Agnes Helou is Breaking Defense's Middle East Bureau Chief, with close to a decade of experience in covering regional defense and strategic topics. She was the managing Editor of Security and Defense Arabia, an Arabic language defense website and magazine, and covered the Middle East and North Africa defense and security topics for Defense News for three years. Her reporting expertise covers the Gulf, North Africa, Middle East and Southern Europe.
Agnes has a master’s degree and is pursuing her PhD in media economics from the Doctoral School of Literature, Humanities & Social Sciences in Lebanon. Her interests include artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, air defense, maritime and border security regional strategic issues.
While a Turkish industry official claimed the country didn’t “need” the Russian systems, experts say a replacement has a little ways to go to catch other operational domestic variants.
The diplomatic rapprochement may signal a win for regional stability and for Beijing, but it’s too early to tell what will actually change on the ground, experts told Breaking Defense.
“The purchase of these block 70 F-16s will essentially double the size of Bahrain’s F-16 fleet and represents a significant upgrade in their force size,” said senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at RANE Network Ryan Bohl.
IDEX 2023 — It’s no surprise that the UAE’s largest defense conglomerate has the most floor space at the International Defense Exhibition (IDEX 2023), but EDGE Group also sought to make a splash with a series of announcements from day one of IDEX and its sister-show NAVDEX. Off the bat, Abu Dhabi Ship Building, an…
The conglomerate’s CEO and managing director, Mansour AlMulla, sat down on day one of IDEX to explain his corporate strategy in an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense.
