About Us
Our Mission
Chronology of Defense Aerospace development
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meet Our Team
Julien Mercier
Co-Founder & Editorial DirectorJulien 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 LeadClaire 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.
Michael Adler
Editor-in-ChiefMichael 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 DeskLena 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.
Marc Duval
Head of Media ContentMarc 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 CoordinatorPriya 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.
Diego Ramos
Social Media LeadDiego 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
Air & Space ReporterClara 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 ReporterPeter 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.
Maya Patel
Procurement ReporterMaya 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 ReporterAhmed 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.
Lucas Meyer
Emerging Tech ReporterLucas 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
Europe CorrespondentSophie 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 CorrespondentTomás 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.
Hanna Berg
Nordic CorrespondentHanna 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 CorrespondentKevin 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.
