Ahmet IsiktekinerLast month, Türkiye’s defence sector achieved a spectacular feat. During a live test over the Black Sea, Baykar’s unmanned jet Kizilelma detected a fast aerial target using Aselsan’s Murad radar and launched a Tubitak Sage Gokdogan missile from beyond visual range. The missile hit.
Beyond the engagement itself, the significance lay in the chain behind it: an unmanned platform, a national radar and a national air-to-air missile operating within a single domestic architecture.
It marked a step toward an indigenous, autonomy-enabled air combat stack rather than isolated technological achievements.
And security experts are unanimous that the war in Ukraine changed the character of war.
It pushed defence companies to rethink how they work, what they build and how fast they can deliver it. The centre of gravity is shifting from slow, hardware-centric programmes to systems driven by software, autonomy and data.
Defence analyst Arda Mevlutoglu describes the direction of travel in simple terms.
“There are strong indications that military advantage is shifting from traditional platforms to software, autonomy and adaptable systems,” he tells TRT World.
“Superiority is increasingly determined by how fast a force can sense, decide, adapt and strike rather than by possessing the most exquisite platform.”
Uncrewed systems are not new. What is new is the maturity of enabling technologies and the scale of demand. Advances in artificial intelligence, sensors, communications, advanced materials and power management have turned autonomy from a niche add-on into a core design principle.
Associate professor Merve Seren of the Ankara-based Yildirim Beyazit University argues that Ukraine accelerated the shift by changing how militaries even define the category.
In the 1990s, she notes, unmanned systems entered service mainly as air platforms.
Today, she tells TRT World, “unmanned platforms should be seen as a family – spanning land, air and sea, including both surface and underwater systems that are being integrated rapidly and at scale.”
That matters because the change is no longer just about using drones on the battlefield. It is about doctrine. Seren says that earlier use of unmanned platforms did not necessarily create doctrinal transformation.
“Now the fast, intense and widespread use of unmanned systems has caused a doctrinal change in countries’ defence approaches,” she says, pointing to concepts that became central in Ukraine, including saturation attacks designed to exhaust air and missile defence, swarm tactics and the mass employment of FPV drones.
Mevlutoglu makes a similar point from an innovation and procurement angle. The real break, he argues, is the compression of innovation cycles and the diffusion of dual-use technology.
“Start-ups, commercial technologies and autonomy-enabled systems can now deliver meaningful combat impact at a fraction of the cost and time associated with traditional defence procurement,” he says.
The Ukraine shift
Ukraine highlighted this dynamic by turning frontline feedback into rapid adaptation, sometimes in weeks, as explosive-equipped FPV drones, AI-supported target identification and improved loitering munitions altered battlefield conditions faster than many legacy modernisation plans could match.
In policy circles, this broader shift is often grouped under the label deep tech. The term covers AI and data, robotics and autonomous systems, advanced materials and manufacturing, space, new energy systems, microelectronics and quantum technologies, among others.
These fields demand serious engineering and carry uncertain timelines, but once they mature, they scale quickly and can overturn established markets. In defence, that means the edge is no longer only about upgrading legacy systems.
It is about creating new capabilities altogether, then integrating them into networks that link land, sea, air, space and cyber into a single data-rich battlespace.
Governments have internalised the logic. The US created the Defense Innovation Unit in 2015 to pull commercial technology into defence programmes at commercial speeds.
NATO launched DIANA to draw startups toward defence problems. What used to be an exception is becoming a baseline expectation.
Mevlutoglu describes the strategic implication as a competition between systems, not just platforms.
“The Ukraine war has made visible that conflicts are now contests between innovation systems,” he says. “Those who can iterate fastest, integrate autonomy and deploy software-defined capabilities gain disproportionate advantage.”
The most visible face of this shift is the rise of companies that were built around autonomy and software from day one.
This shift is also reflected in a growing number of cross-company partnerships and joint initiatives.
Ukraine sits at the centre of this story as both laboratory and warning sign. It is a proof of concept for how cheap drones, autonomy and battlefield networking can change operational tempo.
It is also a warning about how quickly a battlefield can become saturated with low-cost attritable systems that force constant adaptation.
Seren points to the maritime dimension as a clear illustration of why the family concept matters.
She says the damage inflicted on the Russian navy shows “the destruction that unmanned maritime vehicles can cause,” while underwater unmanned platforms are becoming even more challenging because the subsurface domain is “a much more grey area” than the surface or the air.
Seren also argues that the other major trend is not only unmanned systems but the autonomisation of war through AI and data-driven processes.
“It is necessary not to think of AI algorithms only as elements integrated into unmanned aerial vehicles,” she says.
“In Ukraine, AI is being used across intelligence analysis and fusion, threat identification, pattern detection, prioritisation and decision support.”
The problem is no longer simply collecting data. It is turning an overwhelming flow of sensor feeds and social media content into actionable intelligence.
“Big data is not only hard to collect,” she says, “it is harder to classify, evaluate and analyse,” which is why AI systems are becoming difficult to separate from battlefield effectiveness.
How Türkiye moved ahead
For much of its modern history, Türkiye often encountered new military technologies after they had become routine elsewhere. Critical systems were imported.
Export licenses were uncertain. Embargoes and programme exclusions repeatedly reminded Ankara that key capabilities could be switched off by foreign capitals.
That kept procurement reactive and tied modernisation cycles to decisions made outside the country.
That pattern has now broken. What began as an attempt to reduce vulnerability turned into a shift in how Türkiye designs, tests and fields military technology.
Two pressures converged. Operational demands along its borders required faster and more adaptable systems.
Export restrictions made clear that waiting for foreign suppliers would not support long-term strategic needs. The response was not an incremental adjustment.
It was a decision to build a full unmanned aviation ecosystem.
Established players moved to match the new tempo. Aselsan, Havelsan, Roketsan and Turkish Aerospace Industries, Inc. (TAI) created new units, absorbed startups and expanded work on software-centric systems.
Alongside them, the centre of gravity in unmanned systems shifted toward Baykar. Its early work did not draw global attention, yet it marked a fundamental change in direction.
The small reconnaissance drone developed in 2005 proved autonomous flight and showed that Türkiye could design such systems rather than depend on foreign suppliers.
Within a few years, the Bayraktar mini UAV was flying missions and the TB2, TB3 and Akinci followed, expanding Türkiye’s reach from tactical surveillance to long endurance and high altitude strike.
Mevlutoglu argues that Türkiye’s ecosystem now matches the requirements set that define competitive advantage in contemporary warfare.
He points to “rapid feedback loops between frontline units and industry, strong doctrine industry synchronisation and the ability to translate operational needs into deployable systems quickly.”
“The Turkish case illustrates a mature and responsive innovation system,” he says, adding that the ability to evolve doctrine and hardware together rather than sequentially accelerates innovation.
He also argues that Türkiye has demonstrated the capacity to generate asymmetric effects through agile, software-driven systems, reducing the disadvantage created by the high cost and long timelines of major platform development.
This is where the Baykar story becomes more than a company profile. In Mevlutoglu’s view, Türkiye’s Baykar-driven autonomy and software-centric model resembles the approach of Anduril or Shield AI, even if the context is different.
“Türkiye’s innovation strength lies in rapid iteration, tight coupling between doctrine and industry, fast prototyping and the ability to incorporate frontline feedback into deployable systems,” he says.
Seren places last month’s success within a broader trajectory. She argues that rising munition lethality, directed energy trends and higher altitude unmanned platforms are pushing the concept beyond reconnaissance and limited strike roles toward unmanned combat aircraft.
Pointing to the Kizilelma test, she says it demonstrated the ability to detect an aerial target and conduct an air-to-air engagement, a capability that many had expected to see later.
Similar efforts are underway in several countries. Australia, working closely with the US, is advancing the MQ-28A Ghost Bat as a collaborative combat aircraft.
The platform recently conducted a live air-to-air missile engagement while operating alongside a crewed early warning aircraft, marking an important step for the CCA concept.
Yet the comparison also highlights where Türkiye currently stands in this race.
While programmes such as the MQ-28A rely on a heavily allied framework and externally sourced sensors and weapons, Türkiye’s Kizilelma test demonstrated an unmanned air-to-air engagement built on a fully national chain.
The platform, radar, missile and integration software were all developed domestically.
This places Türkiye not merely among countries experimenting with unmanned air combat, but among the small group already field-testing sovereign, end-to-end unmanned fighter capabilities.
Taken together, these cases show that the shift toward software-driven and autonomous warfare is no longer theoretical.
While the war in Ukraine accelerated this transition, countries have responded at different levels of depth and speed.
Türkiye’s experience stands out for its ability to integrate platforms, sensors and weapons within a single national framework and move quickly from testing to operational relevance.
In a defence environment shaped by rapid iteration and system-level integration, this places Türkiye among the more advanced actors rather than those still adapting to the change.
