Turkish Air Force Prepares Initial Order of 50+ ANKA III Stealth Drones for Future Air Warfare
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Türkiye’s Air Force is expected to place an initial order exceeding 50 ANKA III stealth unmanned combat aerial vehicles in 2026, according to senior Turkish aerospace leadership. The move signals a shift from development into large-scale production planning as Ankara accelerates its military aviation programs.
Recent public statements by Dr. Mehmet Demiroğlu, Chief Executive Officer of Turkish Aerospace Industries, suggest that the ANKA III unmanned combat aerial vehicle has entered a decisive phase of maturity as Türkiye approaches what he described as an exceptionally demanding year for its national aerospace programmes in 2026. Speaking against the backdrop of a broad industrial mobilisation encompassing both manned and unmanned platforms, Dr. Demiroğlu indicated that the ANKA III programme has successfully completed its critical design review, that its configuration has now been frozen, and that production-related activities have already commenced. Within this context, he stated that the Turkish Air Force is expected to place an initial order exceeding 50 aircraft during 2026, signalling a transition from a design-driven development effort toward procurement planning, industrial execution, and long-term integration into the country’s future force structure.
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Türkiye’s Air Force is expected to place an order for more than 50 ANKA III stealth unmanned combat aircraft as Turkish Aerospace Industries moves the programme from finalized design into production planning ahead of an intense 2026 industrial cycle (Picture Source: TAI)
This timing is significant because it coincides with a shift in emphasis away from incremental air vehicle maturation toward operational availability, sustainment concepts and force-level integration. Dr. Demiroğlu’s remarks suggest that ANKA III is no longer being positioned primarily as an experimental UCAV, but as a system intended for sustained operational employment. While no procurement contract has yet been announced, an order of this scale would normally require early planning assumptions related to training pipelines, simulator infrastructure, spare provisioning, maintenance concepts and mission readiness cycles, all of which typically become central once a programme moves beyond limited evaluation.
Recent flight-test activity reinforces this transition. In December 2025, ANKA III completed its 46th system verification and identification sortie, during which critical autopilot functions were validated as part of its autonomous flight envelope, as reported by Army Recognition. These trials primarily address flight-control autonomy rather than mission-level decision-making, but they establish the technical foundation for higher-order autonomous behaviours such as cooperative tasking, adaptive routing and integration into networked air operations. As industrial ramp-up proceeds in parallel, analytical focus increasingly shifts toward sortie generation rates, mission-system reliability and resilience under contested electromagnetic conditions rather than isolated flight-test milestones.
The completion of the critical design review and subsequent design freeze marks a key programme-management inflection point. At this stage, major airframe and interface changes become exceptional, enabling stable production baselines, supplier commitments and tighter configuration control. Dr. Demiroğlu has stated that lessons learned from two existing prototypes informed the frozen configuration, while two additional aircraft incorporating the updated design are planned for 2026. This overlap between continued prototyping and serial-production preparation can shorten the path to initial fielding by accelerating industrial learning curves, but it also transfers risk toward software maturity. In UCAV programmes where mission systems, autonomy logic and sensor fusion dominate capability, disciplined post-freeze change control becomes critical to prevent late-discovered issues from driving costly retrofits across early production batches.
The programme’s development timeline contextualises this acceleration. Turkish Aerospace has stated that ANKA III was powered up in March 2023, conducted taxi tests in April 2023 and completed its maiden flight in December 2023 following structural assembly and systems installation earlier that year. The maiden flight included an automatic landing, underscoring that autonomy was embedded from the outset rather than treated as a later enhancement. This early design decision now underpins expansion into weapons bay operations, cooperative mission profiles and higher-confidence production standardisation.
Weapons integration provides a clearer indicator of operational intent than flight-test counts alone. ANKA III has demonstrated the release of precision-guided munitions under representative conditions, validating store separation, guidance initiation and mission-system timing. For a flying-wing UCAV oriented toward signature management, such tests are programmatically significant, particularly as the test campaign progresses from externally carried stores toward internal bay release. While these demonstrations confirm baseline compatibility, operational credibility will ultimately depend on reliable employment under manoeuvre, within degraded electromagnetic environments and in cooperative targeting scenarios, where sensor fusion latency and mission-system robustness become decisive.
The projected scale of the initial Turkish Air Force order further reinforces ANKA III’s positioning as a routine operational asset rather than a limited-use platform. A fleet exceeding 50 aircraft would normally support continuous readiness cycles and regular tasking rather than episodic deployment. Even in the absence of publicly disclosed basing or delivery schedules, such numbers imply integration into standing operational plans and national command-and-control architectures, rather than confinement to niche strike or ISR roles.
Industrial posture is being framed accordingly. Dr. Demiroğlu has described an “automotive-style” production approach intended to increase output while controlling costs, consistent with a programme targeting meaningful production volumes. Analytically, this approach favours early stabilisation of subassemblies and software baselines, placing pressure on the programme to define upgrade pathways that allow capability growth without disrupting production tempo or fragmenting fleet configurations. The decision to continue flying updated prototypes alongside serial-production preparation suggests an attempt to balance continued risk reduction with the industrial momentum required to meet a near-term procurement window.
Capability disclosures remain broadly consistent with this outlook. ANKA III is described as a jet-powered, flying-wing UCAV in the 6.5-tonne maximum take-off weight class, with endurance on the order of 10 hours, operating altitudes around 40,000 feet and high-subsonic performance. Payload capacity is generally cited between 1.2 and 1.6 tonnes, depending on configuration, supported by internal weapon bays complemented by external hardpoints. This architecture reflects a design philosophy in which survivability, payload mass and range are treated as adjustable variables, allowing mission planners to prioritise low-observable internal carriage in contested environments or higher payload flexibility when signature constraints are reduced.
Doctrinally, the platform is increasingly framed as more than a strike asset. ANKA III is presented with a layered mission-system architecture encompassing ISR functions through electro-optical, infrared and radar payloads, radar modes including synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indication, and a broad spectrum of electronic warfare capabilities. Concepts for deploying air-launched unmanned systems further reposition the platform within a force-multiplication role, in which it functions as a sensor carrier, communications relay and unmanned systems coordinator within distributed air operations.
Sensor development plans reinforce this trajectory. As reported by Army Recognition, ASELSAN is preparing the integration of its MURAD 100-A active electronically scanned array radar onto ANKA III, significantly expanding the platform’s mission envelope. MURAD is positioned as a multi-role AESA radar family capable of air-to-air surveillance, fire-control support, beyond-visual-range engagement support, and advanced air-to-ground modes including high-resolution synthetic aperture radar and moving target indication. Incorporating gallium nitride-based transmit-receive modules and digital beamforming, the radar enables agile beam steering and low-probability-of-intercept operation. From an analytical standpoint, integrating an AESA radar onto a low-observable UCAV introduces inherent trade-offs between emissions control and situational awareness, but it also enables selective emissions, cooperative sensing and greater autonomy in sensor tasking within networked formations.
Propulsion strategy reflects a pragmatic sequencing approach. The current ANKA III configuration relies on a foreign-supplied engine, reportedly of Ukrainian origin, which has not constrained programme timelines. In parallel, Türkiye continues to develop an indigenous alternative through TEI’s TF6000 turbofan programme. TEI has publicly displayed a first-produced TF6000 engine and presented it as a national turbofan solution in the thrust class relevant to unmanned combat aircraft. While no formal integration timeline for ANKA III has been announced, the availability of a domestic option provides both a sovereign fallback and a long-term growth path. Dr. Demiroğlu has emphasised that priority remains on fielding the single-engine ANKA III in production form rather than pursuing more complex twin-engine concepts, aligning with cost control, maintenance simplicity and fleet scalability during the initial operational phase.
If an operational fleet of more than 50 ANKA III aircraft is fielded alongside KAAN, the implications extend beyond platform numbers and into a structural shift in airpower employment. Analytically, such a force mix would enable Türkiye to move from individual manned–unmanned teaming experiments toward persistent manned–unmanned formations, where UCAVs are not attached ad hoc to crewed fighters but form standing force elements. In this construct, KAAN would function less as a traditional strike aircraft and more as a mission command node, managing sensor distribution, electronic warfare effects and weapons employment across multiple unmanned assets.
At scale, ANKA III could provide distributed sensor coverage, electronic attack capacity and strike mass, allowing KAAN formations to reduce exposure by operating at greater standoff distances or in higher-threat environments with reduced risk to pilots. Doctrinally, this supports concepts of saturation, decoying and asymmetric cost exchange, where relatively attritable unmanned platforms complicate adversary air-defence planning and force disproportionate expenditure of interceptors and sensor resources. The availability of dozens of ANKA III airframes would also enable rotational availability, surge capacity and sustained operations over extended periods, addressing one of the traditional limitations of low-density, high-end air assets.
From an operational perspective, the challenge will lie less in individual platform capability than in command-and-control resilience, rules of engagement for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the robustness of datalinks under electronic attack. A force structure built around dozens of networked UCAVs assumes persistent connectivity, degraded-mode operation and clearly defined human–machine authority boundaries. If these challenges are addressed, the combined KAAN–ANKA III construct would represent not merely an incremental capability improvement, but a doctrinal shift toward a distributed, network-centric air combat model aligned with emerging concepts of aerial warfare.
If the anticipated Turkish Air Force order materialises in 2026, ANKA III will move decisively from being evaluated as a promising air vehicle to being judged as a repeatable combat system. At that stage, production quality, mission-system reliability, sustainment design and integration into national and joint command-and-control networks will become the primary measures of success. The design freeze and start of production preparations, set against Dr. Demiroğlu’s description of an exceptionally intense year for Türkiye’s aerospace industry, suggest a deliberate effort to anchor ANKA III within a mature industrial, technical and doctrinal framework, where its value will be defined less by individual platform performance than by its contribution to a resilient, networked air combat force.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.
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Türkiye’s Air Force is expected to place an initial order exceeding 50 ANKA III stealth unmanned combat aerial vehicles in 2026, according to senior Turkish aerospace leadership. The move signals a shift from development into large-scale production planning as Ankara accelerates its military aviation programs.
Recent public statements by Dr. Mehmet Demiroğlu, Chief Executive Officer of Turkish Aerospace Industries, suggest that the ANKA III unmanned combat aerial vehicle has entered a decisive phase of maturity as Türkiye approaches what he described as an exceptionally demanding year for its national aerospace programmes in 2026. Speaking against the backdrop of a broad industrial mobilisation encompassing both manned and unmanned platforms, Dr. Demiroğlu indicated that the ANKA III programme has successfully completed its critical design review, that its configuration has now been frozen, and that production-related activities have already commenced. Within this context, he stated that the Turkish Air Force is expected to place an initial order exceeding 50 aircraft during 2026, signalling a transition from a design-driven development effort toward procurement planning, industrial execution, and long-term integration into the country’s future force structure.
Türkiye’s Air Force is expected to place an order for more than 50 ANKA III stealth unmanned combat aircraft as Turkish Aerospace Industries moves the programme from finalized design into production planning ahead of an intense 2026 industrial cycle (Picture Source: TAI)
This timing is significant because it coincides with a shift in emphasis away from incremental air vehicle maturation toward operational availability, sustainment concepts and force-level integration. Dr. Demiroğlu’s remarks suggest that ANKA III is no longer being positioned primarily as an experimental UCAV, but as a system intended for sustained operational employment. While no procurement contract has yet been announced, an order of this scale would normally require early planning assumptions related to training pipelines, simulator infrastructure, spare provisioning, maintenance concepts and mission readiness cycles, all of which typically become central once a programme moves beyond limited evaluation.
Recent flight-test activity reinforces this transition. In December 2025, ANKA III completed its 46th system verification and identification sortie, during which critical autopilot functions were validated as part of its autonomous flight envelope, as reported by Army Recognition. These trials primarily address flight-control autonomy rather than mission-level decision-making, but they establish the technical foundation for higher-order autonomous behaviours such as cooperative tasking, adaptive routing and integration into networked air operations. As industrial ramp-up proceeds in parallel, analytical focus increasingly shifts toward sortie generation rates, mission-system reliability and resilience under contested electromagnetic conditions rather than isolated flight-test milestones.
The completion of the critical design review and subsequent design freeze marks a key programme-management inflection point. At this stage, major airframe and interface changes become exceptional, enabling stable production baselines, supplier commitments and tighter configuration control. Dr. Demiroğlu has stated that lessons learned from two existing prototypes informed the frozen configuration, while two additional aircraft incorporating the updated design are planned for 2026. This overlap between continued prototyping and serial-production preparation can shorten the path to initial fielding by accelerating industrial learning curves, but it also transfers risk toward software maturity. In UCAV programmes where mission systems, autonomy logic and sensor fusion dominate capability, disciplined post-freeze change control becomes critical to prevent late-discovered issues from driving costly retrofits across early production batches.
The programme’s development timeline contextualises this acceleration. Turkish Aerospace has stated that ANKA III was powered up in March 2023, conducted taxi tests in April 2023 and completed its maiden flight in December 2023 following structural assembly and systems installation earlier that year. The maiden flight included an automatic landing, underscoring that autonomy was embedded from the outset rather than treated as a later enhancement. This early design decision now underpins expansion into weapons bay operations, cooperative mission profiles and higher-confidence production standardisation.
Weapons integration provides a clearer indicator of operational intent than flight-test counts alone. ANKA III has demonstrated the release of precision-guided munitions under representative conditions, validating store separation, guidance initiation and mission-system timing. For a flying-wing UCAV oriented toward signature management, such tests are programmatically significant, particularly as the test campaign progresses from externally carried stores toward internal bay release. While these demonstrations confirm baseline compatibility, operational credibility will ultimately depend on reliable employment under manoeuvre, within degraded electromagnetic environments and in cooperative targeting scenarios, where sensor fusion latency and mission-system robustness become decisive.
The projected scale of the initial Turkish Air Force order further reinforces ANKA III’s positioning as a routine operational asset rather than a limited-use platform. A fleet exceeding 50 aircraft would normally support continuous readiness cycles and regular tasking rather than episodic deployment. Even in the absence of publicly disclosed basing or delivery schedules, such numbers imply integration into standing operational plans and national command-and-control architectures, rather than confinement to niche strike or ISR roles.
Industrial posture is being framed accordingly. Dr. Demiroğlu has described an “automotive-style” production approach intended to increase output while controlling costs, consistent with a programme targeting meaningful production volumes. Analytically, this approach favours early stabilisation of subassemblies and software baselines, placing pressure on the programme to define upgrade pathways that allow capability growth without disrupting production tempo or fragmenting fleet configurations. The decision to continue flying updated prototypes alongside serial-production preparation suggests an attempt to balance continued risk reduction with the industrial momentum required to meet a near-term procurement window.
Capability disclosures remain broadly consistent with this outlook. ANKA III is described as a jet-powered, flying-wing UCAV in the 6.5-tonne maximum take-off weight class, with endurance on the order of 10 hours, operating altitudes around 40,000 feet and high-subsonic performance. Payload capacity is generally cited between 1.2 and 1.6 tonnes, depending on configuration, supported by internal weapon bays complemented by external hardpoints. This architecture reflects a design philosophy in which survivability, payload mass and range are treated as adjustable variables, allowing mission planners to prioritise low-observable internal carriage in contested environments or higher payload flexibility when signature constraints are reduced.
Doctrinally, the platform is increasingly framed as more than a strike asset. ANKA III is presented with a layered mission-system architecture encompassing ISR functions through electro-optical, infrared and radar payloads, radar modes including synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indication, and a broad spectrum of electronic warfare capabilities. Concepts for deploying air-launched unmanned systems further reposition the platform within a force-multiplication role, in which it functions as a sensor carrier, communications relay and unmanned systems coordinator within distributed air operations.
Sensor development plans reinforce this trajectory. As reported by Army Recognition, ASELSAN is preparing the integration of its MURAD 100-A active electronically scanned array radar onto ANKA III, significantly expanding the platform’s mission envelope. MURAD is positioned as a multi-role AESA radar family capable of air-to-air surveillance, fire-control support, beyond-visual-range engagement support, and advanced air-to-ground modes including high-resolution synthetic aperture radar and moving target indication. Incorporating gallium nitride-based transmit-receive modules and digital beamforming, the radar enables agile beam steering and low-probability-of-intercept operation. From an analytical standpoint, integrating an AESA radar onto a low-observable UCAV introduces inherent trade-offs between emissions control and situational awareness, but it also enables selective emissions, cooperative sensing and greater autonomy in sensor tasking within networked formations.
Propulsion strategy reflects a pragmatic sequencing approach. The current ANKA III configuration relies on a foreign-supplied engine, reportedly of Ukrainian origin, which has not constrained programme timelines. In parallel, Türkiye continues to develop an indigenous alternative through TEI’s TF6000 turbofan programme. TEI has publicly displayed a first-produced TF6000 engine and presented it as a national turbofan solution in the thrust class relevant to unmanned combat aircraft. While no formal integration timeline for ANKA III has been announced, the availability of a domestic option provides both a sovereign fallback and a long-term growth path. Dr. Demiroğlu has emphasised that priority remains on fielding the single-engine ANKA III in production form rather than pursuing more complex twin-engine concepts, aligning with cost control, maintenance simplicity and fleet scalability during the initial operational phase.
If an operational fleet of more than 50 ANKA III aircraft is fielded alongside KAAN, the implications extend beyond platform numbers and into a structural shift in airpower employment. Analytically, such a force mix would enable Türkiye to move from individual manned–unmanned teaming experiments toward persistent manned–unmanned formations, where UCAVs are not attached ad hoc to crewed fighters but form standing force elements. In this construct, KAAN would function less as a traditional strike aircraft and more as a mission command node, managing sensor distribution, electronic warfare effects and weapons employment across multiple unmanned assets.
At scale, ANKA III could provide distributed sensor coverage, electronic attack capacity and strike mass, allowing KAAN formations to reduce exposure by operating at greater standoff distances or in higher-threat environments with reduced risk to pilots. Doctrinally, this supports concepts of saturation, decoying and asymmetric cost exchange, where relatively attritable unmanned platforms complicate adversary air-defence planning and force disproportionate expenditure of interceptors and sensor resources. The availability of dozens of ANKA III airframes would also enable rotational availability, surge capacity and sustained operations over extended periods, addressing one of the traditional limitations of low-density, high-end air assets.
From an operational perspective, the challenge will lie less in individual platform capability than in command-and-control resilience, rules of engagement for autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the robustness of datalinks under electronic attack. A force structure built around dozens of networked UCAVs assumes persistent connectivity, degraded-mode operation and clearly defined human–machine authority boundaries. If these challenges are addressed, the combined KAAN–ANKA III construct would represent not merely an incremental capability improvement, but a doctrinal shift toward a distributed, network-centric air combat model aligned with emerging concepts of aerial warfare.
If the anticipated Turkish Air Force order materialises in 2026, ANKA III will move decisively from being evaluated as a promising air vehicle to being judged as a repeatable combat system. At that stage, production quality, mission-system reliability, sustainment design and integration into national and joint command-and-control networks will become the primary measures of success. The design freeze and start of production preparations, set against Dr. Demiroğlu’s description of an exceptionally intense year for Türkiye’s aerospace industry, suggest a deliberate effort to anchor ANKA III within a mature industrial, technical and doctrinal framework, where its value will be defined less by individual platform performance than by its contribution to a resilient, networked air combat force.
Written by Teoman S. Nicanci – Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group
Teoman S. Nicanci holds degrees in Political Science, Comparative and International Politics, and International Relations and Diplomacy from leading Belgian universities, with research focused on Russian strategic behavior, defense technology, and modern warfare. He is a defense analyst at Army Recognition, specializing in the global defense industry, military armament, and emerging defense technologies.
