The Saud royal family are by far the world’s largest buyers of US weapons. The King of Saudi Arabia is by far the world’s richest person, with a net worth well over a trillion dollars; and, when his (Aramco’s) 260 billion barrels of oil reserves were valued at $100 per barrel, his net worth was over $15 trillion. The King has total control over the world’s largest (in terms of dollar-value) company: Aramco [2]. Since 1980, the Saudi government has owned 100% of it; the Saudi government is totally under the King’s exclusive control. The King owns all that oil. Forbes and Bloomberg decline to estimate his wealth, because kings don’t want them to; but, clearly, it dwarfs that of anyone such as Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. And Gates and Buffett don’t possess the power to keep their wealth from becoming published, but the Saudi King does.
On 13 September 2010, Britain’s Telegraph headlined [3] «US secures record $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia». On 28 January 2012, Dayton Business Journal bannered [4] «Top 10 foreign buyers of US weapons», and Saudi Arabia was #1 that year, with $13.8 billion. #2 was UAE, with 10.4 billion. UAE is run by six royal families, all friends of the Saud family; and, like the Sauds, they follow the strictest, Wahhabist-Salafist, form of Islam, the type of Sunni Islam that’s preached by ISIS and by Al-Qaeda. Current ‘defense’ expenditure figures aren’t available; but, clearly, the Sauds are now fully embroiled in slaughtering Shiites both in Yemen and in Syria, and are buying far more US weapons today than they were before – the sum probably dwarfs any previous sales-volume.