Military Innovation and Limited Strategic Autonomy in Middle Powers: an Analysis of Türki̇ye’s Uav/ucav Capacity
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the security-related, institutional, and technological conditions under which Türkiye’s UAV/UCAV capacity developed and assesses its implications for security policy and international positioning. Designed as a qualitative explanatory case study, the research analyzes a purposively selected corpus of 43 academic, institutional, and open-source documents through five themes: security pressure, institutional coordination, domestic production, operational learning, and international visibility. The Turkish model is positioned through a criteria-based comparison with the United States, Israel, and Iran without ranking national capabilities. The findings show that the transformation cannot be explained solely by technical modernization. Security pressure, public-private coordination, battlefield learning, and gradual dependency reduction jointly shaped the capacity. The article therefore conceptualizes Türkiye’s experience as a middle-power military innovation pathway that produces limited but strategically consequential autonomy in selected domains.
Source: Akademik Yaklaşımlar Dergisi
DOI: 10.54688/ayd.1987834
Authors: Sadi Özbay, İrfan Durmuş
Institutions: Jandarma ve Sahil Güvenlik Akademisi, Munzur University
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225237643