Explosions in Armenia, broadcast on YouTube in 2020, revealed this new form of conflict to the world. There, in a blue-tinted video, a radar dish spins beneath cyan crosshairs till it erupts right into a cloud of smoke. The motion repeats twice: a crosshair targets a automobile mounted with a spinning dish sensor, its earthen boundaries no protection towards aerial assault, leaving an empty crater behind.
The clip, launched on YouTube on September 27, 2020, was one in every of many the Azerbaijan navy printed throughout the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, which it launched towards neighboring Armenia that very same day. The video was recorded by the TB2.
It encompasses all of the horrors of conflict, with the added voyeurism of an unblinking digicam.
In that battle and others, the TB2 has crammed a void within the arms market created by the US authorities’s refusal to export its high-end Predator household of drones. To get round export restrictions on drone fashions and different vital navy applied sciences, Baykar turned to applied sciences available on the business market to make a brand new weapon of conflict.
The TB2 is in-built Turkey from a mixture of domestically made components and components sourced from worldwide business markets. Investigations of downed Bayraktars have revealed parts sourced from US firms, together with a GPS receiver made by Trimble, an airborne modem/transceiver made by Viasat, and a Garmin GNC 255 navigation radio. Garmin, which makes client GPS merchandise, launched a press release noting that its navigation unit present in TB2s “is not designed or intended for military use, and it is not even designed or intended for use in drones.” But it’s there.
Commercial expertise makes the TB2 interesting for one more purpose: whereas the US-made Reaper drone prices $28 million, the TB2 solely prices about $5 million. Since its improvement in 2014, the TB2 has proven up in conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine. The drone is a lot extra reasonably priced than conventional weaponry that Lithuanians have run crowdfunding campaigns to assist purchase them for Ukrainian forces.
The TB2 is only one of a number of examples of economic drone expertise being utilized in fight. The identical DJI Mavic quadcopters that assist actual property brokers survey property have been deployed in conflicts in Burkina Faso and the Donbas area of Ukraine. Other DJI drone fashions have been noticed in Syria since 2013, and kit-built drones, assembled from commercially out there components, have seen widespread use.