The Turkish Bayraktar TB2: Ankara’s Renewed Prominence in the Drone Market
The Turkish Bayraktar TB2 is becoming a bestseller on the unmanned combat aerial vehicles’ market, increasing Turkey’s defence industry’s already strong confidence. At the beginning of this month, an €8 million contract between Albania and the Turkish consortium Kale-Baykar was made public (Malyasov, 2021), following agreements signed by the company with Poland, Qatar, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Morocco (Brownsword, 2021). Turkey is slowly catching up to the United States and Israel as the world’s leading seller of surveillance drones by producing and exporting its own indigenous systems. At the moment, a TB2 variant and the Akinci drone are being developed in a joint effort by Turkey and Ukraine, and a MALE-drone is being co-produced with two Saudi manufacturers (Brownsword, 2021). The Turkish combat drone has revealed to be a first choice for countries with smaller budgets and limited airpower capabilities like Azerbaijan and Albania. The more affordable and very efficient Bayraktar TB2 allows these countries to modernise their armies.