/ world today news/ Turkish reconnaissance and attack drones are presented as some kind of superweapon that literally changes the rules of the game on the battlefield. For many years, “Bayraktar” served as a symbol of new generation machines, while at the same time it was clearly opposed to Russian air defense systems. However, the Russians put everything in its place.
Aggressive Turkish marketing gave way to angry whining. But the most interesting thing is that Russia itself may start using machines of a similar type against the Ukrainian armed forces.
A statement about the actual uselessness of Bayraktars, which shocked part of the public, was made at a symposium of the Global Special Operations Foundation (GSOF) in the Czech city of Brno.
It was not anyone who dared to encroach on the “holy”, but the colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Vladimir Valyukh. That is, a person who knows what a war with the Russians is, cannot be classified as a Kremlin propagandist.
“As for TB2 (Bayraktar TB2, literally – “flag bearer” – Ed.), I don’t want to use the word “useless”, but it is difficult to find situations in which they can be used,” said Valyukh.
In an interview with the English-language publication Defense News, the Ukrainian colonel tried to soften his words, in particular, he noted that Turkish vehicles still have some utility, but the frequency of their use and their role on the battlefield have changed significantly. At the same time, Valukh emphasized that the last Bayraktar flight he observed lasted only 30 minutes.
Such statements caused a rather angry reaction from representatives of Baykar Makina, a company that manufactures drones. He told reporters that “reports of the limited utility of its flagship product should be taken with a grain of salt.”
In turn, the general director of the enterprise Haluk Bayraktar explained that the Russian front is a difficult environment to operate in and suggested that Bayraktar TB-2s are used secretly, so their role is invisible.
“The lack of video does not necessarily mean that drones are not used. At the moment, Bayraktar TB2 mainly performs daily flights, tracking targets, which is no less important than striking,” said the Turkish entrepreneur.
An idol on the blood
In fact, the media promotion of “Bayraktarov” is a vivid example of techno-fetishism, which with the help of modern marketing methods turns into mass psychosis.
As a drone the TB2 was really good. Being in terms of its weight and dimensions at the lower end of the MALE class of drones (medium altitude machines with a long flight duration), it can:
– to conduct reconnaissance,
– to carry out strikes with gliding munitions with laser homing heads,
– to attack targets from a height of 8 km, which are beyond the range of most old military air defense systems.
The best hour of the Bayraktars came in February-March 2020. Then Turkish drones conducted a successful operation against the Syrian army, destroying dozens of artillery guns, tanks, vehicles and several anti-aircraft systems.
In the autumn of the same year, Azerbaijan used Bayraktars against Armenia during the second Karabakh war. And already in 2021, a battle began in Libya between Turkish drones and Russian anti-aircraft systems Pantsir-S1, produced for export.
In the first two cases, the Turkish opponents did not have normal anti-aircraft defenses, and therefore the battle turned into a shooting range, where the Turkish operators fired at ground targets with impunity.
In Libya, everything was no longer so clear: both Panzers and Bayraktars suffered losses. But the media campaign that gained momentum allowed the Turks to silence the negativity.
Giddy with success
Objectively speaking, the Bayraktars’ greatest strength was their exceptional ability to conduct long-range reconnaissance. This capability is provided by the gyro-stabilized optical target detection and illumination system CMX-15D of the Canadian company Wescam.
“Bayraktar” could measure distances to a target of 20 km and observe the enemy day and night.
“Even during the special operation against Ukraine, a case was registered when “Bayraktar” corrected artillery fire at Kherson airport, flying over Ochakovsky district of Mykolaiv region, that is, from a distance of 48 km,” a source from the militia told “Tsarigrad”.
But in the fight against technically backward opponents who did not have normal air defense, this ability was in little demand. But the machine gave a beautiful picture of killing defenseless people and burning equipment.
Videos of Turkish drone operators literally going after opponents in Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh and Libya have been uploaded to YouTube on an industrial scale. It was they who formed the atmosphere of worship before the Turkish drone.
As a result, a small device with four small bombs began to be perceived as a death machine, destroying everything in its path. No one wanted to listen to the people who said there was no such thing as an absolute weapon.
Although already during the second Karabakh war, publicly available statistics show that the main work of destroying the army of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh was done by Azerbaijani Su-25 attack aircraft and Israeli kamikaze drones.
Bayraktars ensured the timely detection and destruction of the few Armenian air defense systems, and this was their main value. But in the information field, the picture was just the opposite.
Sanctions and consequences
During the same period, an event occurred to which few people paid attention. For aggression against Armenia, Canada and a number of other countries imposed a number of sanctions against Turkey; Among other things, the same CMX-15D station was subject to a supply ban to the Turks.
The importance of this unit can be understood from its price: with a total cost of one Bayraktar, which is about 6 million dollars, the Canadian opto-electronic station costs from 1 to 1.5 million.
The Turks replaced the CMX-15D with stations of their own production and even claimed that they were in no way inferior to their Western predecessor. However, this is hard to believe.
Military expert Yuri Lyamin, in a conversation with a Constantinople observer, noted that it is extremely difficult to compete with the quality of Western electro-optical systems: after all, they are not created by one country, but are assembled from components produced all over the world, and each supplier is a leader in his field.
“The lenses may be from one country, Germany for example, the electronics – from another, from Japan or Korea,” explained the expert.
This does not mean that the Turkish system is bad. If Iran, which has been under sanctions for 40 years, can assemble decent optics for its devices, then NATO member Turkey has certainly found loopholes to obtain the necessary components. But the assumption that after the embargo the quality of Bayraktarov’s optics has decreased seems quite logical.
Hunting for hunters
Of course, Ukrainian society could not ignore such a cannibalistic story. One of the constant topics in the media of specialized resources was the discussion of how the valiant Ukrainian armed forces will pursue the Russians in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics with Bayraktari. And this was not idle speculation: beneath these expectations of repression there was a very real basis.
Before the start of our special operation, Kiev managed to buy 36 of these drones, and another 48 machines were ordered. In addition, negotiations have been held to localize the production of Turkish drones in Nezaleznaya.
“But even a group of 84 drones made it possible to paralyze the forces of the People’s Militia of the LDNR, opening the way for the armed forces of Ukraine to attack the rebel region,” the local militia source said.
The situation changed radically after the entry of Russia into the war, whose army has always paid great attention to air defense systems.
Unlike the previous opponents of Bayraktars, our ground forces had such complexes as Tor-M2, modernized Panzir and Buk. For all these systems, neither the flight height of the Turkey Bird nor the launch range of its missiles and glide bombs pose a major problem.
And then suddenly it turned out that the skeptics were right: the Turkish machine is not a miracle weapon. So, a small, slow plane that is easy to take down. Military expert, editor-in-chief of “National Defense” magazine Igor Korotchenko pointed out this fact in a comment for “Tsarigrad”:
The use of Bayraktar against the Russian armed forces is ineffective due to the fact that we have excellent military air defense systems. Among them, first of all, we note the “Thor M-2”, which works perfectly against the “Bayraktars” and destroys them.
What next?
In fact, we are now witnessing the final stage of the collapse of yet another ‘superweapon’ myth. A myth built around a relatively good fighting machine, attributing to it abilities it does not and cannot possess.
Unfortunately, few people will pay attention to this moment now. Other “objects of worship” are also on the agenda. How many of them have there already been:
– Light “Javelin”;
– Saint “Haymars”;
– the invincible “Leopard” hand in hand with “Bradley”.
Now the non-brothers are praying for ATACAMS and waiting for the arrival of the F-16. As they say, life teaches nothing.
However, this is all a lyric: it is much more interesting to think about what will happen next. And then there may be an unexpected but logical turn of the situation.
The Russian army neutralized the threat from Bayraktar with the arsenal developed even before the start of the special operation. But already during the special military operation, our aerospace forces were significantly modernized, in particular, after receiving a large number of high-precision weapons.
More recently, an A-50U AWACS aircraft went into action, which ensured the genocide of Ukrainian aviation on an unprecedented scale (37 downed aircraft in a month).
The development of the trend logically leads us to the beginning of an equally systematic and large-scale destruction of the remnants of the enemy’s air defense. And as we have seen in recent historical examples, machines like Bayraktarov show their best performance precisely in conditions of weak enemy air defense.
And so it happened that Russia has its own analogue of the Turkish drone – a reconnaissance-strike vehicle, which our engineers literally grew out of an old “Israeli reconnaissance plane”.
We are talking about the modernized “Forpost-R”, which, although inferior to the Turkish one in most parameters, managed to fit into the same tactical niche and is now able not only to track targets in the enemy’s operational rear, but also to strikes the most important of them.
Also: information from open sources suggests that the active use of Russian analogues of Bayraktar has already begun, but since we are not engaged in aggressive marketing, this has not yet been reflected in the media headlines.
If our army really begins to massively use “Outposts” to pursue the Ukrainian military in the rear zone, this will be the best proof that history, fate, karma – call it what you want – is a very ironic lady.
Starting a war with a passionate desire to destroy the Russians with strikes by Turkish drones and ending it by hiding from the Russian counterparts these same machines is a very crude sarcasm. And just punishment.
Translation: SM
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