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Old 03-27-2004, 08:57 AM  
jayeff
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Join Date: May 2001
Posts: 2,944
The Uzi has been manufactured in several countries and it was available in 3 versions: standard, mini, and micro. At its peak, the Uzi was used by police, military and security forces in close to 100 countries.

The Galil was also apparently an excellent weapon, but not widely used by the Israelis, since they could buy the M16 more cheaply. It was exported to several countries and variants were made in South Africa and I believe, Eastern Europe.

Israel also designed its own smaller, lighter version of the F-16: the Lavi. Politics killed that plane before it was completely developed, but their Merkava battle tank repeatedly out-performed the Abrams M1 in every field test. Armed with Israeli-made kinetic energy shells, in Lebanon the Merkava was successful against the (then) supposedly unbeatable Soviet T72.

Just yesterday I read about the latest bit of Israeli military hardware: mini drones. They have had larger unmanned planes for a while (the US Hunter drone is based on Israeli technology), but one of the new models is small enough to go in a soldier's back-pack: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3571261.stm

Less dramatically, Israel is a world leader in agricultural technology and strongly represented in bio-technology, computer hardware and software, communications, imaging and more.

Apart from working with the US, Israel is openly in partnership with China on agricultural projects and allegedly sold China plans for the Lavi when development of the plane was shelved at home.
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