Monday, January 14, 2008


MR. MCCORMACK: Good afternoon, everybody. Let me just start off with one note of interest. I know people were asking about it this morning and I anticipate that I will get questions about it, so let me pre-empt those questions. We did do a notification to the Hill this morning about part of the Gulf Security Dialogue arms packages. As you know, we do these in and they're of a piecemeal fashion. As they are ready and prepared to go up to the Hill, we go ahead and do the notification. So today's notification was just about one part of this overall package that I know you all have been writing about over the past several months, I guess.


Under the auspices of the Gulf Security Dialogue, the Administration today initiated the formal 30-day congressional notification process for the proposed sale of 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions. The acronym for that is JDAMs to Saudi Arabia. And the best back-of-the-envelope estimate that I have of the cost for those is about 120 million -- million -- million. And we have done just for the historical records here, we've done five other Gulf Security Dialogue cases. There's already been the notification. We have done these in December. The list of those are two proposed sales to the UAE -- one, a Patriot missile system; two, an E2C Airborne Early Warning System support, one to Kuwait which is for Patriot Missile System upgrades and two others to Saudi Arabia; some targeting pods and AWACS upgrades. So that's where we stand. That's the most up-to-date information that I have with regard to the sales. And as there are other pieces that may need to be notified, they'll go and do this. But I know that this was an item of particular interest to you, so I wanted to fill you in as best I could on it.

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