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The Middle East's Game of Drones

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The Middle East's Game of Drones ISPI ANALYSIS 15 gennaio 2021 THE MIDDLE EAST’S GAME OF DRONES THE RACE TO LETHAL UAVS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE REGION’S SECURITY LANDSCAPE Federico Borsari ANALYSIS JANUARY 24, 2020 ITALIAN INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL STUDIES THE MIDDLE EAST’S GAME OF DRONES THE RACE TO LETHAL UAVS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR THE REGION’S SECURITY LANDSCAPE FEDERICO BORSARI ISPI Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), most commonly INTRODUCTION known as “drones”, are making headlines due to their Over the last few years, security dynamics in the increasing use in conflicts around the world and, especially, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Besides their specific military impact and their consequences for been characterized by deepening fragmentation warfare, drones might also have important implications for and persistent volatility. From a wider perspective, political and security dynamics in a context of both state such a trend is also the reflection of a fluid regional fragility and deepening interstate rivalry across the region. landscape, where governance shortcomings, Such developments are likely to accelerate and evolve due geopolitical rivalry and social unrest have become to both the skyrocketing proliferation of unmanned platforms increasingly entrenched and – in some contexts – and the expanding number of their operators - whether state, disruptive. To a certain extent, these developments para-state or non-state actors - with potential reverberations emanate from both the growing competition between on international law as well. Despite the lack of robust and assertiveness of regional powers that have empirical evidence, the present paper aims to contextualise the manifested more or less overtly in virtually all the proliferation of armed drones in the MENA region by taking into region’s war zones. At present, some of the most account multiple factors, including available market, military, influential actors in the Middle East are native to and casualties data, and assess their possible implications the region itself, have heightened their geopolitical for the regional security landscape. Other aspects, such as ambitions and embarked on audacious and the positive or negative connotations of drones are presented, but remain beyond the scope of this essay and will not be unilateralist foreign policies, in many cases defying examined. The paper concludes with a useful inventory of the constraints long imposed by junior partnerships military-grade UAVs currently used by MENA states updated with foreign powers and, sometimes, even going according to open-source data. against the latters’ regional agendas.1 From a military standpoint, such a competition is emerging more and Federico Borsari, ISPI Research Fellow | 2 ANALYSIS more distinctly when it comes to the development and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)2. Introduced more than a century ago in the form of rudimentary flying balloons carrying fuse-controlled bombs3, UAVs, colloquially referred to as “drones”, have today reached unprecedented levels of sophistication, progressively expanding from a niche military tool only available to Israel and the United States in 2001 – when a Predator UAV was first used for a failed targeted killing mission against Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Afghanistan – into relatively cheap yet high-tech weapons in the arsenal of an ever-growing number of countries. The military segment of the global drone market is expected to attract almost $100 billion worth of investments in the next decade, with a 30% increment in terms of both research-and-development and procurement spending, confirming the expanding and strategic importance of UAV platforms in the defence apparatus of numerous states. This tendency is particularly observable in the Middle East, where military UAVs accounted for about 82% of the overall regional drones’ market in 20194, and represents a lucrative “business space” for defence companies such as the Turkish Baykar Makina, the Chinese Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group or the Emirati Adcom Systems, to name just a few. Overall, available data indicate that since the introduction of military UAVs in the MENA market space, regional countries (excluding Israel) have plausibly spent at least $1.5 billion in purchasing these platforms5. Such an estimate does not take into account weapons and training costs, although in some cases these could already be included in the final purchase price. THE REGIONAL QUEST FOR ARMED UAVS A crucial but often disregarded aspect to better appraise the impact of UAVs in the region deals with their specific capabilities, which denote their ultimate – or at least primary – purpose within an expanding spectrum of military utilizations. More specifically, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), along with target acquisition (TA), remain the essential functions of drones and their foundational ones, as THE MIDDLE EAST’S GAME OF DRONES | 3 ANALYSIS most of them are conceived for collecting information, especially images, and sending them in real-time to headquarters or even to the troops on the frontline, in order to improve situational awareness on the battlefield and provide more reliable intelligence about the target. Usually equipped with state-of-the-art electro-optic cameras as well as multi-spectrum sensors and capable of flying at constant low speed for several hours, modern UAVs have come to represent an essential eye in the sky for any military or security force. As a matter of fact, ISR capabilities proved to be a decisive factor in a region characterized by porous borders and vast uncontrolled spaces, allowing many governments to collect valuable intelligence and regain the upper hand against both domestic rebel threats and transnational terrorist groups. Algeria and Egypt, for example, have repeatedly flown drones in their counterterrorism campaigns against the local brands of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) in south-east Algerian territories and the Sinai Peninsula respectively. Importantly, both the Algerian El Djazair 54s (an indigenous copy of the Emirati Adcom Systems’ Yabhon United-40) and Egypt’s Chinese-built Wing Loong Is have also been employed with armed configurations, providing kinetic air support to ground personnel with an array of guided and unguided ordnance. Indeed, even more than ISR platforms, weaponized drones (or unmanned aerial combat vehicles – UCAVs) are capturing the imagination of many governments in the Middle East and making headlines due to their front-row role in all the region’s conflicts. From Yemen to Libya, to Syria and Iraq, armed drones seem to be at the forefront of air operations, in particular close air support and tactical ISR. At present, thirteen regional states are either operating armed drones or in the process of acquiring such capability, with four of them, namely Iran, Israel, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) also exporting UCAVs to other countries or foreign actors. TURKEY Particularly striking has been Turkey’s rapid and energetic debut in the (not so) exclusive club of states possessing armed UAVs, not only because of its large-scale and pioneering use of drones in conventional THE MIDDLE EAST’S GAME OF DRONES | 4 ANALYSIS combat operations but also in light of what might become Ankara’s major role within the global UAV market in the near future. Turkey’s best business partners in the region are Qatar, Tunisia, and Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. Doha recently received the first batch of sixTurkish-made Bayraktar TB2 UCAVs and three ground control stations purchased in 2018, while in early March 2020 Tunisia signed a $240 million contract with the Turkish Aerospace Industry (TAI) for the supply of six medium-altitude long- endurance (MALE) Anka-S combat drones along with three control stations and training assistance.6 This deal, however, is currently frozen and according to recent reports, it might never see the light of day due to Tunisia’s solvency problems. Ankara’s latest client is Azerbaijan, which sealed a contract for the purchase of Turkish-manufactured TB2 combat drones after its parliament recently endorsed deeper bilateral military cooperation with Turkey, just in time for deploying them against Armenian forces in the disputed Nagorno- Karabakh region. Last but not least, since May 2019 an unknown number of TB2 UCAVs, together with the necessary equipment and trainers, have been deployed in Libya to support the GNA against the offensive of Khalifa Haftar’s Tobruk-based Libyan National Army (LNA), triggering a vicious drone war with the latter’s Wing Loong IIs supplied by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). What is more, the Turkish UAV inventory could soon receive two more advanced systems that have been indigenously developed by Baykar Makina and the competitor Turkish Aerospace Industry: the Akinci and the Aksungur respectively. The former deserves special attention, as it is a strategic-class drone with high payload capacity, air-to-air and air-to- ground attack capabilities, mission interoperability with fighter jets and fully autonomous flight and take-off control systems, which provides the Turkish armed forces with a whole new level of ISTAR and strike capabilities that only Israel (and the U.S.) currently possess. Aside from enhancing the country’s military might, the Akinci – and other UAV platforms as well – is upholding its defence industry’s self-sufficiency, as Turkish firms
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