At the entrance of Turkish drone maker Baykar Technology’s headquarters, there is a tile mural that pays tribute to the national tradition of thinking outside the box.

The work starts with Sultan Mehmed II and his fleet on their way to conquer Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, in 1453. It is said he ordered his ships to be secretly dragged over the hills of Galata by placing greased logs underneath them. That landed the Ottoman ships inside the Golden Horn, bypassing the huge chain barrier installed at the mouth of the waterway and taking the ruling Byzantines by surprise.

As the viewer’s eye moves to the right, Baykar’s wares enter the picture, suggesting that Mehmed the Conqueror’s innovative thinking finds a modern equivalent at the company, which has become arguably the world’s most famous armed drone maker during the Ukraine war. Its mainstay Bayraktar TB2 wreaked havoc on the battlefield and was crucial in halting Russia’s march on Kyiv by destroying tank after tank. Earlier, its drones helped alter the outcomes of wars involving Azerbaijan, Libya and Syria.

The result has been a surge in global demand for the TB2. Since the first one was exported to Qatar in 2018, Baykar has signed contracts with a least 30 nations for its drones. Last year, Baykar announced more than $1.1 billion worth of exports, accounting for more than 99% of its revenue. In July, it signed an agreement with the Saudi Defense Ministry worth more than $3 billion for the sale of its advanced Akinci drones.

Selcuk Bayraktar, 43, chairman and chief technology officer of the company and son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Baykar’s success gives Turks a chance to think of themselves in a new light. His company has given Turkey a key role in what military strategists call “asymmetric war,” giving the predominantly Muslim NATO member the power to decide which countries receive cheap drones that can take out enemy air defense systems costing a million times more.

“You don’t need to be followers. You can be leaders,” he told Nikkei Asia in his sprawling corner office. “You don’t need to only do maintenance work or sales work. You can create your own brands. You can create your own designs. You can build aircraft. You can build spacecraft.”

Founded in 1986 as an auto parts maker, Baykar began to conduct research on drones in the beginning of the 2000s. The founder’s two sons, Selcuk and his older brother Haluk, now the CEO, spent months in the field trying out various forms of unmanned aerial devices. By 2014, the company had succeeded in delivering the TB2 to the Turkish Armed Forces. Its first battle test came fighting armed separatists within Turkey.

In late 2020, the TB2 helped Turkish-ally Azerbaijan defeat Armenia in their 44-day conflict over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan used the TB2 to destroy “command and control systems, air defense platforms and artillery” of the Armenian forces, said Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at U.S. think tank Hudson Institute and former commissioned officer in the U.S. Army.

Selcuk, who was educated at Istanbul Technical University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Nikkei Asia that the key to the success of the drones was their surveillance capabilities — the 20-some hours of data collection that leads up to the final hit. “In Azerbaijan, the whole world saw the power of persistent, continuous, real-time reconnaissance and surveillance. You’ve never had that before,” he said.

In Ukraine, Coffey said the TB2s gained “iconic status” during the early days of Russia’s invasion, as they hit Russian supply lines. “Kyiv used the TB2 to target logistic vehicles,” he said. “TB2 has combined military potency with cost effectiveness to create an affordable and capable platform.”

TB2’s success came despite its technological limitations, said Lauren Kahn, a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Even though the radio-controlled drones are slow, they were successful at neutralizing even slower or stationary targets, such as towed artillery or armored vehicles.

“The TB2 is an unlikely hero: cheap, hard to hide and plodding,” Kahn said, adding that the game-changer in the war with Russia was Ukraine’s creativity in using the drones and its ability to “exploit a given piece of technology’s relative strengths and weaknesses.”

In recent months, the TB2 is said to have had less success in Ukraine as Russia’s layered air defense systems and electronic warfare have caught up with the relatively large, low-flying devices. Coffey said “Ukraine is getting better use out of the TB2 now for reconnaissance and [target] spotting missions — especially when paired with HIMARS,” the U.S. High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.

Selcuk said the TB2s are “still being used heavily” in Ukraine. To overcome Russian advances, he said his company makes almost daily upgrades in much the same way as smartphone makers regularly update their software.

The improvements come from Baykar’s headquarters on the outskirts of Istanbul, a Silicon Valley-style campus built about a year ago that features green sofas, orange cushions, free meals, an artificial grass soccer pitch, cinema, two swimming pools and a 45-room lodging facility. A local touch comes in the form of two hamams, or Turkish baths.

Shortly after lunch on a recent Friday, the sofas at the entrance hall were moved to the side and hundreds of straw mats were swiftly laid out. As the clock struck 1:17 p.m., hundreds of staff knelt in unison to pray in the direction of Mecca. In the front row was Selcuk, the chief architect of the company’s unmanned aerial vehicles.

At Baykar’s main factory at the campus, interns wearing white aprons watched closely as engineers put together TB2s, the larger Akinci and Bayraktar’s proudest product to date, Kizilelma, Turkey’s first unmanned fighter jet. With the exception of the engine, which comes from Ukraine, and semiconductors, all critical subsystems of the next-generation drone are produced in Turkey, an official told Nikkei.

Unlike the slow, propeller-driven TB2, Baykar hopes the Kizilelma will eventually be supersonic. Its creators envision a day when swarms of drones will take on fifth-generation fighters. They believe the unmanned aerial vehicles will enjoy an asymmetric advantage. While a pilot’s instinct is to avoid a collision, a drone has no fear.

“Imagine a fifth-generation fighter meeting an unmanned fighter in the sky,” Selcuk said. “It took maybe 10 to 15 years to train the pilot. The pilot had to face a lot of ups and downs in his life just to fly this plane. They’re flying at the edge of life.”

Finding the right people to develop this kind of technology remains a challenge for the Bayraktar brothers. In an interview last year, CEO Haluk said their biggest headache was finding talent in a pool that is “very limited in Turkey and in the world.”

Baykar’s response has been to emphasize on-the-job training. Rather than poaching workers from rivals, the company likes to recruit interns — bringing in 1,300 a year — reckoning they are less likely to be bound by the limitations of other corporate cultures.

“Some of the tech companies in the world only hire geniuses. We don’t do that. We have people from average universities,” Selcuk said. “We look more at ambition, the drive. And we train our engineers.”

He added: “The whole aim of what we are doing is giving the youth self-confidence because we’ve lacked it for centuries. If you look at the development of the modern world, you see that at some point in time, the founders of science or the innovators of science, the center of gravity shifted toward the West.”

Shifting the center of gravity away from the West raises inevitable political questions. When asked about such matters, Haluk noted that all of his company’s weapons exports require government approval and said it is Baykar’s policy not to sell armed drones to both sides of a conflict.

“As a company principle, we are against war profiteering,” he said. “Our priority is to share our capabilities with brotherly countries with whom we have strategic relations, friends, allies and NATO members. Countries like Azerbaijan, Pakistan [and] Ukraine are our priority.”

Haluk said the U.S. decision in 2019 to kick Turkey out of the F-35 joint strike fighter program as punishment for buying Russian arms has created a short-term challenge but could help the nation develop its own homegrown assets.

“It creates a big incentive for Turkey to come up with solutions to overcome the sanctions,” he said. “It gives us an extra push.”

He hinted that major Western countries sanction Turkey at their own peril.

“Turkey’s successes in defense are also driving other middle powers and will increase their strategic autonomy as well,” he said. “That will make the world powers uncomfortable.”