News

2020-12-13

Building Upon Today’s Successes Toward Prosperity Through Technology

The UAE and its regional allies are steering the Middle East into a dynamic and prosperous new era.

By Chris Aebli and Gary Rosholt

As the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, His Excellency Dr. Anwar Gargash, recently said: “The UAE wants to reaffirm its global position, in terms of business, in terms of finance, in terms of logistics. You can’t do this by maintaining an exclusivist view of the world.”

The industry applauds these steps toward national sovereignty, regional collaboration and technological innovation. It is a vision that we at L3Harris Technologies know requires Abu Dhabi and its Gulf allies to invest in advanced new technologies to defend against threats from adversaries.

These threats come from militaries, terrorist organisations, ethnic and religious militias, and cybercriminals. Combatting these adversaries requires developing state-of-the-art intelligence and communications systems and the ability to rapidly synthesise this information to respond.

L3Harris was formed last year out of a merger of defence and technology companies with more than 100 years of experience developing these communication systems. Our legacy businesses ranged from producing tactical radios and night vision systems, to components for satellites. Our shared history also included becoming a world leader in integrated communication systems.

Our merger provides us with the capabilities to help the UAE and other countries defend themselves against the entire range of modern-day threats. And we do this with products that can communicate concurrently through both legacy and digital systems and that are interoperable with outside security networks.

Our regional partners need to be equipped with capabilities to perform three core tasks simultaneously:

* Gathering information on potential threats

* Synthesising this data and information in real-time to enable timely decision making

* Obtaining localised training for timely and independent responses

New advances in total mission control solutions allow surveillance and reconnaissance drawn from sensors on airplanes, observation towers, all-terrain vehicles, maritime assets and drones to be synthesised through integrated tactical communication hubs and border crossing posts, for complete situational awareness.

When this analysed information is quickly relayed to forces in the field – whether in patrol boats, all-terrain vehicles or in the sky – soldiers themselves become communication hubs. They deploy with hyper-connected mobile surveillance gear, encrypted communications, and night-vision capabilities.

L3Harris supports UAE and Gulf allies’ efforts to neutralise the threats now present in their region. Rivals have shown their determination to test the country’s borders, waterways, and airspace integrity. Additionally, these challenges are increasingly playing out in the cyber world and through information warfare.

For L3Harris, providing the technological solutions and in-country support to confront these challenges is not a short-term engagement. It is an enduring union that is aimed at transferring to our partners the technologies and know-how required so that they can become operationally independent as quickly as possible. We are eager to help the UAE reach its vision for 2071.

The world and the Middle East are going through tremendous change. The UAE has proven itself to be a rare international leader that seeks to stabilise and modernise their country while working cooperatively with other states. L3Harris looks forward to growing its existing UAE partnership to help the country reach its goals.

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