Bombing is a business, and business is booming.
If war is a nasty business, it’s also a lucrative one. New figures released by the State Department show that the United States has sold $33 billion worth of weapons to its Gulf allies since May of last year, with more deals in the works as the business of bombing the Islamic State continues to boom.
“Consistent with the commitments we made to our Gulf partners at the Camp David summit last May, we have made every effort to expedite sales,” State Department spokesman David McKeeby told Defense News.
In the eleven months since, the State Department has helped with the export of everything from attack helicopters to ballistic missile defense systems to precision guided munitions to Gulf Cooperation Council states—that’s Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Gulf spending spree is two-pronged. Sales of higher-end weapons systems—things like advanced naval frigates, attack helicopters, and defensive missile batteries—stem in large part from the U.S.-Iran nuclear accord. GCC states, and Saudi Arabia in particular, worry that a resurgent Iran unencumbered by economic sanctions will move to bolster its ailing military, upsetting the regional balance of power.
But where munitions are concerned, the twin bombing campaigns against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and against Houthi rebels in Yemen are driving sales of precision weapons and “dumb” bombs alike. In 2015, the U.S. delivered 4,500 precision guided munitions to GCC states, McKeeby says, including 1,500 taken from the U.S. military’s own inventories.
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link to fortune.com]