{"id":38777,"date":"2018-10-06T07:21:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-06T12:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38777"},"modified":"2018-10-06T07:21:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-06T12:21:03","slug":"deadly-chinese-drones-now-lurk-above-mideast-battlefields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38777","title":{"rendered":"Deadly Chinese Drones Now Lurk Above Mideast Battlefields"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Deadly Chinese Drones Now Lurk Above Mideast Battlefields<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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Across the Middle East, countries banned from purchasing armed drones from the US due to a weapons embargo are increasingly gravitating towards Chinese defense manufacturers, according to a new report from the Associated Press<\/a>, sales that “are helping expand Chinese influence across a region vital to American security interests.”<\/p>\n

“The Chinese product now doesn\u2019t lack technology, it only lacks market share,” said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military strategist and former lecturer at the People\u2019s Liberation Army Rocket Force University of Engineering. “And the United States restricting its arms exports is precisely what gives China a great opportunity.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

The sales are supporting China’s expansion across a region home to many strategic US military bases, as well as, future routes for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s a hedging strategy and the Chinese will look to benefit from that,” said Douglas Barrie, an aviation specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.<\/p>\n

The AP notes that Chinese drones are more frequently conducting aerial operations in the skies above Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, and the UAE thanks to booming sales, with more than 30 China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics’s Cai Hong 4 (Rainbow 4, or CH-4) medium-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles worth $700 million being sold to countries since 2014.<\/p>\n

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Chinese arms exports have expanded 38% from 2008 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2017, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, a spy satellite passing above southern Saudi Arabia snapped a pictured of US surveillance drones and Chinese-manufactured armed drones, parked side by side at an airfield.<\/p>\n

According to the Center for the Study of the Drone at New York\u2019s Bard College, both drones were being used in the war in Yemen, has emerged as a “sort of a testing ground for drones,” said Dan Gettinger, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deadly Chinese Drones Now Lurk Above Mideast Battlefields Across the Middle East, countries banned from purchasing armed drones from the US due to a weapons embargo are increasingly gravitating towards Chinese defense manufacturers, according to a new report from the Associated Press, sales that “are helping expand Chinese influence across a region vital to American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[13373,130,1007,522,9791,827],"class_list":["post-38777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-associated-press","tag-china","tag-drones","tag-middle-east","tag-peoples-liberation-army","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38778,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38777\/revisions\/38778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}