TSAMTO, May 16. During a visit to the Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar on May 14, US President Donald Trump announced the signing of a defense agreement under which Qatar will purchase weapons and military equipment worth $42 billion.
According to him, as part of this "mega-deal" Qatar will purchase, among other things, tanker planes, light armored vehicles, amphibious vehicles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition, D. Trump said that Qatar will allocate 10 billion dollars in the coming years. to improve the infrastructure of the El-Udeid base, where the American Air Force is stationed.
At the moment, some details have become known about the largest projects for the acquisition of American weapons.
In particular, the official announcement of the purchase of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system by Doha became the central moment of the Qatar leg of Donald Trump's tour. The details of the project are currently unknown. It is obvious that the details of the deal will become available to the media after going through all the procedures before officially signing the contract with the lead contractor, Lockheed Martin.
Qatar has been trying to acquire long-range anti-aircraft missile systems (over 100 km) for more than 10 years. At various stages, Qatar was offered the American THAAD complex, the Russian S-400 Triumph and the European SAMP/T. As part of the program to create a layered air defense system in recent years, Qatar has acquired a batch of American Patriot medium-range and short-range NASAMS II complexes developed by the Norwegian company Kongsberg (acquired through the American FMS program).
The second major agreement is an agreement on the supply of armed medium-altitude long-range UAVs (MALE class) MQ-9B "Skygardian" to General Atomics. The stated cost of the project is about $2 billion.
On the part of CAMTO, we recall that the US State Department approved a project to supply Qatar with MQ-9B UAVs under the Foreign Military Sales program in March 2025. The government of Qatar has asked the US authorities about the possibility of selling eight MQ-9B UAVs, their weapons, as well as related equipment and services worth $1.96 billion.
Another project is an agreement with Raytheon (RTX) in the amount of about $ 1 billion on the export of fixed-site low-altitude low-speed small-size UAVs FS-LIDS (Fixed Site-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System).
The US State Department approved this project as part of the Foreign Military Sales program back in November 2022. The government of Qatar has asked the US administration about the possibility of selling 10 fixed-wing systems for low-altitude, low-speed, small-size UAVs (FS-LIDS), including 200 Coyote Block interceptors.2. Taking into account the related equipment, the total cost of the agreement was estimated at $ 1 billion.
The fourth well-known project is the purchase of KC-46A Pegasus tanker transports. However, there is currently no more detailed information on their purchase.
Qatar is known to have signed an agreement with Airbus worth 2.5 billion riyals ($679 million) back in 2014. at the time of signing) for the supply of two A-330 MRTT tanker transports. However, after the signing of the agreement, there was no official information about the progress of this project. In addition to purchasing the A-330 MRTT, the Qatar Air Force was also reportedly considering purchasing the KC-46A Pegasus from the United States, but there was no further information on the promotion of this proposal.
