The Trump administration approved a $24.3 billion fighter jet sale to Saudi Arabia. The jets will defend against Houthis. The Houthis are Iran-backed. They escalate attacks. They want the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. This is the strait where 10% of global oil shipping passes through. Nothing says sound military strategy like spending twenty-four billion dollars on aircraft to fight guerrilla fighters in sandals who already perfected shooting down expensive military equipment with Iranian drones that cost less than a used Honda Civic.
Saudi Arabia gets F-15s. Brand new ones. The kind that require constant maintenance, trained pilots, and infrastructure that costs another few billion nobody mentions in the press release. The Houthis get $2,000 drones. They launch them from pickup trucks. One of these approaches scales better than the other but the defense contractors cashing the checks don't get paid to think about that.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately bought Lockheed Martin calls. They did not look up which company actually makes the F-15. That would be Boeing. Lockheed makes the F-35. Different jet. Different contract. Wrong ticker. The calls expired worthless on Friday. The traders are now in a Reddit thread explaining how market makers manipulated them personally.
The strait remains strategically important. The jets remain very expensive. The Houthis remain unimpressed by air superiority because they live in mountains and only come out at night. Twenty-four billion buys a lot of things. It does not buy a solution to asymmetric warfare. But it does buy a third yacht for someone in Virginia who never has to explain why the last three Saudi air campaigns failed to stop anything.
The invoice cleared. The jets will ship. The attacks will continue. And some guy in New Jersey will still be holding his Lockheed calls wondering what went wrong.
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
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