A sleek aircraft with a wingspan of 12 meters and a relatively affordable seven-figure price tag, the Bayraktar earned a reputation for blowing up Russian tanks and artillery in the early weeks of the invasion. (Pronounced “bye-rack-tar” and means “standard carrier” in Turkish.) In Ukraine, the drone’s effectiveness made Bayraktar famous and inspired a hit song written by soldier-songwriter Taras Borovok. “Turns Russian bandits into ghosts: Bayraktar,” reads one of the lyrics. Money started pouring into Prytula’s campaign from all over the world. “Go Bayraktars,” one supporter in Poland commented on Twitter. “Come down!” one Australian donor tweeted, adding a GIF of a boxing kangaroo. In less than three days, Prytula surpassed his $15 million goal. Then something unexpected happened: the Turkish defense company that makes the TB2, Baykar Technology, announced that it would not accept the money. Instead, he was giving the drones to the Ukrainian armed forces for free. The company repeated the trick last month, giving away a drone to Ukraine instead of accepting cash raised by crowdfunders in Poland. Smart PR isn’t the only thing that distinguishes Baykar, which is run from Istanbul by two brothers, one of whom is married to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s youngest daughter. The company conducted its first armed strike test less than seven years ago. In 2021, it became Turkey’s top defense exporter, beating established industrial giants such as Aselsan and state-owned Turkish Aerospace Industries by selling $664 million worth of drones to foreign buyers, according to data from the Turkish Exporters’ Assembly. Bayraktar TB2 is at the heart of this success. As well as becoming a cultural icon in Turkey, it has proved popular with governments from Poland to Qatar. Aaron Stein, an American expert on Turkish foreign policy, called the TB2 “the Toyota Corolla of drones.” TB2 embodies a new phase in the era of drone warfare in which low-cost technology is becoming increasingly accessible to regimes that cannot afford the world’s most established weapons producers © Illustration by Saratta Chuengsatiansup The weapon has catapulted Turkey into the ranks of the world’s top drone powers, along with the US, Israel, Iran and China, and is the most significant result of a two-decade effort by Erdogan to promote a national defense industry. The Bayraktar brothers, who declined to be interviewed for this story, have become celebrities at home. Selçuk Bayraktar, the company’s second son and chief technology officer, has two million followers on both Twitter and Instagram. Every post he publishes generates hundreds of laudatory responses from fans. Tens of thousands more attend Teknofest, an annual bash run by the government and a foundation with close ties to Baykar, in which the president, his children and grandchildren don red bomber jackets and take part in what has become a celebration of Turkish defense industry. Even for some of Erdogan’s fiercest political opponents, the company’s success is a source of national pride. Erdogan, meanwhile, has used the weapon to crush an insurgency at home and flex his country’s military muscle abroad. Eager buyers of Baykar technology include Ethiopia, where Abiy Ahmed’s government used it to defeat Tigrayan forces in a brutal civil war last year, and Azerbaijan, which used it to crush the Armenian army in 2020. In addition to heralding Turkey’s preeminence in global defense, TB2 embodies a new phase in the era of drone warfare in which low-cost technology becomes increasingly accessible to regimes unable to purchase from the more established arms producers in the people. Bayraktar TB2 has a gently curved body, narrow wings and three small wheels. From a distance, the overwhelming impression on the inexperienced observer is one of lightness. Capable of staying in the air for up to 27 hours, the TB2 can fly at an altitude of 7,600 meters (25,000 feet) to conduct intelligence and surveillance missions. A built-in laser can mark a target and hit it with one of four laser-guided micro-missiles. It can’t fly as far or carry as heavy a load as higher-end drones like the $32 million US-made Reaper. But the TB2 has a unique advantage: its cost, which is likely about $5 million per aircraft, according to analysts. Military experts agree that the TB2 strikes a unique balance between price and performance. “It incorporates design and performance features of NATO standards,” says Arda Mevlütoğlu, an Ankara-based defense analyst. “It’s combat-proven in a variety of conflicts and operations, and it’s relatively inexpensive.” The cover of FT Weekend magazine, 27/28 August The origin of the drone can be traced to Akçay, a village on the edge of a sheer mountain range in southeastern Turkey. In the early 2000s, an engineer and amateur pilot named Özdemir Bayraktar visited the area with a local military commander. “He showed us the blood of the martyrs,” Bayraktar told Turkish newspaper Milliyet in 2010, speaking metaphorically of Turkish soldiers killed fighting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a leftist group that embraces Kurdish nationalism and fights a violence. campaign against the state since 1984. Bairaktar, who died last year aged 72, added: “I said we would do everything we could to help.” Soon his company turned from making auto parts to making weapons. Turkey bought its first unarmed drones from the UK and the US in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the years that followed, Ankara was told it could not acquire lethal drones, which were much more tightly controlled. , because Western allies were concerned about how they would be used, particularly in the conflict with the PKK. “Turkey is a proud nation, and that too [was] really insulting for us to hear this,” says İsmail Demir, head of Turkey’s defense procurement and export agency, which is also responsible for boosting domestic production. Demir’s office in Ankara is filled with Turkish-made model planes, helicopters and tanks. By the mid-2000s, drones had become a key component of international military conflict, border control and surveillance. Turkish companies began producing prototypes and jockeying for position as the state sought to launch a domestic defense industry. The Bayraktar family stood out with its rising history and appetite for self-promotion. In a 2005 video, a baby-faced Seljuk stands on a strip of tarmac, sleeves rolled up, addressing a group of military and officials after a demonstration of a mini-drone. He tells them: “If this project and others like it get support, then within five years we could be number one in the world.” Because it is a privately held company, the company’s financials are not publicly available. However, the number of people it employs – about 2,500 today, up from 800 two years ago – is an indication of its recent growth. After studying at Istanbul Technical University, Selçuk received a scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania and then at MIT, where he researched control systems for unmanned helicopters. At the same time, he was experimenting with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) prototypes for the family company. The first big breakthrough came in 2006, after the company won a government competition for the best small, hand-held drone. “It was very clear that he was really ahead of the game, compared to the others,” says the former official, who helped run the competition. Selçuk started a PhD at Georgia Tech but dropped out in 2007 to return to Turkey and work as Baykar’s CTO. His elder brother Haluk, an industrial engineer, would become CEO.

In 2014, the company delivered the first, unarmed TB2 to the Turkish armed forces under contract. Within two years, Turkey’s state-run news agency released videos, taken from the drones’ built-in cameras, showing strikes against PKK members. One of the earliest shows a dizzying cliff face on the Iraqi border before cutting to a puff of smoke. That’s when six PKK fighters were “neutralized,” the state news agency reported. The release of drone footage was a tactic that would be developed repeatedly over the next few years. Videos of Russian or Armenian military targets locked onto Bayraktar’s crosshairs and then detonated became a propaganda tool for Turkey’s armed forces and advertising to Bayraktar’s international clients. Bayraktar TB2’s appearance coincided with a particularly dark episode in Turkey’s conflict with the PKK, which has claimed an estimated 40,000 lives over the past four decades, most of them Kurdish. Erdogan, who had pursued a peace process with the militant group in the late 2000s and early 2010s, presided over its collapse as domestic politics and the war in neighboring Syria changed his calculations. The PKK is abhorred by the majority of the public in Turkey. After the ceasefire collapsed in 2015, cities in the country’s southeast were plunged into violent clashes between armed youth linked to the PKK and state security services. The group, designated by the US and the EU as a terrorist organization, responded with a wave of bombings across the country, killing…