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.
“The first deployment of STM NETA 300 will be for mine detection and destruction missions,” STM General Manager Özgür Güleryüz said, though it’s meant for a range of operations.
Experts told Breaking Defense that the surge in spending is spurred by Ankara’s focus on boosting its air and missile defense capabilities as well as local defense production.
“Israel, Hezbollah, and Iran have reasons to confuse GPS-guided weapons used by their adversaries in the region and any of them could be behind these incidents,” one expert told Breaking Defense.
After today’s attack, an analyst told Breaking Defense he expected UNIFIL to “likely reassess where it can position forces in the south, though without a full mandate to pull out I suspect some will remain in the area.”
Hezbollah, likely spooked by Israel’s ability to locate and kill senior members, may have opted a “use-over-lose” approach to the missiles, one expert said.
Israel and Hezbollah are battling it out, leaving Lebanon’s formal military sidelined – but with a chance to find purpose in the aftermath, analysts said.
“The United States and Iraq have decided on a two phase transition plan for operations in Iraq,” a senior administration official told reporters today.
Hezbollah has been propped up by Iran all these years to be a threat on Israel’s border in case of open conflict between Israel and Iran, but that relationship is not a two-way street, experts tell Breaking Defense.
It’s a first for Hezbollah to strike “this deep into Israel and do so using a guided system. This is a new level of escalation by Hezbollah we haven’t seen before,” Fabian Hinz, a research fellow for Defence and Military Analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies told Breaking Defense.
Israel’s increased bombardment of Lebanon has reached the point that it must be called “a full scale war,” Wehbe Katicha, a retired Lebanese general officer, told Breaking Defense.
“The conversation about the acquisition of the F-35 platform just got a boost,” Bilal Saab, head of US-Middle East practice at the TRENDS consulting firm, told Breaking Defense.
“FADA will [serve] as a one-stop shop for all space-related activities and providing end-to-end solutions and services to local and international customers…” EDGE said.
Iraq’s defense chief said he considered the deal a “qualitative strategic breakthrough for [the country’s] air defense as it covers all Iraqi airspace and achieves the regional balance of the country.”
By fact checking the AI through a new verification process for Large Language Models, it’s possible to reduce hallucinations from 5-10 percent to as low as 0.1 percent.
By fact checking the AI through a new verification process for Large Language Models, it’s possible to reduce hallucinations from 5-10 percent to as low as 0.1 percent.
