MILITARY INNOVATION AND LIMITED STRATEGIC AUTONOMY IN MIDDLE POWERS: AN ANALYSIS OF TÜRKİYE’S UAV/UCAV CAPACITY

This article examines the security-related, institutional, and technological conditions under which Türkiye’s UAV/UCAV capacity developed and assesses its implications for security policy and international positioning. Designed as a qualitative explanatory case study, the research analyzes a purposively selected corpus of 43 academic, institutional, and open-source documents through five themes: security pressure, institutional coordination, domestic production, operational learning, and international visibility. The Turkish model is positioned through a criteria-based comparison with the United States, Israel, and Iran without ranking national capabilities. The findings show that the transformation cannot be explained solely by technical modernization. Security pressure, public-private coordination, battlefield learning, and gradual dependency reduction jointly shaped the capacity. The article therefore conceptualizes Türkiye’s experience as a middle-power military innovation pathway that produces limited but strategically consequential autonomy in selected domains.