a war it cannot afford and an air-defence shortfall it has not resolved, the gap between a security alliance that may never fire a shot and a procurement channel that is already delivering drones becomes the pact’s most consequential feature.
Can Turkey Actually Replace the F-35?
Not as a direct substitute — the KAAN flies on different engines, lacks the F-35’s sensor-fusion maturity, and will not reach serial production until 2028-2029. But Turkey does not need to match the F-35 spec-for-spec to change Riyadh’s negotiating position. An available fifth-generation-adjacent aircraft without a congressional review attached alters the calculus even if it never enters Saudi service.
Whether Turkey can replace the F-35 depends almost entirely on which part of the aircraft’s value proposition Riyadh believes it is buying, because Turkey’s KAAN is not the F-35, does not pretend to be the F-35, and does not need to be the F-35 to alter the balance of negotiating power between Riyadh and Washington. The KAAN completed its maiden flight on February 21, 2024, the Turkish Air Force contracted its first serial-production batch in May 2026, and TAI General Manager Mehmet Demiroğlu told Breaking Defense in February that negotiations with Saudi Arabia over approximately twenty aircraft — described as “a small squadron” — were in “the final stages of decision-making.”
If Saudi Arabia is buying stealth-penetration capability against a peer-level integrated air-defence network — the mission profile the F-35 was designed for against Russian-built S-300 and S-400 systems — the KAAN is not a substitute and will not be for years. The aircraft flies on GE F-110 engines in its current configuration, not the F135 that gives the F-35 its supercruise-adjacent thrust, and its sensor-fusion architecture remains under development. Turkey unveiled a 42,000-pound-thrust-class indigenous turbofan at SAHA 2026, the Güçhan, as a future engine candidate — its output sits within 2.3 per cent of the F135’s 43,000-pound rating — but full integration into the KAAN airframe is not expected before 2030, and serial deliveries will run into the early 2030s before the fleet reaches meaningful operational depth.
If Riyadh is buying strategic diversification — a fifth-generation-adjacent aircraft from a supplier that will not condition the sale on dismantling Huawei base stations or certifying against Chinese maintenance-site access — the KAAN becomes a fundamentally different proposition. The aircraft does not need to match the F-35 sensor-for-sensor to reshape Riyadh’s negotiating position; it needs only to exist as a credible enough platform that Congress understands the F-35’s monopoly on Gulf fifth-generation airpower is expiring, not permanent.
Turkey’s drone offering is both more mature and already inside the Saudi procurement pipeline. Riyadh signed a deal worth approximately €3 billion with Baykar for roughly sixty Bayraktar Akinci heavy combat drones in 2023, with first locally assembled units — produced through a joint venture with Saudi Arabian Military Industries at a facility designed to give Riyadh indigenous production capability — expected for delivery in 2026. Saudi operators have completed Baykar qualification training, which places the Akinci closer to operational readiness than any manned-fighter alternative under active discussion. The Akinci does not replace the F-35 in any doctrinal sense, but it fills the persistent-surveillance and precision-strike role that accounts for the majority of the sorties Saudi Arabia actually flies when its shield has underperformed, and it arrives without a thirty-day congressional review or a DIA counterintelligence assessment attached.
The timeline gap is the honest answer to the question this section asks. KAAN deliveries are two to three years away, and the F-35’s congressional clock expires in roughly a week. Turkey is not offering to replace the F-35 tomorrow — it is offering to ensure that a congressional rejection is a setback rather than a strategic orphaning, and that a congressional approval lands in a market where Riyadh has already demonstrated it does not depend on the approval to begin building a fifth-generation air force.
Five Days, One Cockpit Canopy, and Hong Kong
Bloomberg reported on September 22 — five days into the Saudi F-35 congressional review — that a cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door from an Australian F-35, both coated in the Radar Absorbent Material that constitutes the aircraft’s most closely guarded manufacturing technology, had been routed through a Lockheed Martin intermediary not to the United States but to Hong Kong, where they were received by an entity American and Australian investigators are still working to identify. Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles described the diverted components as not “sensitive,” a characterisation the Pentagon has declined to endorse and that sits uncomfortably with the fact that RAM coating is the physical embodiment of stealth — the material difference between a $100 million fighter that disappears from radar and one that does not.
The diversion is operationally unrelated to the Saudi sale: it involved an Australian airframe, a Lockheed supply-chain failure, and a Hong Kong endpoint with no connection to Riyadh. In every political sense, however, it landed on the desks of the congressional staffers reviewing the Saudi notification at the exact moment the DIA’s China-infrastructure concerns were shaping the debate’s trajectory. The argument that the F-35’s most sensitive technologies can be secured inside Saudi Arabia becomes measurably harder to sustain when F-35 components coated in radar-absorbing material have turned up in a jurisdiction Beijing administers, five days into the review window, through the programme’s own prime contractor.
The supply-chain breach also undercuts the secondary argument that the sale’s congressional advocates have been offering: that the F-35’s classified-maintenance environment operates on networks isolated enough to withstand the presence of Huawei equipment at adjacent Saudi facilities. A cockpit canopy that travels from Australia to Hong Kong via a Lockheed-contracted intermediary demonstrates that the programme’s security perimeter is only as reliable as its weakest logistics node, and that the weakest node may not reside in the kingdom the DIA flagged but inside the supply chain the programme’s own manufacturer is supposed to control.
For Riyadh, the Hong Kong diversion functions as both alibi and indictment simultaneously. It establishes that F-35 technology leakage is a programme-wide vulnerability rather than a Saudi-specific one, which weakens the case for singling out the kingdom’s telecommunications infrastructure as a disqualifying risk. But it also establishes that adding another operator in a contested counterintelligence environment compounds rather than isolates that programme-wide risk, and congressional opponents will deploy both arguments at once, because neither is wrong.
Who Controls the Architecture Riyadh Signed?
On paper, Riyadh does — the secretariat sits in Saudi Arabia. In practice, Turkey holds the manufacturing capacity (KAAN, Akinci, TB2, corvettes) and Pakistan supplies the nuclear deterrent the pact cannot name. The Arab Center concluded the mutual-defence guarantee is aspirational while the defence-industrial framework is operational, which means the architecture functions on Ankara’s terms.
The Mecca agreement’s most consequential ambiguity is not whether it functions as a genuine mutual-defence treaty — the Arab Center’s verdict that it probably does not is difficult to contest on the evidence available — but whether it creates an architecture Riyadh controls or one that absorbs Riyadh into terms set in Ankara and Islamabad. The secretariat sits in Riyadh, but the defence-industrial capacity overwhelmingly does not. Turkey manufactures the KAAN, the Akinci, the Bayraktar TB2 that rewrote the drone-warfare playbook from Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, and the naval corvettes Ankara has started exporting into the Gulf. Pakistan contributes a nuclear deterrent the pact does not formally acknowledge and a military-industrial base that produces the JF-17 fighter jointly with China — the same China whose telecommunications infrastructure is the basis for the DIA objection threatening the Saudi F-35 sale.
The Conversation’s assessment that the Mecca pact constitutes “a verdict on the reliability of US security guarantees” captures one dimension of what the agreement represents, but it misses the commercial one. The pact is also a bid by Ankara to become the primary non-Western defence supplier to the Gulf at the precise moment Washington’s ability to deliver its signature export platform is in question. Erdogan did not travel to Mecca in August to sign a collective-defence treaty against a threat that has not triggered a collective response in the seven weeks since; he travelled to position Turkey as the country that builds what America withholds, and Fidan’s September statement made that positioning explicit enough that it no longer requires interpretation. The Russian-aligned Valdai Club characterised the agreement as “a new experiment in regional strategic autonomy,” a framing Moscow prefers because it supports the narrative that the American alliance system is fragmenting — but the framing is not wrong simply because Moscow finds it convenient.
Pakistan’s role in the architecture is more constrained than its 650,000-strong military suggests. Islamabad’s Foreign Office stated publicly that no military response is “currently under discussion” under the pact, a formulation that frames readiness as contingent rather than committed and stops well short of the automatic-response mechanism NATO’s Article 5 was designed to provide. Pakistan’s own deep defence relationship with Beijing — from the JF-17 co-production line to the Chinese-funded Gwadar port that sits on the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz — further complicates the counterintelligence environment the DIA has identified as the core F-35 risk. The Mecca pact’s three signatories include two countries whose own procurement histories with Russia and China respectively would disqualify them from F-35 access under current American protocols, and that Riyadh chose these two states as its collective-security partners at the moment it was asking Congress to approve a $24.3 billion F-35 sale suggests either a strategic confidence in its ability to compartmentalise alliances or a bet that the sale was never coming and the pact needed to compensate for its absence. What Riyadh acquired when it bought a nuclear ceiling it cannot independently set may matter less than what it signed in Mecca with partners whose own procurement profiles serve as the template for the congressional objection Saudi Arabia now faces.
Does Riyadh Need the F-35 or the Leverage?
Probably the leverage. The F-35 addresses neither capability gap — PAC-3 interceptor shortfalls nor Prince Sultan Air Base’s lost deterrent role — that defined Saudi vulnerability in the Iran crisis. What the aircraft delivers is a credential: confirmation that Washington trusts Riyadh with the most sensitive platform in its inventory. That credential may matter more than the aircraft itself.
Saudi Arabia received Major Non-NATO Ally status under the Strategic Defence Agreement signed with Washington in November 2025 — a designation that unlocked expedited arms procurement and the defence-cooperation frameworks the United States had previously reserved for states like Japan, Australia, and South Korea. But the agreement deliberately excluded the explicit executive pledge Washington extended to Qatar: a commitment to treat an attack on the partner state as a direct threat to the United States itself. The F-35 was the centrepiece of the military deliverable, the hardware that made the MNNA designation tangible rather than ceremonial, and without the aircraft the strategic agreement becomes a framework whose most visible output never arrives.
Whether Riyadh actually needs the F-35 as a weapons system — rather than needing it as proof that Washington considers the kingdom a first-tier security partner — is a question the past two months have partially answered. Prince Sultan Air Base lost its deterrent value before Iran fired a shot, not because the Royal Saudi Air Force lacked stealth fighters but because the base’s role as a forward-deployment site for American aircraft was neutralised by political decisions no airframe can reverse. The Patriot PAC-3 interceptor shortages that defined the early weeks of the Iran crisis were a logistics and procurement failure, not an airframe gap, and the F-35 addresses neither problem.
The Saudi defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan is a verdict on the reliability of US security guarantees.
The Conversation, analysis, August 2026
What the F-35 delivers is not capability alone but credential: that Riyadh has cleared the counterintelligence threshold for the most sensitive platform in the American inventory, that the relationship has moved beyond the transactional arms-for-oil framework into something closer to the integrated defence partnerships Washington maintains with Tokyo or Canberra. That credential has become progressively harder to argue before the committees that control the sale, given a procurement record that includes a reported $2 billion Pantsir-S1 deal routed through sanctioned Russian firms, expanding military contacts with Beijing, and now a collective-security pact with two states Washington has either sanctioned or expelled from the F-35 programme.
Saudi Arabia’s diversified defence strategy has produced a paradox the Arab Center captured precisely: the more Riyadh diversifies its suppliers, the more opportunities it creates for China “in terms of training, weapons sales, and military diplomacy,” which makes the F-35’s counterintelligence requirements harder to satisfy, which drives further diversification away from the platform whose requirements caused the diversification. The Mecca pact did not create this cycle; it formalised one that began the moment Riyadh concluded that depending on a single weapons supplier whose legislature could block any sale at any time was a strategic vulnerability rather than a relationship worth preserving on Washington’s terms.
The Turkish alternative will not deliver a single airframe for two to three years, and the review window closes in days. What happens inside that gap — whether Riyadh waits, pivots, or accepts the F-35 on conditions requiring the dismantlement of the Chinese infrastructure the DIA flagged — will determine whether the Mecca pact remains a hedge or becomes the architecture that replaces what Washington could not deliver. The 42,000-pound-thrust Güçhan engine Turkey unveiled this year sits within a rounding error of the F135 that powers the aircraft Congress is debating. The engineering gap is closing faster than the political one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has Congress ever successfully blocked an F-35 foreign military sale?
No joint resolution of disapproval has ever blocked an F-35 transfer. The programme’s only operator removal — Turkey in July 2019 — was an executive-branch decision triggered by S-400 delivery, not a congressional vote. The thirty-day review mechanism has historically functioned as a negotiation window in which conditions are attached or delivery timelines adjusted, not as a kill switch. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2024 that total F-35 programme costs would reach $1.7 trillion over the aircraft’s lifecycle, a figure that gives fiscal conservatives grounds to scrutinise any expansion of the operator base independent of the counterintelligence debate surrounding the Saudi sale.
What does Saudi Arabia currently fly as its primary air-superiority platform?
The Royal Saudi Air Force operates eighty-four F-15SA/SAs delivered under a $29.4 billion 2012 Foreign Military Sale, making the Boeing F-15 the backbone of the kingdom’s fighter inventory; Boeing delivered the final airframe in 2023. The Eurofighter Typhoon fleet of seventy-two aircraft handles the second-line air-superiority and multirole strike mission, while the Panavia Tornado IDS/ADV fleet is being phased out of frontline service. The F-15EX — Boeing’s upgraded Eagle II — was discussed in 2025 policy circles as a potential F-35 fallback, but the production line is committed to US Air Force orders through at least 2028, and the aircraft lacks the Low Observable characteristics that constitute the F-35’s core value proposition over the F-15 it was designed to complement.
Does the Mecca pact have a nuclear dimension?
The agreement does not mention nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, or extended-deterrent commitments in any of its published provisions, but one of its three signatories — Pakistan — possesses an estimated 170 nuclear warheads and the delivery systems to employ them across the region. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told CBS in a 2018 interview that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, “we will follow suit as soon as possible,” and the Saudi-Pakistan bilateral defence relationship has long been speculated to include an informal nuclear-umbrella understanding that neither capital has confirmed or denied. The Mecca pact’s collective-defence clause does not extend to nuclear-use or retaliatory scenarios, but it formalises a military alliance with a nuclear-armed state at a moment when the Iran nuclear file and Riyadh’s own enrichment ambitions under the stalled US-Saudi civil-nuclear negotiation both remain unresolved.
What happens if the congressional review expires without a resolution of disapproval?
If neither the House nor the Senate passes a joint resolution of disapproval within the thirty-day window, the sale proceeds to the contracting phase — but proceeding does not mean delivering. The F-35’s production timeline typically runs three to four years from contract signature to operational delivery, which places the first Saudi F-35As no earlier than 2029 or 2030. During that interval, Riyadh would need to construct classified maintenance facilities meeting Lockheed Martin’s Autonomic Logistics Information System network-isolation requirements, train pilots and ground crews through the US Air Force’s F-35 schoolhouse at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, and demonstrate to the programme office’s satisfaction that the DIA’s telecommunications-infrastructure concerns have been resolved. Congressional approval is the beginning of the procurement process, and the counterintelligence conditions that nearly blocked the sale at the review stage will follow the aircraft through every subsequent phase of integration.
