Saudi Arabia's Military Atrophy and Defense Geopolitics

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 wealth and influence of Saudi Arabia, the nation’s military isn’t nearly as powerful as one might expect. In fact, it is treated as 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, a critical question emerges regarding why Saudi Arabia is not the military powerhouse its resources suggest it should be.

It is necessary to examine what Saudi Arabia is doing to change the equation to build itself into a regional power that can meet the moment, and to evaluate how powerful the nation could truly become if Riyadh were to fully commit itself to building a formidable military and an independent defense-industrial complex.

The Disconnect Between Grand Ambition and Military Reality

Of all the nations known for the extreme heights of their ambition, few are even remotely comparable to Saudi Arabia. The nation is currently pursuing a litany of unprecedented megaprojects, including 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 functions as a hotel stretching across a massive lagoon, and an artificial moon, all initially promised to be ready for completion 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 a corresponding population actually wants to live there.

Compare the grand scale of Saudi Arabia’s broader ambitions to the state of its standing military, and the results are notably confusing. Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are not tiny by any means; the nation boasts a total active-duty troop count of 260,000. In 2025, it is expected to spend nearly eighty billion dollars on its military.

This figure represents over seven percent of its gross domestic product and stands as 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. Furthermore, its navy will soon sail a total of eleven well-armed frigates, alongside 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 maintains ten thousand troops focused solely on air defense, plus an entire branch of its military dedicated to strategic nuclear missiles. Saudi Arabia is known for a technological sophistication that allows it to keep pace with peer forces in Europe, Asia, and North America.

However, looking closer at the Saudi military, its standing relative to its international peers leaves a great deal to be desired.

Complete Dependence on Foreign Military Imports

In aggregate dollar amounts, Saudi Arabia spends roughly as much on its military as Germany, India, the United Kingdom, or France. Yet, in one particular regard, each of those nations leaves the Saudi Armed Forces far behind. Each of those nations, as well as other top military spenders like Japan, South Korea, or Israel, all possess a robust military-industrial complex to call their own.

The less impressive among them are still quite formidable, while the best among their number are world leaders in military innovation. Each of them develops and builds a fair proportion of their own military hardware, such as the French Rafale fighter jet and CAESAR howitzer, or several classes of major combat vessels and multiple types of main battle tanks for Japan. Many of those nations consistently export their military hardware around the globe.

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 proprietary equipment. 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 a wide margin to be using practically zero indigenously designed or built hardware in its arsenal. In fact, it is not until reaching the Netherlands, which is number nineteen on the global list and spends barely a quarter of what Saudi Arabia does, that one finds a military anywhere near as reliant on foreign imports as the Saudis are. The foreign equipment Saudi Arabia acquires often comes at unusually high prices.

This is not because the nation buys expensive hardware that other countries cannot afford, but because Riyadh seems quite content to pay for overpriced copies of the exact same equipment that other countries purchase for far less. By all outward indicators, Riyadh is not just content to pay premium prices for its advanced weapons; it is more than happy to live in a world where it has no better domestic alternatives. Saudi Arabia barely possesses 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.

Internal Security, Regime Survival, and Structural Inefficiency

In terms of what Saudi Arabia actually does with its imported hardware, the results can be structurally baffling. First and foremost, its military is split in half for reasons tied deeply to domestic survival rather than battlefield efficacy. While the military comprises roughly 260,000 troops in total, over half of those personnel are part of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

This organization exists under a completely different chain of command via the nation’s Ministry of National Guard, instead of being directed by the Ministry of Defense like the rest of the armed forces. The National Guard’s primary function is to protect the House of Saud from a coup d’état—a task it seems entirely capable of handling, given that it is larger than the rest of the military combined. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia’s choices regarding military hardware often defy strategic logic.

The military frequently uses several redundant pieces of hardware sourced from multiple nations to fulfill the exact same function, when just one standardized platform would suffice. The proportions of certain types of equipment can also be highly irregular. The army possesses more tanks and fewer artillery pieces than would be expected of a force 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 segregated government ministries.

According to numerous international military personnel who have trained alongside Saudi troops, many among their number suffer from being undermotivated, unfocused, or lacking in standard tactical proficiency. Saudi Arabia’s vast military expenditures do not provide anywhere near the return on investment that other Middle Eastern nations consistently achieve, despite the fact that those regional competitors are doing much more while spending significantly less. Compare Riyadh to a nation like Turkey, which has 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. Alternatively, consider Iran, which holds 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, committing a much smaller proportion of its gross domestic product.

Egypt presents similar numbers, with about 440,000 active-duty troops and 480,000 in reserve, despite spending the equivalent of under five billion dollars on its 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. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are not just lacking in power or industrial independence relative to the nations that spend comparable sums on defense.

The military is lacking even when compared to its regional peers, despite having the sheer capital to eclipse many of them simultaneously. It is in a state of atrophy that would alarm the leaders of most major militaries, coupled 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.

The Historical Context of the House of Saud and Tribal Alliances

In the broader landscape of international defense spending, systemic structures rarely happen by accident, and the current state of Saudi Arabia’s military is no different. The nation’s undersized armed forces, its unusual and entirely imported composition, and its atrophied military-industrial complex are the product of deliberate choice, not mere coincidence. Understanding the strategic thinking behind Riyadh’s choices is critical for comprehending the state of its military today.

In the special case of Saudi Arabia, the situation is not necessarily the byproduct of poor decision-making. In many respects, the status of the Saudi military operates entirely by design, beginning directly with the domestic political realities facing Riyadh. At home, Saudi Arabia operates similarly to an apex entity with minimal natural predators.

Very few nearby nations have the combined military and economic strength to challenge it. Those that could mount a challenge generally prefer not to, and any nation that might be powerful and bold enough to try—namely, Iran—is fighting on multiple fronts across the region. These adversaries know full well that an attack interfering with Saudi oil production would provoke a massive and immediate global response.

Furthermore, Saudi Arabia operates with the understanding that the international community will help protect its oil against external threats. This means that the worst immediate military threats Riyadh typically has to worry about are non-state actors, such as the Islamic State or the Houthi rebels. If the size of the current Saudi military were cut in half, and then halved again, it would still retain more than enough capacity to respond to terror threats on its own soil, even if it could no longer consider intervening proactively in neighboring conflicts like the war in Yemen.

The primary threat that Saudi Arabia does focus on is the threat of regime change from within. The nation’s very 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 exceptionally powerful within Saudi Arabia, but its leaders are acutely aware that they are not invincible.

It is for this precise historical and political reason that Riyadh has chosen to split its military in two, sending the larger half into its own separate ministry as a National Guard. This National Guard is then specifically charged with defending the regime against the smaller, but considerably better-equipped, regular military. Additionally, the regime arguably benefits directly from a regular military that remains highly factionalized and inefficient.

High-ranking officers with massive egos are often kept busier competing for internal clout than plotting an overthrow of the Crown Prince. The structure tolerates a system influenced by patronage, where loyalty is heavily incentivized and where enlisted troops are structurally discouraged from independent initiative that might lead to subversive political ideas. Furthermore, this is not a country where young Saudi citizens are typically driven to put their comfortable lives on hold to sign up for enlisted military service.

Instead, Saudi Arabia has faced accusations of relying on mercenaries from Yemen, Africa, and Latin America to bolster its prior interventions in Yemen. Its reticence to allow foreigners into its regular military inherently constrains the armed forces to remain as small as the localized recruiting pool dictates. Although Saudi Arabia could theoretically recruit more troops, it prefers to allow many capable young fighters to serve in the local militias of their own clans and tribes.

The Saudi state has cultivated a mutually beneficial historical arrangement with these tribes, allowing them to serve alongside the National Guard and enjoy all the associated financial incentives. Through this method, the regime unifies tribes that are loyal to the House of Saud, maintains their loyalty with a consistent flow of funds, and ensures that any tribes inclined to go rogue remain embroiled in localized clan rivalries long before they can grow strong enough to challenge the royal family.

Geopolitics, Leverage, and the Acquisition Strategy

Beyond domestic regime survival, international geopolitical factors heavily influence Riyadh’s purchase of so much foreign equipment and its willingness to accept hardware that is overpriced, redundant, or both. Where price is concerned, the calculus is straightforward: Saudi Arabia possesses vast financial reserves, and arms-exporting nations reliably enjoy lucrative contracts. By paying a premium for its hardware, Riyadh actively purchases genuine political goodwill in foreign capitals, easily dismissing the extra expenditures as little more than a rounding error in its sovereign wealth framework.

Regarding the nation’s willingness to pay for redundant equipment, the underlying reasoning is similar. Riyadh can build wider diplomatic goodwill by distributing its purchases among multiple competing foreign suppliers. However, there is also an aesthetic and prestige-driven angle.

As with so many other elements of Saudi Arabia’s grand ambitions, the nation’s military leadership often operates by the unwritten rule of aesthetics. If the Saudi military has most of its critical strategic boxes checked off, and it can afford to spend extra capital simply to project a formidable, highly advanced image, the leadership is more than willing to fund that posture. There is a deeply pragmatic reason for Saudi Arabia to rely on vast amounts of foreign hardware sourced from multiple world powers simultaneously.

The fundamental reality of foreign military exports dictates that purchasing a complex piece of advanced hardware intrinsically links the buyer to the seller for decades. A major platform requires decades of spare parts shipments, software updates, specialized training, and ongoing maintenance. Consequently, for as long as a nation fields that foreign military equipment, it remains highly dependent on the continued favor of the supplying nations.

For most countries, these export limitations and end-user agreements are a severe vulnerability, exposing them to the meddling and coercion of major powers. Such constraints are simply tolerated as the unavoidable cost of doing business. Regional rivals in Tehran, for instance, have struggled immensely to keep various platforms in service under the crushing weight of Western sanctions.

For Saudi Arabia, however, this dynamic is inverted into a strategic asset. The global economy remains deeply invested in ensuring that the nation’s oil continues flowing without interruption from the desert directly into the global market. By choosing to remain deliberately reliant on foreign hardware to protect that oil infrastructure, Riyadh provides external powers with peace of mind in two simultaneous ways.

First, it guarantees that Saudi resources are defended by proven equipment that powerful nations manufacture, understand intimately, and trust, rather than risking the possibility that untested indigenous Saudi technology might fail during a critical crisis. Second, it allows Riyadh to painlessly hand away direct leverage over its armed forces. By giving the United States, China, European states, Russia, and other suppliers the knowledge that they could threaten Riyadh with export controls if necessary, Saudi Arabia reassures its foreign partners.

This grants significant diplomatic leverage to external powers but sacrifices very little from Saudi Arabia’s perspective, given that its leadership was never genuinely inclined to build a completely independent military apparatus in the first place.

Vision 2030 and the Neglected Defense Industry

While Saudi Arabia possesses distinct domestic and geopolitical reasons for avoiding a massive standing army and relying heavily on foreign imports, these factors do not fully explain the severe disconnect between the nation’s sheer financial potential and its military reality. The outstanding question remains as to why Riyadh actively chose not to cultivate a military-industrial complex—if not for domestic self-reliance, then for highly lucrative export markets. This gap is especially glaring at a moment when the nation is systematically attempting to inject itself into nearly every global moneymaking venture available.

Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has embarked on a nationwide effort to transform its entire economic foundation in preparation for a rapidly shifting global paradigm. Riyadh is acutely aware that the vast majority of its historical fortunes have been generated exclusively by the international oil trade. While immense oil wealth is a powerful geopolitical tool, it comes with two inescapable systemic problems: eventually, the finite oil reserves will be depleted, and long before that happens, global demand for oil may crater.

As the broader world steadily transitions toward renewable energy sources, Riyadh understands it cannot fight that macroeconomic shift indefinitely. The kingdom faces the daunting prospect of dragging an oil-dependent economy into a largely post-oil world—a fundamentally losing proposition. For Riyadh, the definitive answer to this existential economic problem is aggressive diversification.

The strategy involves taking as much accumulated oil wealth as possible and utilizing it to kick-start numerous self-sustaining industries before the oil or the capital eventually runs out. Since 2016, Saudi leaders have organized the bulk of these efforts under the banner of Vision 2030, a massive, state-directed program intended to surge funding and accelerate infrastructure development to an extraordinary degree. It is this desperate effort to diversify the economy that has led Saudi Arabia to invest simultaneously in so many wildly aspirational megaprojects.

The nation is attempting to instantly transform itself into a major global tourist destination, a crucial waypoint for international freight logistics, a dominant force in global sports and entertainment, a primary player in the international real estate market, and a burgeoning center for tech entrepreneurship. Vision 2030 explicitly touches on questions of national defense, setting an initial public goal to localize over half of Saudi Arabia’s military spending within the nation’s borders by the year 2030. In practice, however, that ambitious localized spending goal has not translated into the organic creation of a healthy, innovative defense-industrial complex.

Instead, the initiative has primarily resulted in basic relocation efforts. Saudi Arabia has focused on moving the physical production lines of foreign-designed equipment onto Saudi soil so that basic manufacture and assembly can be conducted domestically, while the critical phases of design, engineering, rigorous testing, and advanced research and development have been largely ignored. In 2017, the kingdom announced the creation of a state-owned military corporation named Saudi Arabian Military Industries.

Yet, the responsibilities of this entity, colloquially known as SAMI, remain starkly limited. The company was charged predominantly with basic assembly and the localized maintenance of foreign hardware, which accurately reflects its operational reality today. Other state-owned military groups within the country mostly manufacture basic infantry equipment and standard ammunition, alongside limited development efforts focusing on digital and electronic security.

Beyond those narrow parameters, state-sponsored programs intended to research and develop truly complex, indigenous military platforms simply do not exist. For the first several years of Vision 2030, high-level Saudi officials routinely confirmed that their primary hope was merely to form deeper collaborative relationships with foreign nations, import existing technologies for local manufacture, and eventually start exporting those derivative products after a decade or two. Developing proprietary, cutting-edge Saudi military technology was explicitly not the priority.

The Cost of Industrial Stagnation in a Changing Global Order

The exact reasons behind Saudi leadership’s hesitation to aggressively build a proprietary defense export industry remain difficult to pinpoint with absolute certainty. The nation’s leaders historically avoided addressing the question directly, and until very recently, they did not appear to view the lack of defense innovation as a strategic vulnerability. It is highly possible that a concerted focus on gritty defense-industrial initiatives would have presented too sharp of a public relations contrast with the glitzy, futuristic, and utopian appeal of other high-profile Vision 2030 projects.

Promoting a massive arms industry might have risked shining an unwanted light on the darker geopolitical realities of the region at a precise moment when Saudi Arabia’s primary pitch to the global community was one of benevolent, visionary ambition. Alternatively, the neglect may have simply been a profound strategic oversight and a severe misreading of the sheer financial value of the global arms market. Saudi leaders may have intentionally avoided the topic out of lingering fears that aggressive domestic arms development would drive cautious Western nations to expand the scope of their export controls.

At the time, a fair portion of advanced Western military technology was already being selectively denied to Riyadh. Regardless of the internal motivations driving Saudi Arabia’s thinking, ignoring the massive economic and geopolitical potential of defense manufacturing represents a major missed opportunity. Over the last decade, several mid-sized powers have successfully grown into major, highly influential players within the lucrative international arms export industry.

South Korea, Turkey, and China have aggressively expanded their market share, alongside highly profitable recent years for established European producers like Germany and France. In each of these cases, indigenously developed and combat-tested equipment has become the primary selling point. French fighter jets, German main battle tanks, and Turkish combat drones have dominated international procurement conversations.

The growing defense-industrial role of these nations has directly correlated with rising hard power and diplomatic influence on the global stage. While each of these countries possessed a much more robust baseline defense industry than Saudi Arabia did a decade ago, absolutely none of them have surged anywhere near the amount of raw capital toward defense development that Saudi Arabia has funneled into its varied Vision 2030 civic projects. Saudi Arabia has actively demonstrated a willingness to execute many of the foundational steps that could have closed this industrial gap.

The kingdom has invested heavily in recruiting elite foreign experts, constructing brand-new production lines and vast physical infrastructure, and expanding university research institutions. However, these massive investments were simply never applied directly to military-industrial design. Consequently, Saudi Arabia has learned the hard way that despite its broader, aggressive efforts to become more relevant on the global stage, there is simply no easy shortcut to becoming a respected power in the defense world without possessing the sovereign ability to design, build, and test original hardware.

Other strategically relevant nations routinely design advanced military hardware across multiple domains simultaneously, test and refine their proprietary equipment efficiently, and then move rapidly into full-scale production using their own localized facilities and native engineering talent. While not every national defense initiative yields a flawless success, the iterative process is refined over time to a point of consistent sovereign capability. By stark comparison, Saudi Arabia today is not merely a step behind its peers; it is hardly even considered a serious contributor in high-level international defense consortiums.

As highlighted in a 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, far too many major Saudi security decisions and investments over a period of decades were executed without being part of any coherent, long-term force improvement plan, often made with highly limited regard to actual cost-effectiveness. This glaring industrial gap was highlighted recently in a particularly embarrassing diplomatic exchange for the Kingdom. When Saudi Arabia formally requested to join the Global Combat Air Programme—a joint, highly advanced effort between the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan to develop a cutting-edge sixth-generation fighter jet—the response Riyadh received bordered on outright condescension.

Because Saudi Arabia entirely lacks a sovereign aerospace industry, the partner nations viewed Riyadh as far from a valuable technical contributor. The head of the Italian aerospace corporation Leonardo publicly suggested that the Saudis could perhaps start their integration by simply putting together a few older Eurofighter jets on a basic assembly line, after which the consortium might be willing to discuss any further developmental steps.

Adapting to Shifting Alliances and Future Technological Horizons

Over the last several years, Saudi leaders have watched alongside the rest of the world as the established international order has begun to fracture and change dramatically. When Riyadh first laid out the ambitious blueprints for Vision 2030, there was no way to predict that within a single decade, Russia and Ukraine would be locked in a grinding, years-long conventional war of attrition. It was difficult to foresee that Israel and Iran would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Middle East through direct, head-to-head military confrontation, or that China would rise so rapidly to stand opposite the United States as a true, peer-level global superpower.

Like every other nation navigating this volatile era, Saudi Arabia has watched its baseline expectations for the future occasionally fail to match the harsh new realities of global security. In response to this rapidly deteriorating environment, Riyadh has spent the past couple of years fundamentally rethinking its military expenditures and reconsidering its historical decision to sideline its domestic defense industry. During this period, Saudi Arabia has made quantifiable progress in increasing its baseline capacity for military production on its own soil.

As of 2024, the kingdom has successfully localized approximately twenty percent of its total production needs. It has aggressively expanded the total number of military-industrial facilities operating in the country from a mere five in 2019 to over three hundred by the start of the current year. While the kingdom is not currently on a trajectory to reach its ultimate Vision 2030 goals entirely on time—which would require localizing a full fifty percent of its defense production—it does appear positioned to get relatively close and should be able to cross that vital benchmark before the end of the 2030s.

Senior Saudi officials have recently suggested that the nation’s defense-industrial growth is approaching a critical inflection point, moving from incremental, single-digit percentage growth toward genuine exponential expansion. As time has progressed, Saudi Arabia has intentionally played a much more active and prominent role in the joint development of military equipment alongside a diversified portfolio of partner nations. It has worked closely with China to construct the specialized infrastructure necessary to produce ballistic missiles domestically.

It has engineered a complex naval combat management system designed jointly in cooperation with Spain. It has opened diplomatic and industrial channels to receive advanced indigenous defense technology directly from Turkey, and it recently established a bilateral development framework with South Korea to actively facilitate collaborative military research and design. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia’s overarching acquisition patterns have shifted markedly.

China is now supplying four times the amount of military equipment to Riyadh than it did historically. South Korea is successfully exporting advanced air defense systems to the kingdom. Germany has completely reopened its strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia by authorizing the transfer of advanced air-to-air missiles, following several years in which Berlin strictly banned the sale of any military exports to Riyadh due to human rights concerns.

Consequently, Saudi Arabia has secured unprecedented access to highly sophisticated foreign equipment that its engineers can actively study, alongside vastly improved access to the foundational technical knowledge of various partner nations. Crucially, Riyadh has managed this rapid diversification without sacrificing its foundational security relationship with the United States. Recently, Washington agreed to sell Saudi Arabia nearly 150 billion dollars’ worth of advanced weapons, functioning as a precursor to a potential future sale of highly coveted F-35 stealth fighter jets.

With these new international developments, Saudi Arabia has proven fully capable of gathering more advanced and formidable equipment to beef up its standing military at a highly critical time for the region. The nation currently faces a rapidly evolving and deteriorating security situation, as the wider Middle East has been sent spinning on its geopolitical axis. Yemen’s deeply entrenched Houthi rebels, situated directly to Saudi Arabia’s south, pose an ever-growing asymmetric threat.

Simultaneously, surviving operatives of the Islamic State appear to be actively preparing for a resurgence across both Syria and Iraq. While the Saudis benefited from a brief stroke of strategic luck during the recent direct clashes between Iran and Israel—specifically because Iran chose not to attempt a devastating blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—Riyadh understands that conventional war could easily return to Iranian borders. If Tehran ever did attempt to choke off the vital maritime strait, the Saudi military would almost certainly be forced into direct, kinetic involvement.

By securing better equipment and diversifying its supply chains, Saudi Arabia is working to ensure that it can successfully deter most potential regional attackers while maintaining the hard power necessary to deal with adversaries that cannot simply be scared away.

Unfulfilled Potential and the Future of Sovereign Defense

Even with these significant acquisitions and shifting diplomatic alliances, Riyadh still has not built the comprehensive, top-to-bottom defense-industrial complex that its vast capital reserves are fully capable of creating. The kingdom’s recent push toward localizing domestic weapons manufacturing has not translated into any major, systemic initiatives to independently design or engineer sovereign military platforms from scratch. This remains a glaring omission, especially considering that the nation is currently in a prime position to seek out new financial windfalls.

Many of Saudi Arabia’s most globally publicized, hyper-ambitious megaprojects have been quietly downgraded or systematically swept out of the public eye. Negative press has accumulated rapidly, stemming from deep international human rights concerns, growing hesitation from crucial foreign investors, alarming red flags in the country’s macroeconomic data, and deeply troubling reports regarding massive worker casualties linked directly to Vision 2030 infrastructure projects between 2017 and 2024. However, some highly focused Vision 2030 projects are performing adequately—specifically, those initiatives that pour Saudi wealth into pragmatic, self-sustaining sectors that work to meet actual existing market demand, rather than chasing the artificial demand Riyadh claimed existed for a glittering linear city spanning the deep desert.

Initiatives capable of capturing well-trained subject-matter experts, drawn from both within Saudi Arabia and across the broader globe, and channeling their highly specialized expertise into well-funded, concrete engineering projects consistently tend to deliver tangible results. At a moment when Saudi Arabia is actively witnessing the precise shifts in the global oil market that first prompted its long-term economic anxiety, the aggressive push to successfully diversify the Saudi economy must begin yielding reliable, sovereign dividends. For the nation to finally overcome its long-standing historical reticence and throw its immense resources into building a genuine, export-driven arms industry would represent a brilliant strategic solution.

Such an approach would perfectly leverage the nation’s clearly demonstrated financial strengths while effectively bypassing many of the logistical and developmental pitfalls it has utterly failed to navigate in its more utopian civilian megaprojects. A Riyadh that is no longer content merely to slap a “Made in Saudi Arabia” sticker onto the side of another nation’s creatively licensed military hardware is a Riyadh that could immediately dominate an ongoing, unprecedented spending boom within the global defense sector. The kingdom possesses more liquid capital to aggressively solicit the help of elite foreign engineering experts, and to invest in superior research and development infrastructure, than almost any other global competitor currently operating in the space.

Saudi Arabia has the unique ability to follow the proven industrial model that other emerging mid-tier nations have successfully laid out, while achieving those comparable levels of engineering success far faster than the competition. Riyadh can benefit directly from the hard-earned lessons those nations learned through decades of expensive trial and error, and it can funnel exponentially more sovereign resources directly to targeted defense firms than any of its rivals. For Saudi Arabia to go completely all-in on defense manufacturing should logically be a guaranteed winning proposition.

For exactly that reason, it remains all the more perplexing that the nation’s leadership still has not taken the definitive leap. If Saudi Arabia did decide to fundamentally alter its strategic course, either to dramatically strengthen its own sovereign military capabilities or to build out a massive exporting defense industry, the potential achievements would be staggering. Regarding its domestic forces, a few core guiding principles are unlikely to ever shift.

The House of Saud will undoubtedly continue to prioritize its own absolute survival above all else. It will persistently cultivate a tightly controlled internal security environment in which no single faction can gather the combined strength required to attempt regime change, and it will keep heavily relying on complex foreign military hardware architectures, even if a steadily growing portion of the physical assembly is eventually completed in-house. Given these immovable political constraints, it is highly unlikely that Saudi Arabia would ever expand its standing regular army of fewer than eighty thousand troops to match the massive scale of regional rivals like Turkey or Iran.

It is even less likely that the state could suddenly convince a massive wave of affluent, historically comfortable young Saudi citizens to willingly sign on the dotted line for grueling enlisted military service. Nevertheless, the kingdom could rapidly build out its hard power capabilities in entirely different, highly specialized directions, beginning with the complex operational question of foreign manpower. Saudi Arabia possesses a long, deliberately shadowy history of relying heavily on contracted mercenaries.

Because the state strictly prohibits foreigners from enlisting in the regular military proper, private mercenary forces could offer an incredibly valuable, highly flexible mechanism for the nation to rapidly develop greater offensive potency, specialize in chronically overlooked tactical areas, and aggressively assert its geopolitical will abroad. In the mid-2020s, the global demand for well-equipped, highly capable mercenary forces is sharply on the rise. Russia’s Wagner Group successfully formalized the modern model, effectively utilizing nameless, faceless, and seemingly nationless proxy soldiers to firmly establish operational control over highly contested reserves of critical minerals and other strategic resources across multiple continents.

Nations ranging from Turkey to China and the United Arab Emirates have actively started to build and deploy highly similar proxy organizations. They are dispatching these specialized units across the globe to establish a permanent, heavily armed presence in highly profitable conflict zones where their superior weaponry, advanced training, and tactical coordination easily place them head-and-shoulders above most fragmented local threats on the ground. Saudi Arabia stands as a uniquely prime candidate to heavily enter the international mercenary arena.

Its virtually bottomless financial resources can be devoted to the quite literal, immediate purchase of localized loyalty from highly experienced armed actors. Furthermore, relying entirely on contracted foreigners to execute these dangerous operations naturally extends the highly coveted veil of plausible deniability—a diplomatic shield that other countries implicitly enjoy once they begin deploying forces into international, legally ambiguous grey zones. Additionally, if Saudi Arabia were to successfully replicate the aggressive resource-extracting operations perfected by other nations operating in mercenary-controlled areas, those proxy operations could very quickly pay for themselves while simultaneously helping to diversify the broader Saudi economy even further.

While this expanding international mercenary dynamic is rarely a positive force for global stability, recognizing its utility is essential for understanding the specific, highly effective ways that immense Saudi resources could theoretically be leveraged to dramatically further sovereign Saudi interests abroad.

Manufacturing Leverage and High-Tech Defense Opportunities

When assessing the strategic realm of military procurement and global export, Saudi Arabia could conceivably scale up its current localized assembly approach, heavily financing and building the military hardware of other established nations rather than attempting to design and develop its own proprietary models from scratch. Across the globe, and particularly throughout Europe, there are numerous hardware-producing nations that possess brilliant, cutting-edge engineering designs but completely lack the sheer industrial production capacity required to meet surging global demand on any reasonable, combat-relevant timeline. By aggressively building out its vast manufacturing sector to support not just the immediate needs of its own military, but the rapidly expanding import needs of other aligned nations, Saudi Arabia could instantly enhance the abilities of premier arms-producing nations to physically construct the hardware they design.

Furthermore, placing these massive, vital production facilities directly onto sovereign Saudi soil would help the nation inherently preserve one of the most fundamentally important geopolitical gifts that originally accompanied its vast oil wealth. As noted, the global community is deeply invested in preventing any kinetic attacks against Saudi Arabia simply because such violence would place the nation’s irreplaceable oil reserves at extreme risk. While a permanently lowered global demand for oil in a post-fossil-fuel world could severely weaken that protective diplomatic dynamic, that vital international security umbrella could be very quickly and permanently restored if the world’s most powerful nations suddenly relied heavily on Saudi Arabian mega-factories to build their critical military equipment, either for vital use at home or for lucrative export abroad.

Finally, there is an entire spectrum of strategic dominance that Saudi Arabia could quickly achieve if it deliberately chose to focus its vast capital on designing highly specialized, indigenous military hardware tailored for the battlespace of the future. There are undeniably several traditional areas where Riyadh is highly unlikely to become globally competitive within the next decade or two. It is an established reality that Saudi Arabia would require a very long lead time to successfully teach its domestic workforce to independently engineer main battle tanks, fifth-generation fighter jets, or massive naval destroyers on par with advanced nations that have spent generations continuously building and refining those exact weapons systems.

However, Riyadh’s existing massive financial investments, channeled largely through the varied technological arms of Vision 2030, offer the distinct potential to carve out an entirely different, highly lucrative path forward. The kingdom is desperately attempting to transform itself into a premier global hub for advanced, high-tech manufacturing, openly seeking a highly specialized economic status similar to that of Taiwan, South Korea, or Switzerland. When transitioning this technological ambition into the military domain, there are massive, relatively unexploited opportunities for Saudi Arabia to get in on the ground floor of next-generation warfare.

These highly specialized sectors include the rapid development of advanced artificial intelligence targeting tools, autonomous robotics technology, state-of-the-art cybersecurity and offensive cyber-warfare capabilities, unbreakable encryption and secure battlefield communication networks, and the rapid 3D-printed manufacturing of critical drone components and spare parts. All of these advanced, software-heavy areas represent sectors that Saudi Arabia is already heavily prioritizing with its civilian sovereign wealth investments, and where it explicitly hopes to become an undisputed world leader. By intelligently bridging its massive civilian technological investments directly into the modern defense world, Riyadh could quickly see massive, geopolitical returns.

In fact, it is this highly specialized, tech-heavy trajectory that currently seems the most strategically plausible, with several early indicators strongly suggesting that Riyadh genuinely could consider orchestrating a much larger, state-backed pivot into dominating niche, high-tech defense projects over the next several years. Ultimately, the story of the modern Saudi military remains a strangely complex amalgamation of imported international hardware, intentionally hamstrung by the very regime that seeks to use it. It functions as merely one small, highly controlled piece of a massive, multi-tiered geopolitical game that Saudi Arabia is desperately trying to win.

Riyadh is absolutely not the commanding global defense leader that an observer analyzing its wealth might naturally expect. However, that glaring reality is not an accident of history; it is a calculated, deliberate choice. It is a strategic path that the House of Saud firmly believes will serve its immediate survival needs and its long-term geopolitical ambitions far better than any locally manufactured fighter jet or sovereign main battle tank ever truly could.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Saudi Arabia’s military so weak relative to its defense spending?

Saudi Arabia spends roughly $80 billion annually—seventh-most in the world—yet its active-duty force of 260,000 underperforms regional peers like Turkey, which fields nearly 500,000 troops at a third of the cost, and Iran, which maintains over 600,000 troops at a tenth of Saudi spending. The gap stems from a military designed around regime survival rather than battlefield efficacy, including a split between the regular army and the larger National Guard, reliance on foreign imports, and structural incentives that reward loyalty over military proficiency.

Why does Saudi Arabia split its military into two separate forces?

The Saudi military is divided between the regular armed forces, directed by the Ministry of Defense, and the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which falls under a completely separate Ministry of National Guard. The National Guard is larger than the rest of the military combined, and its primary function is to protect the House of Saud from a coup d’état by the regular military itself. This deliberate division trades battlefield efficiency for regime security.

Why does Saudi Arabia deliberately rely on foreign military imports rather than building its own weapons?

By purchasing complex hardware from the United States, China, European states, and others, Saudi Arabia ties those powers to its defense for decades through spare parts, software updates, and maintenance. This gives external powers diplomatic leverage over Riyadh, but Saudi leadership views that as a feature: it reassures powerful nations that Saudi oil will be defended by proven equipment, and it purchases genuine political goodwill by distributing lucrative contracts among multiple suppliers.

What has Vision 2030 actually achieved in Saudi Arabia’s defense industry?

Vision 2030 set a goal to localize over half of Saudi military spending by 2030. In practice, it has largely resulted in moving foreign-designed production lines onto Saudi soil for basic assembly, while design, engineering, and advanced R&D remain foreign. The state military corporation SAMI focuses predominantly on assembly and maintenance. Saudi Arabia has expanded its military-industrial facilities from five in 2019 to over three hundred by the mid-2020s and reached about twenty percent localization, but was publicly rebuffed when it sought to join the Global Combat Air Programme, with Italy’s Leonardo suggesting it start by assembling older Eurofighter jets.

What directions could Saudi military modernization realistically take in the future?

The article identifies two plausible paths. First, Saudi Arabia could become a large-scale manufacturer for established foreign designs, filling production capacity gaps that partners like European nations cannot meet fast enough given surging global demand. Second, it could focus its massive civilian technology investments—in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, drone components, and autonomous robotics—directly into niche next-generation defense capabilities. The kingdom is also a likely candidate to expand its use of foreign mercenary proxies, following models established by Russia’s Wagner Group, the UAE, and Turkey.

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