The UAE is quickly becoming a niche location for high-tech, small-scale defense manufacturing – primarily by requiring foreign defense firms to sign collaborative production agreements or establish weapons maintenance facilities as a condition of their sales contracts. This strategy includes a focus on providing financing to develop next generation weapons systems (such as Raytheon’s Patriot missile), investing large sums in laboratories and testing facilities to encourage firms to re-locate their research and development (R&D) activities, and a multi-tiered effort to become a global hub for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) industry. Although these defense industrial projects are promoted as a means to help meet the federation’s economic goals, the simultaneous increase in the influence of the UAE’s military and security institutions suggests that these initiatives are not solely based on business fundamentals. The increasing participation of Royal Family members in positions of military leadership, the increasing sophistication of regional arms procurement strategies and the officials that implement them, and the ability of non-Royal families with legacies of military service to gain positions within UAE government agencies, are all indications that the military class may be coalescing into a coherent social group with distinct corporatist interests. This phenomenon is unique in the Gulf – a region where military influence has been minimized (and loyalty to the incumbent regime maximized) through recruitment strategies based on the exploitation of social and ethnic cleavages and the inculcation of rivalries between different service branches and affiliated agencies. By contrast, military prestige in the UAE has been facilitated via a number of avenues, including the increasing number of exchanges that bring Gulf military officers to train at U.S. and European military colleges and defense research institutes, and the large investments made in regional research centers. Although many of the latter are touted as initiatives to prevent local brain drain, they have also attracted foreign defense firms, which have poured money and personnel into defense-technology research programs housed in these new centers, and established scholarships and internship programs that steer engineering and computer science students into careers with regional defense subsidiaries. This paper will explore how the dynamics of the contemporary global arms market have contributed to the rise of military-industrial production in the UAE and examine some of the early indicators of increasing military influence within state institutions – including a preliminary effort to map connections between military officials, prominent Emirati businessmen, and foreign defense firms using network analysis.