U.S. Signals Possible Saudi Arabia F-35 Fighter Sale With Public Mockup Display in Riyadh.

A full-scale F-35 Lightning II mockup bearing Saudi markings appeared at the World Defense Show, signaling renewed interest in the U.S. stealth fighter. The display highlights growing Saudi ambition for next-generation airpower while underscoring the political limits Washington faces in preserving Israel’s qualitative military edge.

Army Recognition observed a full-scale F-35 Lightning II mockup on display at the World Defense Show in Riyadh, presented with a Saudi Arabian flag and Arabic markings that left little doubt about the intended audience. While mockups are common at major defense exhibitions, this one carried the unmistakable tone of a tailored proposal, placing the United States’ flagship stealth fighter at the center of Saudi procurement speculation. The display comes as Riyadh continues to signal interest in next-generation airpower, and as Washington weighs the military, political, and regional ramifications of any future F-35 transfer to the Kingdom.
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Saudi-flagged F-35 Lightning II mockup displayed at Riyadh's World Defense Show signals an overt pitch to the Kingdom as it weighs a potential stealth fighter buy, highlighting the jet's internal precision-strike and air-to-air loadouts while underscoring the geopolitical friction and likely export downgrades Washington would impose to preserve Israel's regional air superiority (Picture source: Army Recognition Group).

That signal lands in a moment when Washington and Riyadh have repeatedly explored deeper defense arrangements, with the F-35 often treated as the crown jewel that Saudi Arabia has sought for years. The inclusion of F-35s in U.S.-Saudi discussions has been significant even if not guaranteed, precisely because it touches the region’s hardest constraint: Israel’s qualitative military edge. The mockup’s Saudi flag branding, therefore, reads as a visible nudge to keep the idea alive inside the Kingdom’s procurement system and inside the U.S. interagency process.

The F-35’s sales pitch to Riyadh is inseparable from its weapons model. The jet is built to carry precision munitions internally when stealth matters, then shift to heavier external loads once air defenses are suppressed. The baseline stealth-focused load includes a 25 mm GAU-22/A cannon plus two AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles and two 2,000 lb GBU-31 JDAM guided bombs carried internally. When permissive conditions allow, the aircraft can carry up to 18,000 lb of weapons, giving it the mass and flexibility of a true multirole strike fighter rather than a niche penetrator.

In air-to-air combat, the AMRAAM is the F-35’s primary internal spear. The missile’s active radar seeker allows it to guide itself in the terminal phase, reducing dependence on the launching aircraft and enabling a single pilot to prosecute multiple targets in rapid succession. Operationally, this matters because the F-35’s advantage is often measured in who gets the first high-confidence shot. Stealth and sensor fusion are leveraged to fire from positions where opponents may not even know they are being tracked or targeted. For close-in engagements, the Sidewinder family remains the insurance policy, providing high off-boresight capability and fast reaction in within-visual-range fights when geometry collapses.

On the strike side, JDAM remains the workhorse that turns stealth access into decisive effects. By converting unguided bombs into accurate GPS-aided weapons, JDAM allows reliable engagement of fixed targets such as hardened shelters, radar installations, and command infrastructure in all weather. For Saudi Arabia, which already operates advanced combat aircraft and precision weapons, the F-35’s leap is not about simply having guided bombs, but about delivering them from within the densest threat envelopes with fewer supporting assets and reduced exposure for tankers, jammers, and escorts.

Standoff weapons deepen that logic: the Small Diameter Bomb family offers the ability to engage targets from significant distances while maintaining internal carriage, allowing a single aircraft to service multiple aimpoints in one sortie. When paired with the F-35’s sensor suite and continuous targeting updates, this enables flexible responses against mobile or time-sensitive targets and complicates an adversary’s air defense calculus. It also explains why F-35 weapons modernization remains central to its competitiveness: the jet’s lethality is an evolving library rather than a fixed loadout frozen at initial service entry.

The F-35 community has become a club of air forces built around U.S.-standard missiles and precision-guided munitions, strengthening interoperability in coalition operations. The aircraft is now operated or on order across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, and its weapons commonality has become a practical glue for multinational air campaigns. In that sense, the AMRAAM-JDAM-SDB mix is not just about firepower, but about belonging to a shared operational framework that Saudi Arabia already trains alongside.

The geopolitical problem is that Saudi Arabia sits in the only Middle Eastern environment where Washington is legally bound to preserve Israel’s qualitative military edge in major arms exports. U.S. law requires that certain transfers be assessed against their impact on Israel’s military superiority, making any Saudi F-35 deal inherently more political than comparable sales elsewhere. As a result, any eventual transfer would almost certainly involve aircraft delivered with less advanced configurations than those operated by Israel. In practical terms, this would likely translate into constraints on software baselines and upgrade timing, more limited electronic warfare libraries and mission data sets, tighter controls on networking and cryptographic features, and a more restricted pathway for integrating the most sensitive future U.S. munitions, even if the airframes themselves appear identical.

Against competitors, however, that would still represent a step change. Saudi Arabia’s existing frontline mix of advanced F-15 variants and Eurofighter Typhoons offers excellent payload, speed, and air-to-air performance, while aircraft such as Rafale remain formidable multirole platforms. None, however, combines low observability with the F-35’s sensor-driven kill chain at scale. The mockup displayed in Riyadh, therefore, reads as a calculated message: even with export limitations designed to keep Israel ahead, the Kingdom may still view the F-35 as the only aircraft capable of reshaping the opening phase of a high-end conflict. What our camera captured on the show apron may be the clearest public hint yet that the lobbying campaign for that outcome is already underway.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.