Qatar celebrates its bank holiday with the best military arsenal in the Gulf

Qatar is preparing to celebrate its bank holiday, a festival that is commemorated every 18th December with a large parade of military and police forces and an air show.

The military parade is an opportunity to show the enormous potential of the armed forces of the small Gulf state, whose growth over the past decade has been spectacular, despite the blockade it has been under for more than three years by neighbouring Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt, the Emirates and Bahrain, which accuse the country of supporting international terrorism. 

For example, its air force, under the command of General Salem Hamad Eqail Al-Nabet, is supplied every year with new, highly advanced 4th generation fighters. If the current pace of acquisition and delivery continues, Qatar will have the most varied and sophisticated fleet of fighter aircraft in the Middle East by 2030. 

In recent years, it has acquired a total of 96 aircraft, of which 36 are Rafales from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation and 24 others are Eurofighter Typhoons produced by British company BAE System and purchased in September 2017 for around £6 billion. In addition, 36 American F-15QA Eagles from Boeing were purchased in 2017 for $6.2 billion. And two months ago, Qatar made official before the Pentagon its interest in the powerful 5th generation Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighters. 

In terms of the acquisition of weapons systems, the government of Prime Minister Emir Khalid bin Khalifa Abdulaziz Thani's government is pursuing a policy of diversification towards the West, from which the arms industries of Germany, the United States, France, Italy and of course the United Kingdom are the major beneficiaries, along with those of Turkey.

With an armed force of some 30 000 soldiers, the Chief of Defence Staff, Lieutenant General Ghanem bin Shaheen Al Ghanem, has structured his procurement in a fairly coherent manner. Most of its new land-based weapons systems have been acquired by the Berlin government, combat aircraft are flown by cadres in London, Paris and Washington, while naval platforms are divided between those in Ankara and Rome.

In May 2015, Qatar acquired a first batch of 24 Rafale, 18 single-seaters and six other two-seaters in educational versions. The purchase was supplemented by a training programme for pilots and technical personnel and by a huge quantity of missiles, all of which represents an expenditure of more than 6.3 billion euros for Qatar's coffers.

This multi-million dollar export was the result of an official visit to Doha, the capital of Qatar, by the then President of the Republic, François Hollande, who visited the country accompanied by the then Defence and Foreign Affairs Ministers, Jean-Yves Le Drian and Laurent Fabius, respectively.

The beneficiary of the missile purchase was the French branch of the European consortium MBDA, which sold 140 Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles, 300 MICA short-range air-to-air missiles, 160 Meteor medium-range missiles and 60 Exocet AM39 Block 2 missiles. The final point, for the time being, was materialised in December 2017 by the new president Emmanuel Macron, who ratified the purchase option opened in 2015 for a dozen additional Rafale fighters.

In mid-November, Italian Defence Minister Lorenzo Guerini visited Doha to strengthen military and industrial relations between the two countries. At the same time, he sought to promote the sale of the Italian Aermacchi M346 aircraft, encourage the sale of military vehicles and obtain an additional order for warships, as well as to support the Qatari fleet.

Shipyards in Italy and Turkey are supplying the warships the navy now needs, under the command of Admiral Abdulla Hassan Al Suleiti. With a contract worth nearly 4,000 million euros, the Italian company Fincantieri is building four corvettes, an amphibious ship and two patrol boats in its La Spezia shipyard until 2024.

The first patrol boat called Q61 Musherib, 63 metres long, was launched in mid-September and will be delivered in 2022, while the 107-metre-long corvette Al Zubarah was christened at the end of February and will be completed in 2021. In Turkey, at the Anadolu shipyard in Istanbul, the training ship QTS-91 Al-Doha was launched at the beginning of October. 90 metres long and with a displacement of 1,950 tonnes, it will be used to train a maximum of 76 trainees.

In the ground field, the German manufacturer Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW) is the largest exporter to Qatar. The latest batch of 15 new-generation Gepard SP self-propelled anti-aircraft systems is worth 41.4 million euros.

The head of the ground units, General Saeed Hesayen Mohammed Al-Khayarin, intends to use them to strengthen air defence and repel possible terrorist attacks with manned and unmanned aircraft. The Doha government wants to create a bubble around the five cities that will host the World Cup, which will be held in Qatar between 21 November and 18 December 2022.

Other major KMW acquisitions include the most modern combat vehicles produced by German industry, including the A7+ version of the Leopard 2 tank and the PzH 2000 self-propelled gun, two of the world's most advanced tracked weapons systems.

The transaction was completed in April 2013, closed in 2017 and amounted to €1.89 billion. It involved the acquisition of 62 Leopard 2A7+ battle tanks equipped with 120 millimetre guns, fully equipped to operate in urban areas and to withstand the impacts of high-penetration projectiles and improvised explosive devices. The package included 24 PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers with a 155-mm gun and an automatic loading system, with a range of 30 kilometres. 

In addition, there was a large package of light armed reconnaissance vehicles Fennek, 4WD, and the Dingo 2 HD armoured vehicle, also 4WD, both of which are mine-resistant and equipped with equipment for biological and chemical agents. The Fennek is equipped with a 12.7 millimetre machine gun that is fired from the inside. The Dingo 2 HD was purchased in ambulance, command post and ground radar versions and both are protected to resist small arms fire and artillery fragments. 

With the third largest natural gas reserve in the world, the small emirate is the country with the highest per capita income in the world and has the highest level of development of any Arab country. Its leaders have invested heavily to bring its land and airport infrastructure up to the highest standards. All this despite the fact that it has a surface area of just 11,586 square kilometres, some 300,000 indigenous citizens and around 2.7 million inhabitants, an area similar to that of the Community of Murcia, but with almost twice the population.