22 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
ANNALSOFWA R
WEAPON OF INFLUENCE
A new drone has changed the nature of warfare and enabled Turkey’s rise.BYSTEPHENWITT
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 mil-
itary convoy approaching the city of
Kherson. Russia had invaded Ukraine
several days earlier, and Kherson, a ship-
building hub at the mouth of the
Dnieper River, was an important stra-
tegic site. At the center of the screen, a
targeting system locked onto a vehicle
in the middle of the convoy; seconds
later, the vehicle exploded, and a tower
of burning fuel rose into the sky. “Be-
hold the work of our life-giving Bayrak-
tar!” Zaluzhnyi’s translated caption read.
“Welcome to Hell!”
The Bayraktar TB2 is a flat, gray un-
manned aerial vehicle (U.A.V.), with an-
gled wings and a rear propeller. It car-
ries laser-guided bombs and is small
enough to be carried in a flatbed truck,
and costs a fraction of similar American
and Israeli drones. Its designer, Selçuk
Bayraktar, the son of a Turkish auto-parts
entrepreneur, is one of the world’s lead-
ing weapons manufacturers. In the de-
fense of Ukraine, Bayraktar has become
a legend, 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.”
In April, 2016, the TB2 scored its
first confirmed kill. Since then, it has
been sold to at least thirteen countries,bringing the tactic of the precision air
strike to the developing world and re-
versing the course of several wars. In
2020, in the conflict between Azerbai-
jan and Armenia over the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s dic-
tatorial leader, Ilham Aliyev, used the
TB2 to target vehicles and troops, then
displayed footage of the strikes on dig-
ital billboards in the capital city of Baku.
The TB2 has now carried out more
than eight hundred strikes, in conflicts
from North Africa to the Caucasus.
The bombs it carries can adjust their
trajectories in midair, and are so accu-
rate that they can be delivered into an
infantry trench. Military analysts had
previously assumed that slow, low-flying
drones would be of little use in conven-
tional combat, but the TB2 can take
out the anti-aircraft systems that are
designed to destroy it. “This enabled a
fairly significant operational revolution
in how wars are being fought right now,”
Rich Outzen, a former State Depart-
ment specialist on Turkey, told me. “This
probably happens once every thirty or
forty years.”
I spoke with Bayraktar in March, via
video. He was in Istanbul, at the head-
quarters of his company, Baykar Tech-
nologies, 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.” Bayrak-
tar, who is forty-two years old, has a wid-
ow’s peak, soft eyes, and a slightly off-
center nose. He was f lanked by scale
models of new drones, mounted on clear
plastic stands, which he displayed to me
with the unconcealed pride of an avia-
tion geek. “Any U.A.V. built today to fly,
I pilot it myself, because I, like, love it,”
he told me. Bayraktar, who has more
than two million Twitter followers, uses
his account to promote youth-education
initiatives, celebrate Turkish martyrs, and
post pictures of new aircraft designs.
“Some people here consider him like
Elon Musk,” Federico Donelli, an in-
ternational-relations researcher at the
University of Genoa, told me.
In May, 2016, Bayraktar married
Sümeyye Erdoğan, the youngest daugh-
ter of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s
President. Erdoğan is the leader of aILLUSTRATION BY TODD ST. JOHNIn Ukraine, Selçuk Bayraktar, the drone’s inventor, has become a folk hero.