UAE to Buy Raytheon's Patriot Missiles

UAE to Buy Raytheon's Patriot Missiles (NSI News Source Info) December 19, 2008: Raytheon has won an award of up to $3.3 billion to provide Patriot missiles and systems to the United Arab Emirates, the Tewksbury, Mass., company said Dec. 18. The UAE becomes the 11th country outside the U.S. that has bought Raytheon's Patriot missile systems and services. The UAE contract is for advanced Patriot air and missile defense capability, whole life support and related training. Raytheon will provide the UAE with Patriot Config-3 capabilities, its most advanced Patriot system, and the Patriot GEM-T missiles. The Config-3 system allows the use of Lockheed's PAC-3 missiles, which Lockheed will provide to the UAE under a separate contract. The PAC-3 is a kinetic energy weapon designed to directly strike the warhead in an enemy missile. The GEM-T missile explodes a warhead near its target, driving shrapnel into it. The sale of the missiles to the UAE are Foreign Military Sales through the U.S. government. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems will carry out work for the UAE order at its Integrated Air Defense Center in Andover, Mass. Raytheon provided the UAE with the medium-range Hawk Air Defense System in the 1980s, and the Patriot system will replace that system, according to Dan Smith, Raytheon IDS president. "Now they've entrusted us with the next layer of their national defense, and we're very honored that our partnership is so strong that it allowed this to take place," he said. Raytheon IDS is the prime contractor, both domestic and international, for the Patriot air and missile-defense weapon capability and the system integrator for the Config-3 system. It also provides Patriot systems or services to Germany, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Taiwan, among other countries. The U.S. Army is in the midst of upgrading all its Patriot Config-2 systems to Config-3 systems. That effort, called "pure fleet," may be influencing other countries to upgrade their systems. "For those countries who have Patriot, they obviously have made their strategy a long time ago that commonality with the U.S. system was a good thing," Smith said. "So as the U.S. Army upgraded for technology, it's natural for the other nations to upgrade for technology as well," he said. "What the Patriot nations are trying to do is get everything on a common baseline so that the lifecycle support costs and ownership costs become less because of commonality between all the different equipment."