Saudis to Cut Military Spending as Trump Touts Weapons Sales
Source: Bloomberg
Saudi Arabia will cut military spending for a second straight year in 2019, when education is set to overtake it as the budgets biggest item, according to official projections published on Tuesday.
The Saudi armed forces are among the worlds leading weapons buyers, a role often cited by President Donald Trump to defend Americas close alliance with the kingdom. But theyll have 12 percent less to spend next year, after getting allocated a budget of 191 billion riyals ($51 billion). Spending on education will also drop, by 6 percent to 193 billion riyals. Overall outlays are projected to rise 7 percent as the kingdom boosts capital investment.
The cutbacks on defense may reflect expectations that Saudi Arabias war in Yemen is drawing to a close. Earlier on Tuesday, King Salman didnt include soldiers fighting in the war in his decision to renew a package of cost-of-living allowances for another year.Saudi Arabia's overall outlays are rising, but the two biggest budget items saw cuts
Saudi Arabia heads a coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 to support the government against pro-Iranian rebels. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in a key port city this month, in a rare step toward ending what has turned into the worlds worst humanitarian disaster.
Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-18/saudis-to-cut-military-spending-as-trump-touts-weapons-sales
tRump's wrong yet again.
ETA: The only question is why he was wrong. That is: "How much were tRump's prior claims about Saudi spending wrong because tRump just made the numbers up to serve his purposes?"versus "How much did tRump get played by the Saudis? v. "How much was tRump just plain ignorant."
underpants
(182,826 posts)a piece about the time Trump used this spending as his lame excuse to let MBS off the hook. Might have been Thomas Friedman. Anyway they said the numbers Trump was mentioning would never be what the Saudis actually would end up spending.
Roy Rolling
(6,917 posts)You can only blow up things once, it's not like World War 2.
Giant weapons factories spit out billions of weapons and bombs that will eventually be used by somebody somewhere.
Eventually, you run out of people to kill before you run out of bombs.