Rapid Fire: 2010-08-09

• Footlong Sub: Iranian navy takes delivery of 4 Ghadir class midget submarines, the 1st Iranian-built class of submarine, which is thought to be based on the North Korean Sang-O class coastal submarine.

• Bulking Up: Iran says it is beefing up its indigenous Mersad air defense system, which uses Shahin missiles, by adding new radar, while Russia and Ukraine deny reports of selling S-300 air defense missiles to Iran.

• First 11 Iraqi M1 Abrams tanks arrive at Umm Qasr.

• Kyrgyz Base: US is building a $10 million training base in Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan; the US already operates the Manas Air Base in the country, which serves as a transit center for supplies and troops going to Afghanistan.

• Bump in the Road: Despite a tripling of its defense segment sales, Oshkosh saw its stock price plummet on investor fears that the market for military trucks will dry up in the next few years.

• The global market for unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) is expected to reach $12 billion over the next decade, including $1.2 billion for UUV power systems, according to AlumiFuel Power, a supplier of hydrogen-sourced power systems.

• CSC gets a $28 million task order, under the Flight School XXI contract, to supply simulator-based flight and related aviation training support to the US Army Aviation Center of Excellence at Fort Rucker, AL.

Bulgaria’s Finances Squeezing Existing Arms Deals

F910 Wielingen

Bulgaria’s government recently allocated BGN 256 million (about EUR 131M/ $174M) from the country’s fiscal reserve in order to complete a number of arms deals, lest it find key defense items repossessed.

Bulgaria is actually one of the few NATO countries to meet the agreed 2% of GDP threshold for defense spending. The problem is a low base. Decades of communist rule left Bulgaria poor, and even among its peers in the former Warsaw Pact, its economic ranking was and is low. The recent financial crisis has hit the country hard, and left a number of key arms deals short on cash. While these deals are small in the context of global arms flows, they loom large in the context of Bulgaria’s overall military capabilities…