More On Drones…and Turkey

 


The Drone Ranger

Image source: Mustafa.KarabasTUSAS, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons


Back in November, I did a short piece on the fact that Ukraine is using drone aircraft purchased from Turkey to fight Russian-backed separatists in its eastern territories (see “Ukraine Uses Turkish Drones On Russian Proxies,” November 20, 2021. https://theleftcrisis.blogspot.com/2021/11/ukraine-uses-turkish-drones-on-russian.html). I was intrigued by this Ukraine-Turkish partnership because, at least in theory, Turkey and Russia have good relations. In theory, they are almost allies, at least as far as the United States is concerned.


But, here they are, on opposite sides of a fairly serious little war.


Since then, I’ve run across another piece of interest on the same topic. In “Turkish Drone Doctrine and Theaters of War in the Greater Middle East,” which appeared on the webpage of Small Wars Journal, 11/04/2021, scholar Ridvan Bari Urcosta looks at how and why the Turkish military establishment has embraced drones so quickly and so effectively. 


He argues that Turkey had a unique set of good reasons to adopt drones. Its military theaters, that is, the places it is fighting or may fight wars, lend themselves to drones. The Kurds, for instance, were vulnerable to air attack, but had enough anti-aircraft weapons to make manned missions against them expensive. Drones, by contrast, were cheap and effective.


But, what really interests me about Urcosta’s paper is his explanation of the the Ukraine connection. It turns out that not only is Turkey working with the Ukrainians, it also has a very quiet but effective partnership with Poland. It isn’t exactly an alliance or anything like that, but the two countries (along with Ukraine) seem to have a comfortable friendship.


Why? Because, says Urcosta, “…Turkey and Poland are traditional geopolitical gatekeepers of Russian influence in Europe and the Middle East. Both Ankara and Warsaw determined that their close cooperation is necessary in such turbulent times.” That cooperation, apparently, includes the Polish (and Ukrainian) purchase of Turkey’s excellent drones.


Again, whether a Polish-Turkish-Ukrainian partnership will do the USA any good remains an open question. But, at least it’s nice to know that Mr. Putin may be discovering that a world with a weakened America may not be a world necessarily in his best interests.


~mjt



Source:


“Turkish Drone Doctrine and Theaters of War in the Greater Middle East,” by Ridvan Bari Urcosta,  Small Wars Journal, 11/04/2021, https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/turkish-drone-doctrine-and-theaters-war-greater-middle-east.



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