Türkiye's drone diplomacy — Soner Cagaptay on the Bayraktar export map
Soner Cagaptay at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has tracked the political dimension of Türkiye's drone export program since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. The Bayraktar TB2 has become a foreign-policy instrument as much as a weapons platform.
Key fact
Bayraktar TB2 export customers as of 2024: about 31 countries (Baykar; Cagaptay 2024 WINEP brief). Ukraine purchases since 2019: estimated 50+ units.
Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of *A Sultan in Autumn: Erdoğan Faces Turkey's Uncontainable Forces* (Bloomsbury, 2021), has been the most consistent Washington-based analyst of Turkish foreign and defense policy under the AKP. His 2023-2024 work on drone exports captures a structural shift in Türkiye's middle-power positioning.
Baykar Technology, founded in 1984 by Özdemir Bayraktar and now led by Selçuk Bayraktar — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's son-in-law since 2016 — developed the TB2 medium-altitude long-endurance armed drone over the 2010s. The TB2's combat debut in the September-November 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where TB2 strikes were decisive in Armenian armor losses, transformed the platform's export trajectory.
The export footprint by 2024 spans approximately 31 customer countries, including Ukraine (50-plus units pre- and post-2022), Poland, Romania, Pakistan, Qatar, Morocco, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Albania, and several sub-Saharan African states. The platform competes in a price-and-capability segment between the much more expensive US Reaper and the cheaper Chinese Wing Loong, with availability not gated by US export-control politics.
Cagaptay's analytical move is to read the export pattern as Turkish foreign policy by other means. TB2 sales to Ukraine before 2022 signaled positioning against Russia in the Black Sea. Sales to NATO members Poland and Romania normalized the platform within the alliance industrial base in ways that would have been politically impossible for purely commercial deals. Sales to North African and Sahel states extended Turkish influence into regions French and Emirati arms exporters had previously dominated.
The 2024-2025 question is whether Türkiye can move up the value chain. The Akıncı larger drone, the Kızılelma jet-powered unmanned combat aerial vehicle, and the Anka-3 are all in development. The bet, in Cagaptay's reading, is that Türkiye uses TB2 export success to bootstrap a domestic defense-industrial complex that no Middle Eastern power and few European powers have built. The political-economy constraint is the lira-zone macroeconomic instability that raises Baykar's input costs in dollar terms even as export revenue accrues in dollars.
Soner Cagaptay, senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of *A Sultan in Autumn: Erdoğan Faces Turkey's Uncontainable Forces* (I.B. Tauris, 2021), has produced the most consistent English-language tracking of Turkey's defence-industrial-export trajectory and its diplomatic implications. The Bayraktar TB2 and TB3 unmanned combat aerial vehicles, produced by Baykar (the company owned by President Erdoğan's son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar), have become the most visible Turkish export-defense platform and the most visible operational symbol of the Erdoğan-era reformulation of Turkish foreign policy.
The export map, as compiled from Turkish defence-industry trade-press reporting and from open-source intelligence tracking of confirmed user states, includes Azerbaijan (decisive use in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict), Ukraine (early-war combat use in 2022, before higher-end Russian air-defence assets degraded the platform's survivability), Ethiopia (use in the Tigray conflict in 2021-2022), Libya (use in the GNA-LNA conflict in 2019-2020), Morocco, Qatar, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, the Republic of the Congo, and a number of additional countries with smaller signed quantities or contracts at various stages. The aggregate user-state geography spans North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Sahel, and South Asia — a deliberate geographic distribution that matches the broader Turkish foreign-policy ambition.
The diplomatic-value-of-Bayraktar reading that Cagaptay develops is that the platform has produced a category of Turkish strategic relevance that the conventional defense-industrial export track did not produce. The Bayraktar is operationally meaningful at a price point and a transfer-complexity profile that suits buyer states which cannot access (for political or financial reasons) the comparable US, Israeli, or Chinese platforms. The diplomatic-export-linkage logic — that arms-supplier relationships create downstream political-diplomatic leverage — has worked in the Bayraktar case with particular clarity in the Azerbaijan-Turkey relationship, where the 2020 conflict outcomes produced a substantial deepening of the bilateral across multiple sectors (energy infrastructure, transportation corridors, broader political alignment).
The Ukraine deployment is the empirical case most often cited in evaluating the platform's combat utility. The Bayraktar TB2 performed effectively in the early weeks of the 2022 invasion against under-suppressed Russian air-defence positions, contributing to the disruption of Russian logistical convoys and the loss of multiple Russian high-value vehicles. As Russian electronic-warfare and air-defence assets adapted to the platform, the operational utility declined, and Ukrainian combat operations shifted toward lower-cost FPV drones and toward higher-end Western platforms. The Bayraktar's empirical record in Ukraine is therefore mixed — high-value early, less valuable in sustained operations against a peer-equipped adversary — but the political-marketing value of the early-war footage was substantial.
The institutional partners for the Bayraktar export track have evolved. The TB2's engine, sourced from Rotax in Austria, was the subject of an Austrian export-control decision in 2022 that constrained the platform's subsequent production. Baykar's response — accelerating the development of indigenous Turkish engines for both the TB2 and the larger Akıncı and Kızılelma platforms — has moved the company toward a more autonomous supply chain. The Kızılelma jet-powered unmanned combat aircraft, in development through 2024-2025, would represent the most ambitious step toward higher-end Turkish unmanned-combat capability that is not dependent on Western component supplies.
The forward-strategy reading is that Turkey under the Erdoğan administration has used defence-industrial export, with the Bayraktar as the leading platform, as one of the principal instruments of its broader foreign-policy reformulation. The export geography correlates with the geographic distribution of Turkish diplomatic ambition. Whether the post-Erdoğan Turkish state continues the same configuration is the structural political question. The platforms, the export relationships, and the diplomatic infrastructure are likely to persist past any specific leadership transition; the political doctrine that directs how they are used could shift more visibly.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.