As modern battlefields continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace, increasingly complex operational requirements and the convergence of multiple operational domains are placing greater demands on defence industries to develop solutions that anticipate future needs rather than simply respond to today’s challenges. Against this backdrop, Al Jundi Journal interviewed Hamad Salem Al Ameri, CEO of CARACAL and CARACAL Light Ammunition, to discuss the company’s engineering philosophy and its approach to excellence in the defence industry, as well as the transfer of UAE-developed technology to international partners. The interview also explored the importance of integrating weapons and ammunition, CARACAL’s role in strengthening the UAE’s national industrial base, and the value of direct engagement with end users in guiding product development. The following is the full interview:
Modern battlefields are becoming increasingly complex and multidomain. How do you ensure that CARACAL’s engineering philosophy anticipates tomorrow’s operational requirements rather than simply responding to today’s challenges?
We design platforms, not single-purpose weapons. A rifle entering service today may stay with a soldier for fifteen years, so the question is not only what it must do now, but what it must be able to accommodate later. Modularity therefore sits at the centre of our engineering: adjustable gas systems, barrels in multiple lengths, and rail systems ready to take accessories that do not yet exist. The CSRM, our multi-calibre sniper rifle unveiled at IDEX 2025, is the clearest expression of that thinking. One platform, several calibres, adapted to the mission rather than replaced for it. We also track where the individual weapon is heading, particularly the fusion of optics and sensor data, and we design our systems to integrate those technologies when customers are ready for them.
CARACAL places significant emphasis on precision engineering and rigorous testing. In your view, what defines excellence in defence manufacturing, and how do you embed that culture throughout the organisation?
Excellence is what happens when nobody is watching: the round that fires correctly after the weapon has been dropped in sand, soaked, and left in extreme heat. It is measurable, and we measure it. Our firearms are built to NATO and CIP standards, and our specialised laboratory tests materials and complete systems against environmental simulation before anything reaches a customer. Last year we signed an agreement with Tawazun Quality and Conformity specifically to strengthen safety verification across our firearms and ammunition. The culture follows from that discipline. When an engineer knows their component will be tested to destruction, and knows a soldier depends on the result, the standard sets itself.
CARACAL has transferred manufacturing technology to partners in India. What does the UAE gain by exporting its know-how, and not only its products?
Influence, and a different kind of relationship. Sell a product and the transaction ends at delivery. Transfer the technology to build it and you create a partner whose own industry works to standards you have set, which is a relationship measured in decades. Our agreement with ICOMM was the first transfer of technology in small arms from the UAE to India, and more than 60 percent of each firearm is now produced there. This positions the UAE as a country that originates defence technology, not one that only consumes it. For a nation of our size, that is a considerable shift in both capability and standing.
CARACAL re-established CARACAL LIGHT AMMUNITION in 2025, bringing ammunition production back under your control. What does it mean for the end user when the same company builds both the firearm and the round?
A firearm and its ammunition are one system, though our industry has long treated them as two. Chamber pressure, bullet weight, and powder burn rate determine how a weapon cycles, how it wears, and how accurate it remains at distance. With both under one roof we can tune them against each other, instead of designing a rifle and hoping the available ammunition suits it. For the soldier, that shows up as consistency: the same point of impact and the same reliability, round after round. Bringing CARACAL LIGHT AMMUNITION back under our control in 2025 closed that loop, and it strengthened the UAE’s small-calibre ammunition supply at the same time.
Operation 300bn set out to build the UAE’s industrial base. As the first firearms manufacturer in the GCC, how do you measure CARACAL’s contribution to that national ambition?
I measure it three ways. First, sovereign supply. The UAE no longer depends on foreign approval to arm its own forces with small arms, and because our products sit outside the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, neither do the partners who buy from us. Second, in-country value. Every component we bring into local production and every supplier we qualify here deepens an industrial base that did not exist two decades ago. Third, and least visible, people. The engineers designing our newest systems grew up in a country with no firearms industry at all. Operation 300bn is usually discussed in figures; what it actually produces is capability that stays here.
With operational feedback becoming increasingly valuable throughout a product’s lifecycle, how important is dialogue with end users in driving meaningful innovation and continuous improvement?
It is the most valuable input we receive. A specification tells you what a weapon must achieve. End users tell you what it is actually like to carry, clean, and operate under pressure. The details that never appear in a tender document come from that dialogue: the gripping grooves on a magazine well that allow a soldier to change magazines in darkness, the patented ejection port cover that keeps sand away from the working parts. I spent almost two decades in this sector, including several years in uniform, and I know the difference between a weapon that performs on a range and one that performs on the third day of an operation. We build for the third day.
Finally, would you like to send any message through Al Jundi Journal to the defence community in general, or in the UAE in particular?
To the UAE defence community, I would say that sovereign capability is no longer an ambition here, it is a working reality. When CARACAL was founded in 2007, this region had no firearms manufacturing industry at all. Today, Emirati-designed weapons serve our own forces and compete on their merits in markets far beyond this region. That progress belongs to the UAE Armed Forces as much as to us, because their trust and their willingness to test us honestly made it possible. To the wider community, and particularly to young Emiratis weighing where to build a career, I would say that this industry now offers work of real national consequence. The people who will design the weapons our forces carry in 2040 are sitting in universities today, and we would very much like to meet them.
» Interviewed by AL JUNDI
