The Turkish Navy is moving to acquire 100 expendable unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for kamikaze strike operations against maritime and coastal targets, with the procurement split across three competing producer teams – Aselsan with Ares Shipyard, STM with Yonca Shipyard, and Havelsan with Sefine Shipyard.
The decision to procure the systems was made during the February 2026 meeting of the Defence Industry Executive Committee (SSIK), the highest decision-making body in Türkiye’s defence procurement and industrial policy, with the Secretariat of Defence Industries (SSB) overseeing the program.
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The allocation assigns 40 units to Aselsan, 32 to STM, and 32 to Havelsan – a deliberate decision to develop three parallel supply chains rather than concentrate production in a single vendor, ensuring redundancy and competitive pressure across the industrial base. The total may be adjusted slightly to accommodate an operational doctrine that envisions four-vessel swarms as the basic tactical unit.
Aselsan’s entry – the Tufan, developed jointly with Ares Shipyard – was unveiled at SAHA 2026 in Istanbul. The vessel is 8 metres long, 1.8 metres wide, and carries a high-explosive payload equivalent to one Mk 82 bomb – approximately 227 kg of explosive mass – designed to strike surface vessels and coastal installations. Aselsan had previously developed the Albatros-S swarm USV and the Kılıç 100WH and 200WH kamikaze autonomous underwater vehicles, all displayed at SAHA 2026 as part of a broader push into expendable naval autonomous systems.
STM’s Yaktu – developed with Yonca Shipyard – addresses a different operational profile. At 5.8 metres in overall length and 1.7 tonnes displacement, it is smaller and lighter than the Tufan, designed for asymmetric maritime operations ranging from port protection to open-sea strike missions. STM separately displayed the Yaktu at the Defence Industry Exhibition alongside EFES 2026, where the company also demonstrated its KARGU autonomous aerial swarm in front of 50 national delegations.
Havelsan’s entry – developed with Sefine Shipyard, the same yard behind the Marlin SİDA armed USV that the Turkish Navy commissioned in January 2024 – has not yet been publicly detailed to the same degree, but the Havelsan-Sefine partnership draws on an established naval autonomous systems collaboration.
Both Tufan and Yaktu feature compact, low-profile hulls designed to reduce radar and visual detectability, and both support line-of-sight and satellite communications for integration into network-centric operations. Their swarm architecture enables multiple units to operate cooperatively, sharing data in real time and autonomously allocating tasks during missions – the same distributed-control logic that STM has demonstrated with the KARGU aerial swarm.
The procurement reflects a broader Turkish Armed Forces investment in expendable autonomous strike across all domains – air, surface, and subsurface. At SAHA 2026, Baykar unveiled three new loitering munitions with ranges from 900 to over 2,000 km, while STM debuted the KUZGUN kamikaze UAV with a 1,000+ km range. The 100-unit USV order extends this expendable-strike doctrine to the naval surface domain, creating a capability designed to saturate an adversary’s defences with low-cost, high-volume precision-guided threats rather than relying on expensive anti-ship missiles fired from capital ships.
For a navy that already operates the TCG Anadolu as the world’s first purpose-configured drone carrier and is building the 60,000-tonne MUGEM aircraft carrier, the addition of 100 kamikaze USVs adds a distributed maritime strike layer that does not depend on traditional warship launchers or manned aircraft for anti-surface warfare.
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