Baykar CEO urges NATO to pool drone capabilities

Baykar CEO Haluk Bayraktar on Tuesday urged NATO members to pool their drone development capabilities, telling defense industry representatives in Ankara that deeper partnerships would allow allies to accelerate production cycles. He argued that combining existing strengths proves faster than developing parallel systems independently as unmanned aerial vehicles become central to modern combat operations.

Combining strengths

Speaking at the Defense Industry Forum during the 36th NATO Summit, Bayraktar said the growing role of drones requires shorter development cycles and faster production capacity. "In our approach in Türkiye, for large-scale companies like ours, we do not even wait for demand to emerge to build capacity," he said, adding that current battlefield conditions demonstrate urgent demand for these technologies. Bayraktar noted that while Baykar currently maintains partnerships with 40 countries, most remain outside the alliance, and the company seeks to expand ties with NATO members.

Bayraktar cited the company's partnership with Italy's Leonardo — Leonardo Baykar Aerospace Systems — as a template for cooperation, stating that allies should combine capabilities rather than compete. "It is much faster to cooperate instead of trying to invent everything from scratch or compete," he said. "Technology sharing can of course happen, but the issue is not sharing intellectual property. Under joint ventures, the aim is to create new intellectual property on the existing intellectual property of the parties and build on current capabilities."

Production scale

Bayraktar highlighted that Türkiye's defense industry has expanded from 17 companies to more than 3,000 over two decades, with weekly defense exports reaching approximately $450 million. "We now make in one week the defense exports that were $250 million at that time," he said during the panel titled "From Innovation to Mass: Building NATO's Drone Edge." He added that while every country should develop first-person view drone capacity — "These are almost like ammunition; every country needs a bullet manufacturer" — combat aircraft-class systems require alliance-level cooperation to build effectively.