Qatar surprised friends and foes alike by parading Chinese BP-12A short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) during its national day parade on the 15th of December 2017. Making their public debut in the parade, the BP-12A is the first weapons system of its kind in Qatari service. Nevertheless, Qatar is only the last country in the region to come into possession of ballistic missiles. While some think-tank analysts have come out in force to denounce this ''highly aggressive move on behalf of Doha'', its introduction by Qatar is actually a more nuanced matter. [1]

Armenia's small population and limited economic means force the country to come up with creative solutions to address the obsolescence of its military hardware and to introduce entirely new capabilties to its armed forces. Through the years this has led to a highly active R&D industry that has received little media attention outside of its own borders. While most of its projects never progressed beyond prototype status due to a lack of funding, those with a more limited scope (thus requiring less financial commitment) usually had more success. 

By Joost Oliemans and Stijn Mitzer 

 

When the Cold War ended, and the Iron Curtain was lifted, an era commenced of which the unprecedented spread of information is perhaps its most defining characteristic. The proliferation of media (primarily through the advent of the global internet), increased transparency of nations across the world, and what amounts to the commercialisation of the arms trade have all caused a wealth of knowledge to become accessible even to those with limited resources. This has caused the area of open-source intelligence (OSINT) to bloom like never before, with a vast variety of high quality works on pretty much every imaginable topic suddenly becoming available.

By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans

 

Al-Watiya. An airbase few had ever heard of until it became a symbol in the fight of the internationally-recognised government of Libya (GNA) against Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army (LNA) that seeks to overthrow it. While its capture on the 18th of May 2020 temporarily managed to put the spotlight on the severely underreported Libyan conflict, not the least because of the destruction and capture of two Russian Pantsir-S1 missile systems supplied by the UAE, the full implications of the capture of al-Watiya have gone mostly unnoticed.

By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans

The Republic of Armenia isn't particularly well known for its military industry, and its arms exports have hitherto remained undocumented. Despite being the host of a promising arms R&D scene throughout much of the 1990s, a lack of funding and orders halted further development before it ever had the chance to really take off. Although offshoots of its designs would later become popular in Chechnya and with criminals throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), this is where the exploits of Armenia's small arms industry were thought to have ended. 

 

''[Abraham] Lincoln was a man who created himself from nothing without any help from outside or other people. I see certain similarities between him and me.'' (By Muammar Gaddafi)

 

An article covering trains on Oryx Blog? Yes, you're not mistaken. We know what you are thinking: Where are the tanks, aircraft or ships? But actually, trains are kind of interesting – or some of them at least. Take Japan's Chūō Shinkansen for example, which holds the train world speed record of 603 km/h. Or the Krajina Express, an improvised armoured train used by the Krajina Serb army during the 1990s that looked like a veritable battle fortress. Still not convinced? Then how about Gaddafi's personal Italian high-speed train that's technically still owned by Denmark?

The Libyan Civil War has had a devastating impact on the country's civilian aviation sector, and its two giant An-124 cargo aircraft have not eluded their fair share of suffering. Libya's aviation industry came to a near standstill during the 2011 revolution, and even after the cessation of hostilities it took Libyan airline companies anywhere from months up to a year to restart their operations, while some never flew again. Those that did in doing so expressed their renewed confidence for the future, but insecurity and political turmoil in the wake of the civil war ultimately brought an end to any optimism, and soon the Libyan aviation industry was fighting for its very survival.

 

As the civil war ravaging Libya continued with no prospect of relative stability in sight, the threat of extinction loomed large over the An-124s. At a time when the single aircraft that was still present in Libya was dodging artillery fire left and right, the other An-124 was facing the possibility of being auctioned off by Ukraine in 2017 if the Libyan government failed to pay the $1.2 million it owed to Antonov for storage and routine maintenance of the aircraft since 2009 at the Antonov facility in Kiev.