Azerbaijan starts local production of naval drones

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev visited the country’s navy on September 6, where officials showed him two unmanned surface vessels now being built inside Azerbaijan through a joint production line with a Turkish shipbuilder.

Aliyev and First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva were briefed on the SALVO armed unmanned surface vessel and the KAYRA kamikaze unmanned surface vessel at a facility jointly operated by MIRAS Military-Industrial Company, a state defense manufacturer under Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Defense, and Turkey’s DEARSAN Shipyard.

Defense Minister Col. Gen. Zakir Hasanov briefed the president on the visit, according to a statement from the presidential press service. The two leaders toured the production line and watched the vessels undergo practical testing, and the statement did not disclose how many units of either vessel have been built or when full-rate production is expected to begin.

The SALVO is a Turkish-designed unmanned boat that first completed live-fire testing in 2022, when it struck a moving target in the Sea of Marmara using a Roketsan Cirit 70mm laser-guided missile fired from a remote turret, alongside a stabilized 12.7mm machine gun made by Aselsan. Built with a composite hull roughly 15 meters (49 feet) long, the vessel can reach speeds up to 60 knots and operate out to about 300 nautical miles (555 kilometers) from its controllers, who can run it from shore-based command posts or from other ships.

Photo by the Official Website of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

Dearsan has marketed the SALVO for reconnaissance, surface warfare, facility patrol and armed escort missions. Azerbaijan’s navy first publicly displayed a Turkish-built SALVO during a live-fire exercise in the Caspian Sea in August 2025, though it was not clear at the time when Baku had acquired the vessel.

Photo by the Official Website of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

The KAYRA is smaller and built for a different purpose. At about 7 meters (23 feet) long with a composite hull, it can reach a top speed of 50 knots and operate out to roughly 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers), according to Dearsan’s own specifications. Rather than carrying a separate weapons system, the KAYRA is designed as a one-way attack vessel, packed with its own warhead and intended to ram and destroy enemy ships, patrol boats, port infrastructure or naval bases directly.

Wednesday’s visit marks a shift from Azerbaijan simply operating Turkish-built naval drones to producing them jointly on Azerbaijani soil. The Ministry of Defense-linked MIRAS has increasingly partnered with Turkish defense firms in recent years, part of a broader defense-industrial relationship between Baku and Ankara that expanded significantly following Turkey’s military support to Azerbaijan during the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan has separately developed its own smaller kamikaze drone boats, including the Kalan and Sugovushan models shown at a defense exhibition in 2024, though those remain considerably smaller than the Turkish-designed SALVO and KAYRA.