Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to sell F-35 joint strike fighter jets to Saudi Arabia will rely on critical Australian components, prompting experts to warn Australia could become complicit in human rights abuses.
The US president announced the deal during a meeting with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, this week, despite consistent concerns about the Saudi regime’s human rights record – including bombing raids on civilian targets – and fears it could share the technology with China.
Australia is part of F-35 production, but has no control over where and to whom parts are shipped – even parts leaving Australian soil.
More than 70 Australian companies have production and sustainment contracts with the F-35 program. In excess of 700 of the fighter jet’s “critical pieces” are manufactured in Victoria alone, according to the state government. Australia also hosts a regional distribution hub for F-35 parts in NSW.
“Every F-35 contains crucial parts made in Australia,” said Duncan Frewin, the clerk of the pacifist group Quakers Australia, which researches arms exports.
“Any bomb dropped by these planes can only do so because the Australian government has written a blank cheque to Lockheed Martin, selling them Australian-made parts with no human rights restrictions or monitoring.”
Frewin said Saudi Arabia had a “deplorable human rights record and it is reckless to sell them the world’s most lethal aircraft”.
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Dr Sue Wareham, national president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War, said Saudi Arabia had an “appalling human rights record”, in particular in its prosecution of the war in Yemen.
“To pretend that weaponry in the hands of the Saudi rulers would only be used lawfully and in accordance with human rights principles is not plausible.”
Frewin and Wareham are advocates for peace and disarmament, but their concerns are also shared by more hawkish defence analysts who worry that Australia is losing control of which militaries it supports.
Michael Shoebridge, the founder of the defence and security thinktank Strategic Analysis Australia, said the sale of up to 48 F-35s to Saudi Arabia presented issues for Australia that “we’ve tried desperately to ignore with the Israelis”.
“We will be supporting the Saudis’ use of the aircraft however they choose to use it, and the Saudis’ involvement in the Yemeni civil war in recent years shows this isn’t a hypothetical,” said Shoebridge.
Shoebridge, a former senior defence policy official in the Australian embassy in Washington, has previously said the complex F-35 supply chain allows governments to deny direct support for foreign militaries.
At Senate estimates last month, defence department deputy secretary Hugh Jeffrey told senators the global F-35 supply chain was a “unique arrangement”.
“It’s a global supply chain. We participate in that. Goods are moved around the world. These are US-owned goods. They’re managed by Lockheed Martin. Australia does not direct the export of those goods. It does not control the export of those goods.
Goods manufactured in Australia require an export permit. The Department of Defence did not answer questions about whether Australia could – or would – refuse to supply parts for jets bound for Saudi Arabia.
And the US itself does not comprehensively monitor where its weapons end up or how they are used.
The state department’s Blue Lantern program – monitoring end-use of commercial weapons sales – reviewed fewer than 2% of export applications in its last report (reports are supposed to be transmitted to Congress annually, but the last publicly available report is from in 2022).
Of 18,143 export authorisations approved, 305 were subject to targeted checks (1.6%). 30% of those checked were found to be “unfavorable”, meaning inconsistencies were found between the goods shipped and what was authorised in the licence.
This year, the US Government Accountability Office found efforts to stop US-made weapons being involved in human rights abuses were inadequate.
The Trump administration’s decision to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabia has been controversial globally, in part because of Saudi-led bombing campaigns on Yemeni targets which have killed thousands.
Between 2015 and 2022 an estimated 377,000 people died as a result of the conflict: nearly 15,000 civilians were killed by direct military action, most of them in airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition, the Campaign Against Arms Trade found.
As well, a report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency, part of the Pentagon, flagged concerns that China would be able to access F-35 technology through Saudi Arabia because of Riyadh and Beijing’s security partnership.
The F-35 – described by Lockheed Martin as the “most lethal” warplane in the world, and costing between US$80m and $100m each (A$123m to $155) – is already a controversial platform, implicated in a finding by a UN commission of inquiry that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Wareham, from the Medical Association for Prevention of War, said the arms trade treaty prevented Australia from exporting “weapons or associated items” if there was a risk they will be used to breach international law.
“There is no doubt at all that such a risk exists in the case of Saudi Arabia,” Wareham said. “This makes Australia complicit in any crimes in which the F-35s are used.”
Wareham said Australia could have no confidence in US defence export controls.
“The US economy is so dependent on weapons sales that there appear to be few constraints. While spruiking democracy, the US in fact sells weapons to over half the world’s autocracies. It is an industry out of control.”
