About Us

Defense-Aerospace.com is a news site that covers defense and aerospace developments from a practical, source-based angle. It was launched in Missouri in 1998 and has stayed independent since then.

We focus on official material: press releases, budget documents, policy updates, and verified statements. The goal is to give readers direct access to solid information without biased opinions.

The site is published by Defense Aerospace LLC, a small company based near Jefferson City. It’s managed by Julien Mercier, a journalist with long experience in the field. He handles most of the editing.

Our site is used by professionals – government staff, defense contractors, analysts, and researchers. Many rely on it for daily updates and archived documents. Think tanks and some media also cite us.

In 2025 we completely rebuilt the site architecture, expanded the database, and added secure feeds for corporate clients. The upgrade improved load times and kept the entire historical archive online without paywalls.

Our Mission

We strive to provide clear, fact-based reporting on defense and aerospace developments. We cover technical progress, capability shifts, operational deployment, and strategic impact.

Each of our reports is built on verified data. We avoid interpretation and focus instead on presenting information that’s accurate, timely, and relevant.

Chronology of Defense Aerospace development

1998

Julien Mercier and Claire Dubois launch Defense-Aerospace.com on 7 December with a single aim – publish official defense and aerospace documents online, unchanged and in full.

1998
Late 1990s – Early 2000s

Within six months, procurement officers, analysts, and trade attachés add the site to their bookmarks. Mercier writes custom scripts to post press releases minutes after embargoes lift. Dubois introduced a new interface in 2000, bringing steady U.S. traffic and doubling server load. By 2003 the archive passes 10,000 items, many of which were not indexed elsewhere on the web.

Late 1990s – Early 2000s
2004 – 2010

Correspondent stringers in Washington, Berlin, and Singapore feed regional updates. A 2005 comparative table of frontline-fighter unit costs becomes the site’s most-downloaded PDF and is quoted in three national audit hearings. In 2008 the first “Program Tracker” pages appear, listing cost, schedule, and risk in a single view – quickly adopted by staff officers preparing budget notes.

2004 – 2010
2011 – 2017

Dubois replaces the hand-coded pages with a multilingual CMS, adds full-text search, and links articles to primary-source PDFs. Mercier launches a daily email brief in 2012 and a quarterly “Budget Watch” series in 2015. The archive tops one million words by 2016. In 2017 a single-payment API opens, letting researchers pull historical data into their own models.

2011 – 2017
2018 – 2020

Michael Adler joins as Editor-in-Chief. U.S. budget coverage expands, and an early-alert mailer now dispatches contract notices before 06:00 EST. The newsroom adopts structured style sheets to standardize nomenclature across five languages. During the 2020 pandemic, remote workflows keep output stable; a special series tracks emergency procurement of medical airlift assets.

2018 – 2020
2021 – 2022

Lena Kovacs formalizes a 24-hour International Desk. Updates now arrive in near real time from Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. Cov-ax exercises and Indo-Pacific basing agreements headline daily briefs. Marc Duval builds a 50,000-image library with strict metadata rules, including a 2022 drone-imagery standard adopted by partner outlets.

2021 – 2022
2023

The full archive moves to a French cloud platform with redundancy in Frankfurt. Average page-load times fall below one second, and uptime exceeds 99.9 percent. A zero-trust security model and ISO 27001 compliance pass external audit.

2023
2024

Mercier releases the Offset Deals Index, mapping industrial-compensation arrangements across NATO programs. Priya Shah launches “Industry Voices,” a peer-reviewed blog for engineers and suppliers. A series on next-generation missiles, published in five parts, becomes the site’s most-read investigation of the year.

2024
2025

A headless CMS replaces legacy code, enabling encrypted feeds for corporate clients and seamless mobile rendering. Every article since 1998 remains freely accessible. A new analytics dashboard lets subscribers filter three decades of material by platform, budget line, and supplier.

2025

Meet Our Team

Julien-Mercier

Julien Mercier

Co-Founder & Editorial Director

Julien co-started Defense-Aerospace.com in 1998 after ten years reporting procurement for Les Echos and La Tribune. He sets editorial rules, leads investigations, and chairs the ethics board. He wrote a five-part series on next-generation missiles in 2024 and built a database that traces offset deals across NATO budgets. His first field work came from French units in Bosnia, and he now speaks four languages.

Claire Dubois

Co-Founder & Operations Lead

Claire built the site’s platform and has since refined its layout, usability, and content organization. She previously handled tech publishing at Dassault Systèmes and holds an ESSEC business degree. She oversaw a full cloud migration in 2023, which cut page-load times in half. Today she heads a four-person dev team, manages licensing, and negotiates syndication with major wire services.

Claire-Dubois
Michael-Adler

Michael Adler

Editor-in-Chief

Michael took charge of daily coverage in 2018. Earlier he led the Pentagon desk at Defense News and won an Aerospace Media Award for his F-35 investigations. He exposed 2024 cost overruns in the Next-Gen Air Dominance program, still files a monthly U.S. budget column, and coaches junior reporters during morning pitch meetings.

Lena Kovacs

Head of International Desk

Lena leads a seven-person desk that processes incoming news in five languages. She worked at MTI in Budapest before relocating to Brussels, where she spent five years building a strong NATO contact base. With a master’s degree in linguistics, she edits directly in French, Hungarian, German, English, and Russian. In 2024 she launched an Asia shift to ensure 24-hour coverage of Pacific-region updates.

Lena-Kovacs
Marc-Duval

Marc Duval

Head of Media Content

Marc spent a decade at AFP photo desks before joining in 2016. He now keeps a library of 50 000 vetted images, negotiates rights, and trains colleagues on metadata. In 2024 he drafted drone-footage standards and arranged frontline shoots with Ukraine stringers.

Priya Shah

Blog Authors Coordinator

Priya manages the site’s opinion section, reviewing submissions, approving topics, and keeping authors on schedule. She built her editorial style in Indian national dailies, then completed a master’s in international journalism with a focus on conflict reporting. She launched the guest-column series “Industry Voices” in 2022 and hosts an annual workshop for first-time writers.

Priya-Shah
Diego-Ramos

Diego Ramos

Social Media Lead

Diego joined in 2020 after running defense hashtags for a Madrid think tank. He built a crisis-alert feed that posts within five minutes of a confirmed event and grew total followers by 250 percent. He matches headline tone to each platform and tracks engagement metrics daily.

Reporters

Clara-Nguyen

Clara Nguyen

Air & Space Reporter

Clara reports on satellite programs, flight testing, and civil-military aerospace projects. She studied aerospace engineering at the University of Melbourne and worked briefly in launch operations before shifting to reporting. In 2024 she uncovered key supplier disruptions in the Artemis schedule and created a set of CAD-based diagrams to clarify spacecraft subsystems for general readers.

Peter Johansson

Land Systems Reporter

Peter tracks armor, artillery, and logistics. He spent eleven years on the Nordic defense beat and still serves as an infantry reservist. In 2024 he embedded with a mechanized battalion in Estonia and produced a study on Leopard 2 Arctic mobility trials.

Peter-Johansson
Maya-Patel

Maya Patel

Procurement Reporter

Maya dissects budgets and contract ledgers. She left a Washington policy shop in 2019 to map spending lines for our readers. She built an interactive tracker that lets subscribers search program history back to 2005 and writes a weekly note on GAO audit findings.

Ahmed Hassan

Middle East Reporter

Ahmed reports from Cairo on MENA acquisitions and doctrine. He files in Arabic and English and has covered Abu Dhabi shows and Sinai checkpoints. In 2024 he detailed Red Sea naval drills and now issues a monthly arms-trade brief in Turkish.

Ahmed-Hassan
Lucas-Meyer

Lucas Meyer

Emerging Tech Reporter

Lucas covers automation, drone systems, and backend logistics tools. His reporting grew out of time spent in Berlin working with a defense-research lab focused on AI deployment in C4ISR systems. He maintains a GitHub repository for open-source drone-swarm models and regularly interviews procurement officers on how modular builds affect delivery timelines.

Correspondents

Sophie-Dubois

Sophie Dubois

Europe Correspondent

Sophie files from Paris and Brussels on EU integration and joint programs. In 2023 she wrote a three-part series on PESCO financing that drew questions in the European Parliament. She also co-hosts the “Brussels Brief” podcast on defense industry policy.

Tomás Álvarez

Latin America Correspondent

Tomás follows South American modernization plans. He covers procurement bills, naval-yard upgrades, and submarine overhauls. He moderates a defense-economy panel each year at FIDAE and interviews officers from Santiago to Brasília.

Tomás-Álvarez
Hanna-Berg

Hanna Berg

Nordic Correspondent

Hanna splits her time between Stockholm and Tromsø. She studies Arctic exercises, joint Nordic commands, and logistics in rough weather. She completed a winter-survival course with the Swedish Army and writes on icebreaker fleets and polar satellite links.

Kevin Liu

Asia-Pacific Correspondent

Kevin reports from Singapore on naval activity across the Indo-Pacific. He covers everything from shipbuilding in South Korea to joint drills near Australia. Before joining the site, he studied naval architecture and worked as a technical writer in a ship design firm. Most of his time goes into tracking projects, watching for changes in fleet plans, and speaking with engineers and officers in the region.

Kevin-Liu