Dubai Airshow 2025 – MBDA to increase its footprint in the Emirates forming a fully owned company in the UAE with full Tawazun support, first locally produced system to be the Diamond Shaped loitering munition

During the Dubai Airshow Tawazun Council and MBDA announced the launch of a series of strategic initiatives aimed at supporting the localisation of defence industries and developing the national innovation ecosystem. The European missile company will create a fully owned entity, currently known for the time being as MBDA UAE, and will develop locally the Diamond Shaped loitering munition, a programme in collaboration with Fly-K.

In June 2023 MBDA inaugurated the Missile Engineering Center in the UAE, the first of its kind for MBDA outside Europe, the agreement for its creation having been signed one year earlier. “For the past two years, a joint team of French and UAE engineers collaborating together to finalise the development of those smart weapons,” Patrice Hajjar, MBDA’s Vice President for Middle East, told a selected group of media at the Dubai exhibition adding that “now the next step is the one we announced early this week, the establishment in the UAE of a company 100% owned by MBDA, fully supported by Tawazun Council.”

The company will be established in the near future, the aim being to have it incorporated within the next six months. It will be the single footprint of MBDA in the UAE, as it will merge the Missile Engineering Centre, the MBDA office in Abu Dhabi, and all the projects already ongoing.

“Our objective is to increase our presence in the Middle East, leveraging on the local capability, which is really mature in the UAE, cooperating with other stakeholders like the EDGE Group, as well as with Calidus for the integration of some of our systems. There is really a strategy to develop, to produce some systems here in the Emirates, and export products from there through MBDA UAE, so it is not just studies or research and development,” Hajjar said, adding that the aim is to move up to product development qualification, and export from the UAE.

These were not simple words; MBDA announced that the first product to be developed in the UAE will be the Diamond Shaped, a loitering munition with artificial intelligence elements based on an airframe provided by Fly-R, a start-up based on the French island of La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean. EDR On-Line dealt with the Diamond Shaped in more than one occasion, its development in the Emirates being announced at IDEX 2025, no more details being announced at that time.

“The development will be carried out within one and a half, two years. It’s a fast development project, and the objective then is to go into the industrialisation, and mass production of this product, which is currently considered at TRL 6,” the MBDA’s VP ME explained.

First test flights were already performed at the Fly-R premises, but now most activities will be moved to the UAE, EDR On-Line understood, the next couple of years being needed not only to fully mature the product but also to add local content, investigating the local supply chain.

Beside supporting the new company in recruiting local personnel, Tawazun Council will also help in identifying local subcontractors to establish an Emirati supply chain. An obvious example is EDGE, that might be involved in warheads, seekers, airframe components, engines, and so on. MBDA and Tawazun Council agreed on the intellectual property issue, however this part of the agreement was not made public.

Although already at TRL 6, as mentioned the Diamond Shaped needs still some time to become a product. “Many things have still to be done to transformed something able to fly into a fully developed and qualified product, ready to be mass produced,” Mr. Hajjar clarified, EDR On-Line understanding that integration, the addition of artificial intelligence elements, the warhead development, the launcher, and the integration on platforms, as well as the whole final testing campaign, will be done in the Emirates by MBDA UAE.

While the Diamond Shaped will be the very first system which final development will take place in the UAE, loitering munitions being the first pillar of MBDA strategy in the Emirates, the second pillar is related to smart weapons; here MBDA and Tawazun Council are already working on the SmartCruiser and the SmartGlider, which were the first items to be dealt with by the Missile Engineering Centre, following an agreement signed during IDEX 2021 by the two companies. “This programme is more advanced than a concept phase, and we are heading for a first demonstration within a couple of years,” the MBDA’s VP ME stated. These weapons will come together with a hexa-launcher, allowing a single fighter to carry 18 of them. Of course, MBDA is looking first at the Rafale, 80 of which were ordered by the UAE, the first production aircraft having been unveiled earlier this year. However, it was made clear that both SmartCruiser and SmartGlider are multi-platform system and can be integrated on other aircraft such as the F-16.

What was made clear is that MBDA UAE will develop products that will then become part of the overall MBDA portfolio and will not be a company that will produce locally something which is already being produced elsewhere, the systems developed and produced in the Emirates being exported directly from here. There will therefore be no duplications, and this will be true also for the group Middle East strategy, therefore should other operations be mounted in the area these will be complementary to the one announced.

While loitering munitions and smart weapons are the two existing pillar, a third one is being added, MBDA bringing one of its providers to the Emirates; the ASB Group is specialised in thermal batteries, a key product in numerous military systems, such as missiles, aircraft, ejection seats, and so on. ASB is one of the five companies producing such batteries in the free world, and already has operations in France, the United Kingdom, the United States and India.

The group will create Emirati Thermal Batteries, an industrial subsidiary, that will be located within the Tawazun Industrial Park, which is currently being expanded, and which will also host MBDA UAE, while also being already home of many Emirati defence industries.

Photos by P. Valpolini