ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – Despite the increase in the coronavirus pandemic, major arms manufacturers descended on Sunday at a convention center in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, hoping to make deals with military personnel around the world. Middle East.
The UAE has revealed $ 1.36 billion in local and foreign arms deals to supply its forces with everything from South African drones to Serbian artillery. While the number exceeds the 2019 program’s opening announcement, defense experts anticipate a drop in military spending this year as the pandemic and falling global oil prices squeeze budgets in the Persian Gulf.
The biennial trade fair, the International Defense Exhibition and Conference, is Abu Dhabi’s first major face-to-face event since the virus outbreak – a sign of its importance for the oil-rich sheikh who has maintained strict restrictions on movement in recent months. Zooming out would not be enough for the 70,000 attendees and 900 exhibitors who have the largest arms exposure in the Middle East to seek out potential customers and sell their latest products, from armored vehicles to ballistic missiles.
Emirati officials, including the powerful Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, were present, wandering between displays of rifles, rockets and bombs.
But with the hand sanitizer as ubiquitous as sterile drones, the effects of the pandemic remained visible. There were no significant national flags, including the United States, the largest arms exporter in the world.
Large American companies appeared, but kept a low profile. Lockheed Martin representatives alongside stealth F-35 fighter models were silent amid the Biden government’s analysis of several of the main foreign arms sales initiated by former President Donald Trump, including a massive $ 23 billion transfer of F-35s for the United Arab Emirates.
Israeli restrictions on COVID also prevented him from participating in the exhibition, which would have been the first time after normalizing relations with the United Arab Emirates last year. A technician at the Israel Aerospace Industry booth spent much of the afternoon dismissing disappointed potential customers.
But many other countries had no qualms about showing up during the pandemic, noting how many increased their arms exports in the region. The flow of arms in the Middle East has increased by 61% in the past five years, according to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, amid proxy wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
China, which has the second largest arms manufacturing industry in the world, has attracted passersby with a life-size ballistic missile called the “Fire Dragon”. At state-owned company Norinco, business manager Luo Haopeng commented that China had increased its floor area this year. In addition to his company “serving” ground forces in the Emirates, he declined to comment on his ambitions in the Middle East, where China has already sold armed drones to Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
“This type of equipment is not like food or clothing,” he said, pointing to the giant missile display. “It’s all about politics.”
At the Russian pavilion, Chechen regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov inspected a wide range of Kalashnikovs. Not far away, Poland’s WB Group showed flashy sales videos of its “suicide drone” plummeting from great heights to blow up armored vehicles. Azerbaijan showed interest in the system during the border conflict with Armenia last year, said communications director Marta Lazewska, when Turkish drones helped turn the tide in their favor.
At the Saudi Arabia pavilion, ranked as the largest arms importer in the world for the past five years, authorities were trying to promote the kingdom as an emerging defense giant under the so-called Vision 2030. The program, driven by the powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aims to break the country’s import addiction, diversify its economy away from oil and locate more than half of its military spending.
Despite its US Patriot radar and missile batteries, Saudi Arabia is increasingly at risk of a cross-border attack by Yemen’s allied Houthi rebels, who earlier this month launched bomb-loaded drones that crashed into a passenger plane. empty in the southwest of the country. airport. A Saudi-led military coalition has been at war with the Houthis since 2015, after the rebels expelled the Saudi-backed government from the capital. The conflict created what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
“The threats are obvious these days,” said Walid Abukhaled, CEO of Saudi Arabian Military Industries Company, a holding company owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. “You have drones that come from aggressive countries … you have a few missiles fired from time to time.”
Routine air strikes and rising tensions with Iran could help fuel military spending in the region, even with defense intelligence provider IHS Janes expects that spending in the Gulf to fall 9.4% to $ 90.6 billion in 2021, as a result of the economic destruction caused by the pandemic.
“We go back to the beginning of 2020, where Iran is again a potentially big threat,” said Charles Forrester, senior analyst at Janes, referring to a series of incidents that pushed the United States and Iran to the brink of war last year.
“If Iran goes into a major rearmament program or starts flexing its muscles, that’s where anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense systems come in,” he said. “As we have seen, a very simple system can attack you.”