Saudis Eye France’s Rafale Fighter
Saudi Arabia is in talks to buy 54 Dassault Rafale multirole fighters, the French company has confirmed. If these negotiations lead to a firm order, that will see Saudi Arabia field a highly impressive multinational fleet of advanced fourth-generation fighters: Rafale, Boeing F-15SA, and Eurofighter Typhoon. It would also represent a serious break for the United Kingdom — represented in the Eurofighter consortium via BAE Systems — from one of its traditional customers.
Speaking to the Association of Defense Journalists, Dassault Aviation’s CEO Eric Trappier confirmed recently that negotiations around a Rafale deal are ongoing with Saudi Arabia, Breaking Defense reported today.
While Saudi Arabia has previously purchased French defense equipment, its fighter aviation needs have long been met primarily by the combined resources of the United Kingdom and the United States.
But it seems that difficulties in securing a follow-on order for Typhoons have provided Dassault with an opportunity to offer its Rafale instead.
Saudi Arabia was long expected to buy more Typhoons, in a deal that would be brokered by BAE Systems of the United Kingdom. However, since Eurofighter is a multinational company, exports have to be approved by the other partners: Germany, Italy, and Spain. Germany — which has a stake in Eurofighter via the German arm of Airbus — has consistently blocked further Typhoon sales to Saudi Arabia, citing concerns over human rights abuses, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as well as Saudi Arabia’s role in the Yemen war.
The same kind of political dispute also appears to have stalled a Turkish effort to buy Typhoons from the same company.
In October, Airbus Chief Executive Guillaume Faury criticized the German government for its harder line on arms exports, including the Saudi Typhoon deal. “The German government’s stance on arms exports to some countries is a real problem,” Faury told the business daily Handelsblatt. “If Germany wants to be a trustworthy partner in major defense projects, it must resolve the issue of export controls with the other Europeans and not in spite of them,” he added.
But the German stance has above all proven to be a thorn in the side of BAE Systems and the U.K. government, which have tried to finalize a lucrative Saudi deal for 48 more Typhoons since 2018.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reportedly discussed the issue with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in the summer.
By October, there were British fears that the Rafale was emerging as a serious rival in Saudi Arabia’s search for new fighters.
“It’s a competitive bid process,” an unnamed U.K. official told the Financial Times. “We are not complacent about it. The big risk for the UK is if we treat the French offer merely as a stalking horse,” a second unnamed U.K. official told the same newspaper.
Last week, Dassault’s Trappier admitted that “Saudi Arabia has traditionally bought British” aircraft, but that Dassault had been receptive to Riyadh’s approach. He didn’t directly refer to the German-British Typhoon standoff but did note that the request for Rafales was “independent of the crisis in the Middle East.”
