Turkey going full speed ahead with ambitious drone projects
The Turkish defense industry continues intensive work to develop long-range armed drones and cruise missiles, seeking to gain preemptive strike capability to eliminate threats at their source.
Turkey has successfully test-fired its first cruise missile with a warhead capable of penetrating a concrete bunker. The SOM-B2 test is part of Ankara's efforts to develop a self-sufficient defense industry and decrease Turkey's dependence on foreign arms producers.
Also part of that effort — though it might seem counterintuitive — Turkey's leading drone producer, Baykar Makina, is teaming up with Ukrainian company Ukrspecexport on Turkey's twin-engine, high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) drone called Akinci (Raider).
Baykar Makina is owned by the family of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's son-in-law, Selcuk Bayraktar, who is the chief technical officer. The company makes TB2 drones, which have been in active use in counterterror operations for three years in Turkey and Iraq, and for reconnaissance and surveillance in the Aegean Sea, Eastern Mediterranean and northern Syria.
With the TB2, Turkey became the sixth country in the world — after the United States, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan and Iran — to field an operational drone. As of July, the TB2 — a medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) drone — had completed 100,000 operational flight hours by July. The first exports of the TB2 were to Qatar, followed by Ukraine.
