Cyprus shows off its new Airbus military helicopters touted as more advanced than what Germany has
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Cyprus on Friday unveiled four of its newly-delivered Airbus H145 helicopters that officials say are among the most advanced rotorcraft in the word with a proven track record that gives the Cypriot National Guard an operational edge.
The helicopter is currently used by Germany, the U.S. Hungary, Belgium, Ireland and other militaries with over 500 variants currently in operation, logging over 8 million flight hours, according to Cyprus Defense Minister Vassilis Palmas.
'The new helicopter is a multi-role, digital instrument that is geared toward the demands of the 21st century,' Palmas told a ceremony at Cyprus' main Paphos air base.
Two more of the state-of-the-art aircraft will be delivered, while the contract with Airbus allows for the purchase of additional helicopters, said Airbus Senior Vice President for the H145 program Daniela Dudek.
Dudek said the reliability of the 3.8 ton aircraft is affirmed by its 40 years of service but the integration of advanced avionics and weapons systems make it the 'most military-capable aircraft in its category.'
'What we achieved over years to quickly integrate existing technology on the market, defense technology, and it is unique what you have here. You're even more advanced than what we currently have in Germany,' Dudek said.
The helicopter's advanced avionics, which Airbus codeveloped with Israeli companies in the last two years, also includes an integrated weapons system dubbed H-Force which enables the pilot to easily operate the helicopters weaponry in flight, eliminating the need for a separate weapons officer on board.
Dudek said another unique aspect of the Cypriot helicopters is an integrated battle management system that enables the aircraft to operate seamlessly with forces on the ground as well as other aircraft, including those belonging to the forces of other nations.
Additionally, the helicopter's electronic warfare and other systems afford it a strong self-protection capability.
Ethnically-divided Cyprus is in the process of modernizing its defensive capabilities to bring it up to modern European and NATO standards after years of relying on mainly Soviet-era, Russian-made weaponry. The island nation continues to operate Russian-made T-80 main battle tanks, but has recently sold off 11 Russian-made Mi35 attack helicopters to Serbia.
Cyprus was split in 1974, when Turkey invaded following a coup by Athens junta-backed supporters of uniting the island with Greece. Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence and maintains more than 35,000 troops in the island's northern third.
The Cypriot defense minister said the helicopter purchase is part of wider strategic planning for the continuous upgrading of the National Guard, enabling the island to take part in joint military drills with friendly nations.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Britain plans at least six new weapons factories in defence review
MANCHESTER, England (Reuters) -Britain will build at least six new factories producing weapons and explosives as part of a major review of its defence capabilities, the government said on Saturday. The 1.5 billion-pound ($2.0 billion) investment will be included in the Strategic Defence Review, a 10-year plan for military equipment and services. The SDR is expected to be published on Monday. The Ministry of Defence added that it planned to procure up to 7,000 long-range weapons built in Britain. Together, the measures announced on Saturday will create around 1,800 jobs, the MoD said. "The hard-fought lessons from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine show a military is only as strong as the industry that stands behind them," Defence Secretary John Healey said in a statement. "We are strengthening the UK's industrial base to better deter our adversaries and make the UK secure at home and strong abroad." The extra investment will mean Britain will spend around 6 billion pounds on munitions in the current parliament, the MoD said. Earlier on Saturday, the MoD said it would spend an extra 1.5 billion pounds to tackle the poor state of housing for the country's armed forces. ($1 = 0.7430 pounds) Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Opinion - Hegseth stampedes through the Pentagon
On April 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was canceling Defense Department participation in actions generated by the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017. Hegseth posted on social media that it was 'yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING. WPS is a UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists. Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.' Journalist Walter Pincus, who spent 40 years at the Washington Post covering topics ranging from nuclear weapons to politics, wrote in a recent column that Trump and Hegseth's defense strategy is riddled with irrelevant political considerations resulting in a series of strange moves that must surely weaken national security. In fact, as Pincus points out, what Congress had in mind in the Women, Peace and Security Act was to increase women's participation in preventing and resolving conflict, countering violent extremism and building post-conflict stability around the globe. It is hard to believe that the program was 'pushed by feminists and left-wing activists' when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem co-sponsored the bill when she was in Congress, and President Trump signed the measure in 2017. Perhaps reminded of this doctrinal dilemma, Hegseth pivoted in a later tweet, arguing that 'the woke & weak Biden Administration distorted & weaponized the straight-forward & security-focused WPS initiative launched in 2017.' Hegseth said he will try to end WPS programs at the Pentagon in the next budget. Asked whether he believed Women, Peace and Security to be a diversity, equity and inclusion program, new Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, at his confirmation hearing last month, replied, 'I do not,' adding, 'WPS helped us understand the full challenges that face us.' Hegseth unveiled another terrifying plan on May 5, when he announced 'General/Flag Officer Reductions' in a memo to senior Pentagon leadership to 'drive innovation and operational excellence unencumbered by unnecessary bureaucratic layers.' While the military may be top-heavy, it goes without saying that military firings should be based on merit, not political considerations or race-based policies. Hegseth's purge appears to be totally political. 'That's a recipe not just for a politicized military, but an authoritarian military,' Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a Marine officer in Iraq and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico. 'That's the way militaries work in Russia and China and North Korea. And by the way, it's a big part of why those militaries are not as strong and capable as our own.' Trump's military purge began in February, when the president fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs CQ Brown — an African American, whom Moulton describes as 'one of the most talented general officers of his generation' — for no articulated reason. In April, Trump fired the redoubtable Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who for unclear reasons consistently has the president's ear, urged Trump to fire certain officials due to their perceived lack of personal loyalty. She posted a message on social media saying Haugh had been fired for being 'disloyal' to Trump. So far, the administration has fired five four-stars, including three women: the first female chief of naval operations, the commandant of the Coast Guard, and Navy three-star Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, former president of the Naval War College, who was the U.S. deputy military representative to NATO's military committee in Brussels. Yet women make up less than 10 percent of general and flag officers. It is baffling what Hegseth intended to accomplish with the purge. We do know that he has accomplished a decided weakening of national security. The measures were apparently meant to root out diversity, equity and inclusion from the military. Instead, the administration is paring much of the core of our officer cadre, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Along with the May 5 memorandum, Hegseth released a two-minute video announcing what he ungrammatically called the 'Less Generals More GIs Policy.' He defensively explained that 'this has not been a slash and burn exercise — nothing could be further from the truth … It's going be done carefully. But it's going to be done expeditiously.' Hegseth said he sought to remove 'redundant force structure, to optimize and streamline leadership by reducing excess general and flag officer positions.' He proposed a minimum 20 percent reduction of four-star positions across the active military and of general officers in the National Guard, plus an additional minimum 10 percent reduction in general and flag officers under the new unified command plan. So, who will mind the store? And who will call the shots in a national emergency? The nation's top generals seem unsure about the implications of Hegseth's moves to reduce the general staff. At a hearing before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James J. Mingus testified about the flag office, saying, 'We began a general reduction inside the Army several months ago, before this was ever announced … I think it's probably a little too early to tell in terms of what the overall impacts are going to be.' Air Force Lt. Gen. Adrian L. Spain said, 'It's too soon to say what the exact impact to the Air Force specifically will be with the reductions, but we look forward to seeing the exact language following the announcement.' Hegseth has proved himself to be a bull in a china shop. It is worrisome, now that he has sent troops to the Southern border, that the military could be used in politically partisan ways. In Trump's first term, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper refused an order to have soldiers shoot Black Lives Matter protesters. Hegseth would be unlikely show as much backbone. A nervous nation — seeing Hegseth's obsessive loyalty to Trump and all the weaponizing, the political sturm und drang, the cuts and the dismissals — has to be on edge about how all this will end. James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York's Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast Conversations with Jim Zirin. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Will Starmer's military review match the threats we're told we face?
Down a discreet road, on the fringes of a quiet home counties commuter town, is a set of grey buildings worth many hundreds of millions of pounds. In one, behind a secure fence, a handful of workers are on shift this weekend, making Storm Shadow missiles by hand. Each one is worth hundreds of thousands, the product of months of work, made of myriad components. Storm Shadows, like mini-aircraft, have been flying in the skies above Ukraine with a range of 250km (155 miles), part of the UK's backing of President Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts to try to keep Russia's Vladimir Putin at bay. The factory is calm and quiet - a world away from the fire and fury of the conflict on the edge of Europe. We've been allowed to see the missiles up close because the government is warming up for a big moment on Monday, when the prime minister will unveil a major review of the military, the strategic defence review. Sir Keir Starmer has already said we are living in a "new, dangerous era", with a malevolent Russia and its friends hungry to disrupt and damage the West - while the White House is less eager to cough up to defend Europe. So will this review meet the risk that politicians tell us we face? We have gone through many years in which defence has been a lower priority for politicians and the public, largely because peace has prevailed in the UK. Since the end of the Cold War, a former minister says, "we've been going round the world making sure we are reassuring allies, and there have been some very nasty wars in the Middle East". But, at the same time, the proportion of cash spent on defence has shrunk, and the ability of the military to fight "peer-on-peer" wars has decreased. There are well known worries about stockpiles, a lack of munitions, and weapons being decommissioned that haven't yet been replaced. We now have a smaller armed forces - one that is "hollowed out", in the words of the current Defence Secretary John Healey, who we'll talk to on this week's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. Yet now, the government certainly confronts a more alarming picture - and there is a concerted focus on trying to address it. With conflict on the edge of Europe in Ukraine, a former minister says, "if you are going to credibly deter Russia, you need to persuade them, actually, if they mess around with Nato, they lose". And that's before you consider that Donald Trump is a lot less willing than his predecessor to pay for other countries' defence, and China's "imminent" threat to Taiwan highlighted by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth overnight. So what will next week's review suggest for the here and now, as well as the long term future? First, a caveat. The report is not published in full until Monday; it will be important to examine what it recommends. But the broad outline seems pretty clear: expect it to underline the importance of nuclear weapons and the UK's commitment to Nato, the Western defence alliance. There will be an emphasis on modernising the forces, not least because the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of drones and adapting existing kit quickly to lethal effect. We have clues from the announcements ministers have already made about technology and protecting the country from cyber attacks. The review, and ministers' messaging alongside it, will stress a greater need, in their view, for the public to play a part in protecting the country. A government source says "it's about making sure we think more about national resilience", and a "whole society approach" towards threats. That is expected to include announcements about British industry creating more defence kit, expanding the cadet forces, and bolstering the number of men and women in the military reserves. There have been suggestions of a new civilian force - a new "Home Guard" - to protect infrastructure such as power plants, airports and telecommunications hubs. As another source says, "there is a lot of talk about resilience, a push across the whole of society, the kind we have only done twice in our history, in World War One and World War Two". This is "not telling everyone they need to go out and build an Anderson shelter," jokes a former minister, but No 10 does want to usher in a new way of thinking among ordinary people geared towards keeping the country safe. Whether any of these potential recommendations will change much is up for debate, though. While government sources claim it will be "transformative" and hail a "bold new vision", others are playing down its likely impact. A former Conservative defence minister suggests ministers have "massively overegged" what the review will really promise, and "we'll get a lot of things that sound great, but not many things that actually get moving". A source involved in discussion around the review explained: "What will change? Substantively not much - there is a rhetorical change towards Nato and Europe, but it's not a major change in terms of capability - it's all pretty marginal." The Ministry of Defence's permanent secretary David Williams has already said in public that it won't be until the autumn that we'll get specific details about exactly what is going to be ordered, spent and when. The PM has already sped up his plans to spend 2.5% of the size of Britain's economy on defence by 2027, rather than the initial timescale of 2029. UK Defence Secretary John Healey said on Saturday there was "no doubt" UK defence spending would rise to 3% of GDP by 2034 at the latest. All that doesn't make the problems go away. The first is that after inflation and public sector pay rises, insiders question if 2.5% is enough to meet current defence plans - let alone the government's increasing ambition. Existing, expensive plans will remain - such as recapitalising the army, investing in nuclear, carrying on with the Aukus submarine deal with America and Australia, and the global combat air programme to build a next-generation fighter jet - which will gobble up billions of pounds now and for years to come. Second, the chancellor doesn't want to change her self imposed rules on borrowing and spending again, so as we talked about last week, money is tight in government. Defence is already a relative winner in the review of government spending that's coming down the tracks. Third, the PM faces a political dilemma - a pound on defence is a pound that doesn't go on health or welfare, and you won't find huge numbers of Labour MPs who stood for Parliament with the goal of giving more to the military, while trying to reduce benefit payments. Defence has long been one of the PM's big signals to the party and country that he is different to his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. His version of Labour is comfortable appearing in front of Union Jacks, posing with soldiers or clambering in and out of submarines, though not all of his colleagues are. And fourth, fundamentally there is a political question about whether a promise of big cash coming in the 2030s matches increasingly urgent rhetoric about the dangers we face which other allies are using to speed up defence spending more dramatically. At the end of June, Nato allies will gather for a major summit in The Hague. Nato's secretary general Mark Rutte has already made abundantly clear he wants the UK and its allies to be spending at least 3% on defence as soon as possible. The US, the country with the biggest cheque book, wants countries to aim for as much as 5% and if it's to be less, to stop claiming that pensions, health care for veterans or other costs, can be counted as defence spending. I'm told the summit could set a new target for Nato allies to spend 3.5% on defence either by 2032 or by 2035. If that happens, the UK could seem to be lagging behind. As a senior figure warns, for some Nato members, spending 3.5% of GDP on defence is a already a "done deal" - but the UK is still "hopping around". Almost before the ink is dry on the defence review, the government's critics may be able to warn it falls short. Perhaps then, the government's approach is as far as it is currently financially or politically possible to go. But with the PM warning defence should be the "central organising principle" of government - the first thought in the morning and the last at night - threats to our security might evolve faster than politics. This week there will be fierce scrutiny of whether we're really keeping up. Numbers are down - but Starmer will still struggle to win on immigration The Conservative Party faces problems - is its leader one of them? The real problem facing Britain's shrinking military Sign up for the Off Air with Laura K newsletter to get Laura Kuenssberg's expert insight and insider stories every week, emailed directly to you. BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
