There are few greater recent success stories in military UAVs than Turkey’s rapid transformation over the past twenty years into one of the world’s key suppliers, mirroring a huge advancement in the rest of its indigenous defence industry.
THE MAIN DRIVER of the success has been Baykar Defence, a well-connected Turkish defence company that specialises indrones.
Baykar started out in 1984 making automotive parts, switching to UAVs in the early 2000s in response to a Turkish government indigenisation programme after it was unable to acquire certain types of UAVs and UCAVs abroad. Over the years it has produced a range of UAVs, but by far its most well-known and popular has been the Bayraktar TB2, which has seen extensive use by Ukraine during Russia’s ongoing invasion, and before that in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In both cases, as well as in theatres like Libya, Nigeria and Syria, TB2s have demonstrated an ability to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance(ISR) missions and strike targets with precision-guided munitions despite hostile conditions.
Export success has been swift, with over 400 TB2sexported to more than twenty five countries since its first flight just eight years ago, making it one of the most prevalent types in service today. Of the twenty operators, eleven (Morocco, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Togo, Niger, Nigeria, and Mali)are in Africa. While Baykar has received by far the most orders, the TB2 is not the only Turkish UAV seeing export success in Africa and elsewhere:
‘South Africa was once a UAV powerhouse’
Turkish Aerospace Industries has sold a number of Anka UAVs to Algeria, Chad, and Tunisia. At one point it seemed like South Africa, once a UAV powerhouse of its own and an early leader in the technology, might dominate sales on the continent. However, its companies have received few military orders, and no substantial ones in recent years. Bear in mind though that when South Africa’s UAV development industry was at its peak, demand was almost non-existent.
Subsequent years of underfunding, underinvestment, and state capture, meant that once demand did pickup, companies like Denel Dynamics were not well positioned to compete. Even if companies like Denel Dynamics had been in a healthy state when the opportunity arose, they’d have found it difficult to match what companies like Baykar offer.
First, economies of scale and a careful approach t oindustrialisation and the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) parts have allowed Baykar to keep the cost of the TB2 low, at around US$5 million each for a standard model and reportedly as low as US$1million with certain capabilities removed. As a point of comparison, South Africa’s sale of Seeker IIs to Algeria in the late 1990s cost around US$2 million apiece, equivalent to around US$3.7 million today, for simpler aircraft that lacked weapons launch capability.
Baykar and by extension Turkey, have also shown a willingness to provide technology transfer and the linking of UAV sales to broader economic and financial packages, following a time-tested approach that’s also used by the major arms exporters like the US, EU, Russia, and China.
However, emerging market countries may sometimes consider it more in their interests to do such deals with other emerging market countries, such as Turkey, where the economic imbalance is less lopsided than with the world’s top-tier economies. None of this has occurred in a vacuum, of course.
At Ankara’s instruction, Turkish diplomats in Africa have put in years of persistent effort to build personal relationships in both business and political spheres and provide marketing, introductions, and support for Turkish industry, in particular defence companies like Baykar, Rocketsan, TAI, and Aselsan. This has paid dividends.
Just as importantly, Turkey also imposes few export restrictions and is less concerned with how their systems are used. For instance, in January 2022 the Ethiopian military reportedly used TB2s equipped with Rockets an MAM-L guided weapons as part of a strike on what turned out to be a camp for internally displaced people in Tigray, killing around 60 people categorised by the Washington Post as predominantly civilian. Despite the controversy both Turkey and Baykar refused to comment on or condemn the incident. This is a factor that should not be under estimated.
A number of other armed UAV manufacturers impose relatively stringent export controls with most governments understandably being cautious about providing this level of capability to governments that have questionable human rights records and may be indiscriminate in airstrikes. On top of this, the TB2s have a proven track record of relatively successful combat operations in nearly a dozen different countries, despite differing operator skill levels, force technology maturity levels, and availability of supporting assets, providing a level of confidence that few other types can match to forces struggling with funding challenges and shortages of personnel.
The supporting systems and training around these platforms have been honed over many years to allow even less technically advanced forces to be able to operate them with a reasonable level of success. They’re still realistically beyond the reach of a large number of forces, but the barrier to entry has lowered quite substantially over the past decade.
‘UAV strikes from high altitude’
It’s therefore unsurprising that Turkey has been making significant inroads into the African market for armed UAVs. Nor that so many African militaries have awoken to their potential, particularly against a wave of insurgent activity that has emerged in many parts of the continent along with the increasing cost of conventional combat aircraft.
Of course, it has not only been Turkey’s UAV manufacturers that have benefitted from this recent demand, or that have been well-placed to take advantage of it: Chinese manufacturers like CASC have had significant export success of armed UAVs to the continent as well.
However, Turkish sales still surprisingly exceed those and have happened in a relatively short time. And while the sales have, in most cases, provided much-needed capabilities to the African country that purchased them, they may also pose some risks and have potential implications for regional stability and security.
For instance, armed UAVs can at times expand the scope of insurgencies by encouraging much wider dispersion, more mobile operations, and basing in neighbouring countries to avoid detection and targeting. They can also encourage the use of force both inside and outside a customer country’s borders, both because the difficulty in detecting them means they can be used in a more deniable fashion, and because of their relatively low cost and uncrewed nature.
The essentially random nature of UAV strikes from high altitude also induces serious fear amongst civilians, which might drive them into providing further support for insurgencies. Especially if there have already been some strikes, intentional or unintentional, on civilians.
One thing is clear; this is merely the beginning. We can expect to see many more armed UAVs operated by African armed forces in the coming years, and it’s a fair bet that a large proportion will be Turkish.
