Western Expatriates in the UAE Armed Forces, 1964–2015

There has been a Western expatriate presence in ruler-controlled military forces of the Trucial States and, later, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) since the 1960s. Their numbers and roles have varied enormously during this time, and can be grouped into three distinct periods. The first, from 1964 to 1980, begins with the engagement of the first expatriate in the Abu Dhabi Defence Force, which was controlled by the Ruler of Abu Dhabi. Expatriate numbers grew rapidly to around 150 in the early 1970s, before declining to around twenty by 1980. During the second period of the 1980s, there were rarely more than a dozen expatriates employed, while the third period starting in 1990 has seen the ongoing engagement of increasingly large numbers of expatriates. To discover why the number of Western expatriates embedded in the Emirati military between 1964 and 1980 rose, then fell to just a few, and why the numbers from 1990 to the present day have persistently risen, this paper argues that the engagement of expatriates is related to the type of force that the rulers wished to create.