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The requirement would come at 4 pm. A team would work through the night. A second team would arrive before dawn and push the update before 10am, so the next shift of operators had an upgraded system before they began.
That was the rhythm inside EDGE Group, one of the world’s leading advanced technology and defence groups, as Iran’s strikes continued week after week.
By May 4, UAE air defences had engaged a cumulative total of 549 ballistic missiles, 29 cruise missiles, and 2,260 drones since attacks began on February 28, nearly 3,000 attempts in total. Locally developed UAE-made jammers neutralised more than 85 per cent of hostile drones, with EDGE’s electronic warfare systems forming the backbone of the country’s air defence response. Behind those numbers were engineers running on two or three hours of sleep, updating live systems between shifts.
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“We need to ship the technology fast. We need to enable the client very fast. We need our people ready to close the loop and update the system very fast,” Dr Chaouki Kasmi, Group CTO and President of Technologies and Industrialisation at EDGE Group, told Khaleej Times.
“It’s all about building the capability and adapting at the speed of the threat. Because people on the other side are not sleeping. They are adjusting their airframes, adjusting their sensors, adding countermeasures. By the time the threat reaches, we need to be ready,” he added.
Kasmi was on the ground throughout. Asked whether he slept, his answer was direct.
“When I moved to the Emirates I was glad to serve this country as a citizen of it,” he said. “For me, my responsibility and my duty were to be on the ground. How many hours I slept? I don’t remember. Not much. But I am an example of so many engineers who did not ask for anything in return. The only objective was: how do we protect the UAE? The rest never mattered.”
What made the response possible was not improvisation. EDGE’s electronic warfare architecture, integrating radar, electro-optic systems, and RF detection into a unified command and control platform, had been accumulating operational and synthetic data for years. When the conflict began, that data fed directly into AI models already deployed. The update cycle ran in hours.
“We don’t look after data for the sake of having data,” Kasmi said. “We look at the operationalisation of the data. Collect, process, annotate, retrain the model, push it back into the system. And it is very quick.”
Inside the facilities, every administrative layer was stripped out. Procurement officers sat next to designers. Finance staff worked beside engineers. When a component could not be sourced, the design changed overnight.
“The engineer at his computer had someone from procurement next to him, someone from finance next to him,” he said. “The goal was to sustain development of national capabilities while being careful with cost. Our engineers remember that cost-effective is the only way to sustain.”
Among those engineers were young Emiratis midway through EDGE’s six to eight month engineering boot camp when the strikes began. Kasmi’s team placed the entire cohort directly into the factory.
“They learned in one month and a half what they would have learned in close to three years,” he said. “They understood the responsibility of time, the pressure of delivering at performance, the reality of adapting to a fast-evolving environment. We could see a new generation of Emirati leaders coming out of that learning period.”
The conflict accelerated something else inside EDGE that had been building for years. Every intercept generated data. Every engagement was cleaned, annotated, and fed back into AI models already running inside the systems that had just fired.
“This has been a moment where the volume of data we acquired, already cleaned, already annotated, is already feeding into our new AI models already deployed,” Kasmi elaborated. “People are leveraging AI to develop hardware and software very fast. This is one of the major transformations EDGE is going through. It’s transforming its entire R&D environment to be multiplied and boosted by AI technologies.”
EDGE recorded $5 billion in annual revenue with 70 per cent from global exports, a commercial position now backed by operational proof. Kasmi is direct about what that proof means internationally.
“We have contracts with end-users globally,” he said. “We have operations in Brazil, we showcased our Monsup trials with the Brazilian Navy. We have Milrem Robotics in Estonia, Anavia in Switzerland and many others. We have diversified our supply chain and our alliances, and we have acquired top companies and startups in different parts of the world. This gives you access to different supply chains and different knowledge bases.”
“When the war started, no plane was flying from any country to the UAE easily,” he said. “So we planned for the worst, to develop in the worst conditions. There are certain capabilities you need at scale continuously, whether you can fly or not. Those are the things we invest massively in our production lines.”
Nearly 3,000 attempts in 67 days. The systems built here held every one that mattered.
Source: Khaleej Times