Middle East

Dan Darling, a Middle East defense analyst with Forecast International, predicted the UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel will collectively spend about $70 billion on defense in 2009. The UAE will account for about $7 billion of that.Oil-rich Gulf nations still have large cash reserves saved from years of steadily high petroleum prices. One of their biggest expenditures is on air and missile defenses to protect critical assets such as oil fields.Under a $3.5 billion deal, the UAE by 2012 will receive two air-defense weapons that can be deployed from Patriot launchers: Lockheed Martin’s Patriot advanced capability-3 (PAC-3) and Raytheon’s guidance enhanced missile.“What the UAE has asked the U.S. government for is a comprehensive integrated air-and-missile defense effort … and Patriot is the base piece of that,” said Tim Glaeser, Raytheon’s director of business development and strategy for Patriot programs. “This remains a volatile region and there are threats out there. Basically if the countries want to continue to embark on a program of growth and seek stability, they need peace, and if you want peace, you have to have security.”Glaeser said Raytheon has engaged in various levels of talks about selling the Patriot system to all the Gulf Cooperation Council nations. The GCC is a security alliance that includes the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman.Raytheon has received permission from the U.S. government to share technical data on the air- and missile-defense system with Qatar.

mario-It is crazy that by 2012 the Middle East will have two air defence weapons that will be shot out of a Patriot launchers that is advance guidence missles.The U.S.A government to share technical data in air and ground which most of the middle east will share.U.S will be spliting $7 billion dollars on.