10/10/2026
Nigerian, Rwanda Military Delegations Watch ASELSAN’s Korkut 35 Down Drones in Turkey
📌 Delegations from Rwanda and Nigeria were among the foreign military and industry observers present at ASELSAN’s Korkut 35 live-fire demonstration at the Karapınar Test and Evaluation Group Command near Konya, Turkey, where the system engaged and destroyed two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a simulated drone attack.
📌 According to the account provided to Military Africa, one target was a Shahed-type one-way attack drone, the loitering mu****on family that has become a defining weapon of the Russia-Ukraine war and, increasingly, of conflicts across the Sahel. The second carried a smaller radar cross-section and was configured to mimic the radar and thermal signature of a cruise missile.
📌 ASELSAN successfully demonstrated the operational capabilities of its KORKUT 35 Air Defense System in a live-fire demonstration attended by defense delegations from 12 countries.
📌 African militaries should treat very short-range air defence as an urgent requirement, not a luxury reserved for better-funded forces. The continent’s existing counter-drone posture remains heavily weighted toward man-portable jammers, effective against a single commercial drone at close range but structurally unable to handle a coordinated multi-drone attack, a fibre-optic guided mu****on immune to radio jamming, or a target with a Shahed’s size, speed and altitude profile.
📌A system like Korkut 35 addresses a different part of that problem: not detection or electronic disruption, but the ability to put kinetic rounds on a target once it has been found, whatever category of aerial threat that target turns out to be.
📌 The systems that deserve serious consideration from African defence planners are those that can defeat drones and still contribute against aircraft and helicopters, rather than systems that solve one narrow slice of the airspace problem while leaving the lower layer of the sky uncovered.
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