In the defense of Ukraine, the drone designer Selçuk Bayraktar has become a legend. He is the namesake of a baby lemur at the Kyiv zoo, and the subject of a catchy folk song, which claims that his drone “makes ghosts out of Russian bandits.”
A video posted toward the end of February on the Facebook page of Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, showed grainy aerial footage of a Russian military convoy approaching the city of Kherson. Russia had invaded Ukraine several days earlier, and Kherson, a shipbuilding hub at the mouth of the Dnieper River, was an important strategic site.
I spoke with Bayraktar in March, via video. He was in Istanbul, at the headquarters of his company, Baykar Technologies, which employs more than two thousand people. When I asked him about the use of his drones in Ukraine, he told me, “They’re doing what they’re supposed to do—taking out some of the most advanced air-defense systems and armored vehicles in the world.” Bayraktar, who is forty-two years old, has a widow’s peak, soft eyes, and a slightly off-center nose.
Bayraktar and his family live on Baykar’s grounds, which he compared to a university campus, with sports facilities and a park that he called “bigger than Google’s.” While we spoke, his mother, Canan; Sümeyye; and the couple’s four-year-old daughter, also named Canan, were eating dinner in an adjacent room. Bayraktar told me that he was one of the oldest engineers at Baykar, and that many of the firm’s programmers are women. “My software side comes from my mother,” he said.
Özdemir set out to secure government support for Selçuk’s drones. Özdemir was friendly with Necmettin Erbakan, an Islamic nationalist and a vitriolic critic of Western culture. Turkey had been a secular republic since the nineteen-twenties, but Erbakan, a professor of mechanical engineering, believed that by investing in industry and grooming technological talent the country could become a prosperous Islamic nation.
In December, 2015, Bayraktar oversaw the first tests of the TB2’s precision-strike capability. Using a laser to guide dummy bombs, the drone was able to strike a target the size of a picnic blanket from five miles away. By April, 2016, the TB2 was delivering live munitions. The earliest targets were the P.K.K.—drone strikes have killed at least twenty of the organization’s leaders, along with whoever was standing near them. The strikes also taught Bayraktar to fight for the airwaves.
Bayraktar’s older brother, Haluk, is the C.E.O. of Baykar Technologies; Selçuk is the C.T.O. and the chairman of the board. In addition to being used in Ukraine and Azerbaijan, TB2s have been deployed by the governments of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Qatar, Libya, Morocco, and Poland. When I spoke with Bayraktar, Baykar had just completed a sales call in East Asia, marketing its forthcoming TB3 drone, which can be launched from a boat.
Much of the drones’ battlefield experience has come against Russian equipment. Russia and Turkey have a complicated relationship: Russia is a key trading partner for Turkey, Turkey is a popular holiday destination for Russian tourists, and Russia is overseeing the construction of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, which, when completed, will supply a tenth of the country’s electricity. In 2017, Turkey angered its allies inwhen it bought a Russian missile system, triggering U.S. sanctions.
Bayraktar’s TB2 drones fly slowly, and their propellers should be easy to locate. But in Nagorno-Karabakh the drones seemed to evade enemy reconnaissance, either through radar jamming or through technical incompetence. “A striking feature of the video clips was the utter helplessness of the doomed systems,” the Israeli missile expert Uzi Rubin wrote, after reviewing Azerbaijani footage of precision air strikes.
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