Spurred on in the early 2000s by the growing international unmanned market, Turkey developed an indigenous drone industr y and has become a significant UAV player. Richard Thomas reports
The Bayraktar platform, seen here in its prototype form, has been widely distributed among Turkey’s armed forces
Baykar
Turkish Aerospace Industries’ Anka drone family provides the country’s armed forces with a significant MALE surveillance and strike capability
Babak Taghvaee
The history of Turkey’s rise as a verifiable developer and exporter of unmanned aerial systems can be charted back to attempts to acquire US and Israeli aircraft in the mid- to late-2000s – efforts that, for a number of reasons, purportedly did not meet Ankara’s hopes or intentions.
Long considered the premier suppliers of military unmanned solutions, the US and Israel had snatched a considerable share of the global market for such systems, a situation that Turkey, as with many countries at the time, had no choice but to engage in.
