Every escalation cycle in the Middle East runs through the same Washington mechanism: the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) notifies Congress of a Foreign Military Sales case, Congress has 30 days to object (it rarely does), and a letter of offer and acceptance gets signed. The result is not a spot transaction — it is a multi-year production commitment that lands as funded backlog on the prime contractor's books. When regional tensions spike, the FMS queue lengthens, and the primes that own certified missile-defense platforms convert geopolitical anxiety directly into revenue visibility.
The current cycle is no different. Israel's Iron Dome system — co-produced with RTX (formerly Raytheon) — has drawn repeated emergency U.S. replenishment appropriations, and American allies across the Gulf and NATO's eastern flank are accelerating their own air-defense procurement. That demand funnels into two dominant platforms: Patriot (RTX) and THAAD (LMT).