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.
Though few details of the exercise are known, analysts said the emirates could be sending a signal to Washington about security “options” in the region.
For the first time since its launch in 2017, Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) has participated in the defense show in Istanbul as part of the Saudi Pavilion, one of the largest international spaces at the show.
“For Iraq’s military… these are prestige items more than a security necessity,” CSIS’s Daniel Byman told Breaking Defense of the fighter jet rumors, saying Baghdad has “less glamorous” priorities.
Baykar CEO Haluk Bayraktar described the deal as “the biggest defense and aviation export contract in the history of the Republic of Turkey,” though specifics haven’t been made public.
With several conflicts in motion, “middle layer suppliers like Turkey, South Korea and Israel with more speed and flexibility than traditional suppliers, and with much less political strings attached to their defense exports, are rapidly and successfully picking up the slack,” military analyst Sitki Egeli told Breaking Defense.
Eurodrone is a four-nation European consortium, involving Germany, France, Spain and Italy, which aims to develop an unmanned aerial system for operation in a non-segregated airspace.
“In order to be one of the top 25 company globally and achieve our target, we have to look at inorganic growth that comes from acquisition regionally and globally,” SAMI’s CEO tells Breaking Defense.
