Explosions in Armenia, broadcast on YouTube in 2020, revealed this new form of struggle 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 in opposition to aerial assault, leaving an empty crater behind.
The clip, launched on YouTube on September 27, 2020, was one in every of many the Azerbaijan army revealed throughout the Second Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, which it launched in opposition to neighboring Armenia that very same day. The video was recorded by the TB2.
It encompasses all of the horrors of struggle, 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 essential army applied sciences, Baykar turned to applied sciences available on the business market to make a brand new weapon of struggle.
The TB2 is inbuilt Turkey from a mixture of domestically made elements and elements sourced from worldwide business markets. Investigations of downed Bayraktars have revealed parts sourced from US corporations, 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 shopper GPS merchandise, launched a press release noting that its navigation unit present in TB2s “is just not designed or meant for army use, and it’s not even designed or meant to be used in drones.” However it’s there.
Business expertise makes the TB2 interesting for an additional purpose: whereas the US-made Reaper drone prices $28 million, the TB2 solely prices about $5 million. Since its growth in 2014, the TB2 has proven up in conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine. The drone is a lot extra inexpensive 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. Different DJI drone fashions have been noticed in Syria since 2013, and kit-built drones, assembled from commercially accessible elements, have seen widespread use.
