Dealers Make A Killing At Abu Dhabi Weapons Show

The war in Ukraine, now in its second year, has jacked the global arms trade, fueling the appetite for materiel, not just in Moscow and Kyiv but also around the world as nations gird themselves for possible confrontations, Nabih Bulos reported for LA Times.

Photo Insert: This year's International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) was the largest in the event’s 30-year history.

The war has rocked long-standing relationships within the weapons industry, rejiggered the calculations of who sells what to whom and changed customers' tastes in what they want in their arsenal.

Signs of those shifts abounded at last week's International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX), the biennial arms bazaar held in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi.

This year’s show was the largest in the event’s 30-year history, organizers said, bringing in 1,350 companies, 350 delegations, and about 130,000 attendees from 65 countries.

They flooded Abu Dhabi’s national exhibition center with enough armored vehicles, attack aircraft and air, land and sea drones to equip a not-so-small army.

Weapons companies are seeing their shares rise on the stock market to their best level in years, with indices for the defense sector outperforming those tracking the broader market by a wide margin, experts say.

Defense spending is surging in European nations seeking to keep up stocks at home while helping to arm Kyiv with rocket launchers, missiles and tanks.

The German government has shaken off its usual hesitancy regarding military matters and pledged to spend $100 billion on reequipping its armed forces, though no money has yet been spent on weaponry. In Asia, Japan and South Korea are boosting military spending in response to China, whose defense budget grew by 7% in 2022.

That translates into Beijing's largest-ever annual increase in absolute terms — $16 billion, adjusted for inflation, according to a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

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