An offshore patrol vessel is, as a rule, a modest thing: a hull built for endurance, a single medium gun, a job description that runs to fisheries protection and chasing smugglers. The United Arab Emirates has looked at that formula and, politely, ignored it.

New photographs of the UAE Navy’s Falaj 3 class, released this week, show a ship barely 60 metres long and displacing only about 670 tons that carries a weapons fit you would expect on a missile corvette three times its size. For its displacement, it may be the most heavily armed warship afloat anywhere in the world.

A patrol boat in name only

The numbers are what make it remarkable. The Falaj 3 is a little over 200 feet long, displaces roughly 670 tons at full load, and is run by a crew of just 39. Most vessels in that class carry a single gun and, if they are lucky, a shoulder-launched air-defence missile. The Falaj 3 carries a layered air-defence system, anti-ship missiles, counter-swarm rockets and modern electronic protection — the toolkit of a front-line combatant.

Forward sits a Leonardo 76 mm Super Rapid gun with the STRALES system, firing radio-command-guided DART rounds that can engage manoeuvring supersonic missiles and fast attack boats alike — and at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated interceptor. That cost logic matters: in the Gulf, expensive surface-to-air missiles are routinely spent on far cheaper drones.

Layer upon layer

Behind the gun, an eight-cell vertical launch system holds MBDA VL MICA surface-to-air missiles, able to reach out to roughly 12 miles and up to 30,000 feet. Further aft, a 21-cell launcher for the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile provides a second, independent layer of point defence — two full air-defence systems on a hull most navies would arm with almost nothing.

The offensive fit is just as serious: four MM40 Exocet Block 3C anti-ship missiles, with a reach of around 150 miles, plus two twelve-cell launchers for LOGIR guided rockets to swat down drones and uncrewed boats cheaply. Two 30 mm remote weapon stations and Rheinmetall MASS decoy launchers round out the close-in defence, all cued by a Leonardo Kronos 3D radar and a SPYNEL infrared search-and-track suite.

Why cram so much into so little

The logic is geographic. The Persian Gulf is a confined sea where combat happens at short range and under constant threat from missiles, drones, helicopters and swarms of fast boats. Concentrating maximum firepower into a small, comparatively cheap hull lets a navy field more shooters for the same money — a philosophy the Falaj 3 pushes about as far as it will go.

Built by Abu Dhabi Ship Building, part of the UAE’s Edge Group, and derived from Singapore’s Fearless-class patrol vessel, the lead ship Altaf was commissioned in February 2025. Edge is building eight more of the design for Kuwait. For anyone who still thinks of the patrol boat as the navy’s runabout, the Falaj 3 is a firm correction.

Footage from the launch of the first Falaj 3 gives a sense of the hull that carries all this hardware:

Sources: The War Zone, Edge Group, Janes, Naval News.