Evolution of the UAE Armed Forces

Evolution of the UAE Armed Forces
By Athol Yates
Published in December 2020
380 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

This book is a very informative - if somewhat dry - history of the UAE’s military.

I bought it in the UAE a few years ago. It then lived in my library, where it gathered dust, unread, alongside countless other tomes. This year (2026 for future readers), Trump began military operations in Iran. Iran retaliated, hitting the UAE. This naturally created significant concern for me. When cleaning my library I found and remembered this book, and decided to read it to get some insights on the current conflict.


This book is written for a military audience. The author, Athol Yates, is an Australian born professor of civil security studies in Abu Dhabi. I am not sure exactly why he wrote the book, but it seems like he either was commissioned by the UAE government, and / or wrote it as training material for his students. The target audience is very specific - people from the UAE in the security industry.

I didn’t gain very much insight into the current Iran war. But some passages were relevant. For example, I learned that the US has refused to give the UAE superior quality weapons in order to artificially inflate Israel’s relative capabilities compared to Arab neighbors. This might explain why the UAE is so dependent on the United States. I also learned that Iran already has attacked the UAE several times - before the Iranian revolution when it seized some islands; during the revolution when it seized more islands; during the Iran Iraq war when it struck an Abu Dhabi oil facility; and numerous other incidents where it has harassed UAE vessels.

I gained tremendous insight into Emirati politics. The most interesting chapters of the book were the chapters where it describes the British controlled forces (the Trucial Oman Scouts) and the feudal levy style ruler controlled forces. I was shocked to learn that each Emirate had its own separate independently controlled army; and that several times these were used to manage internal inter-Emirate conflicts.

The fact that this style of Emirate controlled armed forces today is unthinkable shows how much progress the UAE has made in only a few decades.

Despite what many in the West say, I love the UAE. To me, its semi feudal political system is a major strength not a weakness.

I probably cannot recommend this book to anyone because I don’t know anyone who might be interested in reading it. But if you are interested in the UAE and doing a deeper dive, it might be worth buying and skimming. If you specifically are doing defense or defense adjacent work in the UAE, its a must read.

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