ABU DHABI, UAE – Despite the growing coronavirus pandemic, major arms manufacturers went down to a convention center in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on Sunday in hopes of agreeing with the military from all over the Middle East.
The United Arab Emirates revealed $ 1.36 billion in local and foreign arms deals to supply its forces from South African drones to Serbian artillery. While the figure exceeds the 2019 program opening announcement, defense experts predict a drop in military spending this year as the pandemic and falling world oil prices cut budgets in the Persian Gulf.
The biennial fair, the International Defense Exhibition and Conference, is the first major face-to-face event in Abu Dhabi since the virus broke out, a sign of its importance to the oil-rich sheikh who has maintained tight movement restrictions. last months. The zoom would not be enough for the 70,000 attendees and 900 exhibitors who rely on the largest weapons exhibition in the Middle East to look for potential customers and deliver their latest goods, from armored vehicles to ballistic missiles.
Top UAE officials, including the powerful Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, were on hand, wandering among exhibits of rifles, rockets and bombs.
But with a hand sanitizer as ubiquitous as a sterile drone shows, the effects of the pandemic remained visible. There were no significant national flags, including the United States, the world’s largest arms exporter.
Large American companies appeared but kept a low profile. Lockheed Martin representatives who were on the sidelines of F-35 stealth fighter models were cramped in the midst of the Biden administration’s review of several major foreign arms sales initiated by former President Donald Trump, including a mass transfer of F -35 in the United Arab Emirates.
Israeli restrictions on COVID also prevented it from joining the exhibition, which would have been the first time last year it normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates. A technician at the Israeli aerospace industry booth spent much of the afternoon driving away potential disappointed customers.
But dozens of other countries did not raise any doubts during the pandemic, which underscored how much their arms exports to the region have increased. According to a recent report by the International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm, arms flows to the Middle East have increased by 61% in the last five years, amid wars in Libya, Syria and the Middle East. Yemen.
China, which has the world’s second-largest arms manufacturing industry, lured pedestrians with a life-size ballistic missile called the “Fire Dragon”. In state-owned Norinco, business manager Luo Haopeng remarked that China had increased its area this year. Beyond his company that “serves” the UAE ground forces, he declined to delve deeper into his ambitions in the Middle East, where China has already sold armed drones to Iraq, the UAE and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia.
“This kind of equipment is not like food or clothes,” he said, pointing to the giant missile screen. “It’s all about politics.”
In the Russian pavilion, Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov inspected a wide range of Kalashnikovs. Not far away, the Polish group WB showed flashy sales videos of its “suicide drone” falling from great heights to blow up armored vehicles. Azerbaijan had shown interest in the system during its border conflict with Armenia last year, communications director Marta Lazewska said, when Turkish drones helped change course in its favor.
In the Saudi Arabian flag, ranked as the world’s largest arms importer in the past five years, officials were trying to promote the kingdom as an emerging defense giant under its so-called Vision 2030. The program, driven by the powerful prince Heir Mohammed bin Salman aims to break the addiction to the country’s imports, diversify its oil economy and locate more than half of its military spending.
Despite its radar and U.S. Patriot missile batteries, Saudi Arabia is increasingly at risk of cross-border attacks by Houthi rebels allied with Iran, which earlier this month launched drones loaded with bombs that crashed into an empty passenger plane southwest of Abha. airport. A Saudi-led military coalition has been at war with the Houthis since 2015, after the rebels ousted the Saudi-backed government in the capital. The conflict has created what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
“The threats are obvious lately,” said Walid Abukhaled, CEO of Saudi Arabian Military Industries Company, a holding company owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. “You have drones coming from aggressive countries … you have some missiles fired from time to time.”
Routine airstrikes and rising tensions with Iran could help fuel military spending in the region, even as defensive intelligence provider IHS Janes expects those spending in the Gulf to drop from 9 , 4% to $ 90.6 billion in 2021, a result of the economic destruction caused by the pandemic.
“We have returned to early 2020, where Iran is once again a major threat,” said Charles Forrester, Janes’ senior analyst, referring to a series of incidents that pushed the United States and Iran into the edge of war course.
“If Iran enters a major rearmament program or starts flexing its muscles, this is where missile defense and air defense systems come in,” he said. “As we have seen, a very simple system can attack you.”